Custom Data Grabber including Sky UK Channel/EPG Grabber (5 Viewers)

[ay129]

There are some reasons why the team haven't, however the main one is the TVE3 is on a feature freeze and most of the focus is on TVE3.5; Given the number of people working on the TV Engine, this is not a pressing issue despite its usefulness. I would imagine that the dev team will in time develop something similar for their own use.

Not sure I agree with you. DJBlu's code has been around for a long, long time...........surely there has been ample opportunity over the years (sic!) to have this done.
For me it makes it frustrating to have to re-install and muck around with the entire thing every time a new release comes out..........and to the point where one starts to look elsewhere for MP alternatives without the hassle........or simply not bothering to upgrade ever!

If we all send a message to MP management perhaps? - https://www.team-mediaportal.com/contact-us-at-mediaportal

Ian.

This. And possibly put this through as a feature request in the next MP release, and definitely push to have this baked into MP2. The squeaking wheel gets the grease!

 

[ay129]

Ian, and everybody,

I have just posted a feature request for the integration of DJ Blu's SVN code stuff into the main MP body.

Could all of you users of this great plugin show some support by posting / liking / agreeing with the post I have created here?

https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...abber-and-plugins-integration-into-mp.123778/

DJBlu, sorry if I'm stealing your thunder, but I know you have previously submitted your code patches and it came to nought. I'm hoping that a bit of democracy and people power can push this awesome work of yours forward and reduce the strain on you in constantly pushing out these new SVN's. Please reply to that link above!

Thanks
ay129

 

[onelegend]

Need to consider if the grabber is good for use outside of sky's systems and all the work involved in integrating it

Sky is effectively being switched off for everything other than a sky box (djblu him self has suffered from the pairing update), can we still use it for just freesat features and are people happy with that?

 

[Benoire]

The premise behind the grabber is perfect, a simple way to remove the grabbing code and multiple different systems from the actual base code, allows for regional updates beyond the normal release date of the base engine. The implementation of this here is pretty cool, but from what I can gather pretty IO heavy and can overload IOPS of HDDs sometimes.

Onelegend is correct that at the moment Sky UK is killing the homebrew market and that without it, the purpose behind some of this more specific work is no longer required.

This approach as I said before is on the radar for development, but given the quite localised nature of the plugin use now (for the moment anyhow), I can understand why mm1352000 and the other TVE developers are concentrating on other areas at present. As long as the FTA TV operators conform to the various ISO standards for broadcasting, this work is not required.

Chris

 

[bob808]

Chris you are half right there it's not just the epg that this brings moreso the auto tuning and group creation so this is still valid for freesat if that's where the systems end up anyway. So this is still valid and required even if a sizable chunk of the audience drop out if things change for their usable channel list.

 

[ears]

Good point. The facility to grab, group and order channels at the click of a button makes MediaPortal a good prospect. I've long since lost count of how many times I've had to dump my database and start again, having a channel and group generator at the click of a button is incredibly useful. Database exports and imports have failed on me before so can't rely on them - and although I do export, I have no control over when the database will corrupt, meaning I may not have a recent export to fall back on.

Don't forget the series link functionality too - if this is being merged it would be nice to integrate the freesat (DVB-S) and freeview (DVB-T) series link and EPGs too as these are more stable and less likely to be messed with than the Sky ones.

 

[Benoire]

Chris you are half right there it's not just the epg that this brings moreso the auto tuning and group creation so this is still valid for freesat if that's where the systems end up anyway. So this is still valid and required even if a sizable chunk of the audience drop out if things change for their usable channel list.

It's been a while since I left the UK and I was using Sky anyway, but does freesat have groups? Do any of the FTA providers use groups? Certainly freeview in NZ is not grouped and this is based on the UK spec. Channel numbers and ordering is done automatically in TVE3 and this has been expanded on in 3.5.

There is some very good stuff in the work here, I'm especially keen on the auto scan - add / delete channels bit... The devs are already wanting to make the TV Engine rival an STB so this stuff is coming at some point but there are only a small number of developers working on the tv side of things and with TVE3 under feature freeze that would mean all focus on a new engine. Remember just because you're not part of the dev team that you can't write code and see if they'll use it.

 

[Thecork]

Apologies if this information is elsewhere but I couldn't seem to track it down. I have just setup mediaportal after using xbmc for a while and so much happier with the tv integration than xbmc's rubbish plugin stuff. I have used this build to add the series link and sky epg stuff (just using freesat) and it's working great apart from one thing I can't work out. I've just setup two series links as a test, match of the day (for me) and holyoaks (for her!) lol. If I look in the epg, some future recordings are not highlighted red as if they are going to record. If I go into 'scheduled' I see all episodes set to record but only some have the red icon (circle) next to them. These are the ones that are that are highlighted red in the epg I believe. Can someone please advise what is going on? Will all these episodes record? As an example motd is on tonight and Thursday, tonight's is highlighted red and Thursdays isn't, but both appear in the scheduled section (with tonight's having the red icon). Thanks for your help in advanced.

Sorry to be a pain guys but does anybody have any answer to my question above? Having tested it for a couple of weeks now, everything is actually recording fine using the series link option. Just for some reason it appears random as to whether it's highlighted red in the guide or not as set to record. It's just one of those annoying WAF things that gets her nagging 'why is that not showing it's gonna record...' Etc

 

[Benoire]

The Series link option is using series codes in the datastreams to lock the programs in, if a particular program doesn't have a record circle then it is likely that the series code is different and that might indicate a repeat? If you have MySQL workbench you can series link both MOTD programs and have a look at what MP has stored in the database, there is a series ID table that should indicate if they are the same. I would suspect that they're not the same good and that if you have a sky box it would not record those ones not selected either.

Have a try with that first and let me know what the codes are, even if they're not the same.

 

[Thecork]

The Series link option is using series codes in the datastreams to lock the programs in, if a particular program doesn't have a record circle then it is likely that the series code is different and that might indicate a repeat? If you have MySQL workbench you can series link both MOTD programs and have a look at what MP has stored in the database, there is a series ID table that should indicate if they are the same. I would suspect that they're not the same good and that if you have a sky box it would not record those ones not selected either.

Have a try with that first and let me know what the codes are, even if they're not the same.

Thanks Benoire I'll take a look in the database. Like I said, things are actually recording, even though they are not highlighted red in the guide or have the red circle in 'scheduled' they are actually recording correctly (in my original post, the Thursday recording of MOTD recorded no problems). Ill take a look tonight when i get a chance and ill report back.