New GB-PVR 1.2.13 setup - slow and tedious

[dreamwalker]

Hi everyone, I'm trying to move over to gbpvr in hopes of creating a more user friendly HTC that can replace my MCE2005/dvbdream. I've scouted the boards for the past few days already so hopefully what I'm asking doesn't sound stupid. I've managed to get video playing; it's just the tvguide/epg setup that I'm still struggling with:

1. It seems the predominant approach to getting things working is first get a xmltv file and then map it to the actual channels on the card. I've successfully tried a few apps (YAPIX2MLT and the one for microsoft) and created and imported them to gbpvr. However, the mapping process is really painful. Am I the only one that wants to map ~500 automatically? Is there some sort of plugin that can take care of this for me? It seems UltraXMLTV Manager could have taken care of this but it seems like a dead app now :/

2. My XMLTV file is ~100mb. I noticed after I loaded it, gbpvr runs very slugish when I get into the tvguide. Is this a known issue? My gbpvr.db3 has grown to be ~100mb as well and doesn't seem to shrink even after I remove all my capture sources/channels... Is this normal?

3. Has anyone gotten the DVBEPG working? I'm currious if the plugins will be able to get movie information from IMDB (or the likes) using DVBEPG approach?

Here's my setup:

Card: DVBS Twinhan 1020a
System: Asus P4PE-800e 1gb ram, 240gb RAID 1
Vid Card: ATI 2500HD w/ 512 MB
Codec: nVIDIA PureVideo
OS: XP SP2
GBPVR: 1.2.13
MDAPI: 2.1.3
Satellites Testing: 110/119

Thanks for any help anyone can offier!

By the way, is the crux of this badass app still being maintained by only 1 man??

[peely]

Hi,

Being new to GB-PVR and coming from Mediaportal TVE3, I did find the process a little strange. It appears that you use an XMLTV file then map these to channels found in each of your tuner cards (I have three), card by card.

This did feel a little strange at first, as MP has a way of presenting a distinct set of channels, of which you can substitute if they differ from card to card (BBC One on DVB-T > BBC One East on DVB-S). Then, you work backwards from the XMLTV grabber into the channels located on your system, mapping the guide to the TV channels. On GB-PVR you seem to map the channels on your system to the guide, the guide being the parent in the relationship.

What I did initially with GB-PVR was to get an XMLTV file with every UK available channel combination, meaning somewhere in the order of 300 channels, this resulted in a configuration headache and a long time to load the guide on the clients. I have to say though, as soon as I realised this and started again with only the XMLTV channels I actually needed I found the process a lot easier and this meant I could thin down the satellite channels I wasn't interested in.

In conclusion, although the relationship between guide channels and available tuner channels seems inside-out, its a very workable approach and I prefer it.

A "delete all guide channels" feature, or at least a method of deleting more than one guide channel at a time in the UI would be useful though. I had a poke around in an sqlite editor but I think ended up deleting too much. The method of auto matching guide channels to tuner channels doesn't always work well too, probably matching on values with spaces and puctuation removed and spelt numbers converted to numerals would probably work better.


Neil.

[martint123]

@peely - if you use Alan Birtles xmltvgui Radio Time grabber you can use one of it's processors to change the RT channel names to be the same as the broadcast channel names. Then when you come to map channels, gbpvr seems to spot the same names and do much of the work for you.

[peely]

@peely - if you use Alan Birtles xmltvgui Radio Time grabber you can use one of it's processors to change the RT channel names to be the same as the broadcast channel names. Then when you come to map channels, gbpvr seems to spot the same names and do much of the work for you.

Thanks, that's what I use but hadn't ticked that post-processor option because the option name sounded a little scary.

Will give it a go cheers.

[martint123]

It may take a little tweakery to get the names right. (BBC regions etc)

[dreamwalker]

I was thinking the easiest approach to handle automated mapping would be to simply match the XMLTV's channel guide with the providers channel id (aka ServiceID). It's not 100% accurate, BUT it would save a lot of time.

Right now, I want to setup around ~100 channels out of the 300-500 in my xmltv file. I'm sorry to wine, but it's a real chore to map these out. Things aren't sorted or anything, so it's not the easiest.

There are a couple of reasons why I might want more than I can watch:

1. I'd like to be able to do a movie search and I figure sometime there might be something on a channel I don't normally watch. I'd like to still be able to schedule a recording off there.

2. I'd like to have other people watch things and just flip around in it. Different people have different taste.

3. It's cool to show people all the channels I have

Thanks!