Attention Sub: Open TV / Custom Data Grabber plugin

[Benoire]

This is copied from another forum section as I got it in the wrong place initially!

Hi,

This is for Sub mainly. I'm currently maintaining the Sky TV custom data grabber for MediaPortal TVE3. It was developed by DJBlu who is currently on a long term leave (military service of some form I believe) and uses two components, a custom data grabber dll (coded in C#) which is inserted in to the main code as a way to capture full PIDS by referencing certain details (in MP it is a separate DLL and then referenced in TSWriter), there is then the custom plugin which does the activities.

The plugins are the real heart and these can capture all the OpenTV data and insert this in to the database for the tv engine to read and use to record programs, allows for proper series linking from the main sky feed, can make the engine act like an STB by doing refreshes to add/remove channels, select certain channels within a defined LCN range, region picking for channels etc. Imagine EPGCollector (without the support of the other types of guide, yet) but 'built' in.

While I currently use MP, I am curious about Mediabrowser as a front end due to a number of reasons and wondered whether it was possible to get a version of the custom data grabber integrated in to NextPVR and then the plugins integrated as a plugin as nextpvr appears to work with it. I also like the built in decoding client as that was very quick when I last used PVR (before I found and got DJBlu to add NZ to the sky plugin).

The data grabber needs to be integrated into some form of TS writer so it can be called by the plugin. The plugins themselves need access to the database where the channels are stored, access to the tuners as it uses the engines tuners, and it needs to be able to run constantly in the background so it can do its updates or refreshes as necessary.

As MediaPortal is Open Source, it was easy to make the modifications and then merge with the latest master when they update (they do not support this work as TVE3 is in code freeze) but NextPVR is closed I believe and so I'd need pointers to access the stuff directly.

The advantage of this system is that it can be expanded to cover others such as MHEG5, Mediahighway etc. SJB has done an immense amount of work on EPGcollector and the tags contained can easily be used to find the other guides.

Thoughts and comments? It's all on github under benoire or Djblu (for the custom data grabber) so if it does peak your interest, have a look!

Anyway, thanks for your time!

Cheers,

Chris

[sub]

I'm not really sure how to respond on this one.

You can't currently write a plugin that gets full access to the transport stream. It would certainly be possible to add this, but quite a bit of work, so I'd have to be fairly confident this would be used before committing the development time required to add the capability.

You may also find the Open Source license used by your MediaPortal components disallow their use in a plugin used by a closed source app like NextPVR. (ie GPL?)

[Benoire]

Hey Sub,

No worries... I was just throwing it out there :-)

I know that DJBlu had engaged with Dot-I from Argus-TV to do something similar. In this case, the components (plugin and custom data grabber) are not part of MP natively, they are added in to a full release build; they where all developed by DJBlu (apart from the Sky_UK.dict).

I guess for those that use EPGcollector to collect their EPG data, this can be used instead and could be as native as possible without it not being a plugin.

I guess I'm just seeing if there is interest I like the way it can act as a set-top box by doing all the channel adds/removes, region work and update those annoying EPGs. Anyway, I appreciate that it would be time consuming and that you would have to expose other dlls for the plugin to attach to (stream, tuners, database etc.) but I thought I'd throw it out there!

Cheers,

Chris