Custom Data Grabber with Sky EPG Grabber for 1.16 onwards (3 Viewers)
- Thread starter Brownard
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United Kingdom
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- #102
Yep not much dev can work on this for the moment except @mm1352000 is working hard on EPG for a version of TVE3.5 that will be compatible for TVE3, so thanks to him because that really not an easy task and take all free time 
I tried working with EPG collector still pulling what little hair i have. DJBLU gbrabber was ideal it correctly ordered the channels grabbed epg and logos, just cant get anything close to that working...
Anyone know any tips to get me close to what is needed
Anyone know any tips to get me close to what is needed
Thanks to the pointers from @Benoire, after using MediaPortal for many years on three separate multi-client instances at different locations we have had to make the jump to TVHeadend as our PVR solution and Kodi as the front end. Series Link and proper channel numbering was pretty important for us. Given that we are all primarily users of Windows, I wanted to try and keep management as close to how it used to be before - I.E a drive dedicated for the storage of our Movies and TV Show content that is easy to move about (teaching my Dad doing things like this in anything outside of Windows would be a no go).
For anyone technically minded enough, what I did was used Proxmox Hypervisor (Proxmox - powerful open-source server solutions), it's completely free and you can create Virtual Machines as well as LXC containers. Therefore, we have a VM running Windows which has our storage directly mounted into it (essentially a raw device mapping) this can be fully managed via Remote Desktop etc), and then a LXC container running TVHeadend with the DVBS-2 Tuners mounted into it from the host. The Recordings folder is shared out from the Windows Client VM and is CIFS mounted into the LXC container. TVHeadend is then pointing to this mount point to record to.
Obviously you will essentially loose a machine to do all this, but obviously you could use a cheap Android TV Box and run LibreElec on it and that would get around that issue. However, given Proxmox is essentially running on Debian, in theory you should be able to install Kodi onto the host and that would be another workaround, but I havent looked at that myself yet.
If anyone wants any advise with this setup I can try help you out best I can.
Adam
Without hawking this too much more, Series link recording from the Kodi interface has been implemented and working. You'll need Kodi 18 and TVH4.3+; both of these are unreleased so may have bugs but once stable series linking is available without using the TVH gui and will pretty much replicate DJBlu's effort.
I'll give my thanks to MM1352000 and the MP crew, I would not have got in to this HTPC stuff without MediaPortal and certainly not decoding Sky through it and making it easier to multi-room!
I'll give my thanks to MM1352000 and the MP crew, I would not have got in to this HTPC stuff without MediaPortal and certainly not decoding Sky through it and making it easier to multi-room!
Thanks for all the info on the above - a very interesting read. The Custom Data Grabber has been a feature of the household MP set up for many a year. "Her Who Must Be Obeyed" has been giving me grief about the lack of data in the EPG and having just read through the thread I think I am coming to a point where a decision will soon have to be made on which way to jump, (not just based on EPG, but other features that no longer work)
The series link feature was great, the OH used it all the time. We have been using MP daily on our TV's for nearly ten years now and the user interface is now just second nature. However, since the original setup, our TV habits have changed, and whilst we we do watch TV now and again or watch the occasional film or TV series stored on the server, we tend to stream a lot of stuff off Netflix, Amazon Prime and various UK based TV catch up services i.e. BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, All 4 etc. I haven't been able to use the Online Videos plugin for years to do this, so just access which ever TV we are using via a BT keyboard and use Chrome browser with desktop shortcuts to access the web based stuff.
I think I am going to have to make a jump to whichever "Media Software" gives me back a one box & one remote solution which was the reason for setting up the current system and persevering with MP at the start as it provided that solution - my current setup seems a long way from doing that at present.
I'll try the EPG solution that @Jasmeet_181 posted up, which I assume works with the 'regular' version 1.18?
I really should give MP2 a go, but can it access Netflix, Amazon and the other online stuff and keep an up to date EPG for Feesat and Freeview???
The series link feature was great, the OH used it all the time. We have been using MP daily on our TV's for nearly ten years now and the user interface is now just second nature. However, since the original setup, our TV habits have changed, and whilst we we do watch TV now and again or watch the occasional film or TV series stored on the server, we tend to stream a lot of stuff off Netflix, Amazon Prime and various UK based TV catch up services i.e. BBC iPlayer, ITV Player, All 4 etc. I haven't been able to use the Online Videos plugin for years to do this, so just access which ever TV we are using via a BT keyboard and use Chrome browser with desktop shortcuts to access the web based stuff.
I think I am going to have to make a jump to whichever "Media Software" gives me back a one box & one remote solution which was the reason for setting up the current system and persevering with MP at the start as it provided that solution - my current setup seems a long way from doing that at present.
I'll try the EPG solution that @Jasmeet_181 posted up, which I assume works with the 'regular' version 1.18?
I really should give MP2 a go, but can it access Netflix, Amazon and the other online stuff and keep an up to date EPG for Feesat and Freeview???
I hesitate to jump in here because I have to think I have missed something basic - but having read through all the entries I am unable to understand what the problem is. As far as I can tell what you're missing most is the EPG data that the the custom code used to grab from from the Sky feeds before that got stopped. Also I see that several entries are willing to pay for development work to solve this.
Why don't you just pay for an EPG feed such as that from Schedules Direct? I have never used the custom code (my years in IT taught me NEVER to rely on something unique for anything other than to solve a one-off problem) but always used the XMLTV route to get data from an internet source and then map it to the right channel. You only need to do this once - and it works every time. I used to use the free Radio Times source but switched to Schedules Direct (about £20 per year) when the BBC stopped doing and I use the MC2XML free grabber (there are other sources and grabbers). Yes, you will need to spend some time setting up, but it's not really that hard. From Schedules Direct you get 14 days of data, major updates every Friday to get the next 14 days and so on with minor updates daily. They have a very comprehensive service for the UK (can't speak personally for other countries but I believe it's pretty good) covering all the Sky, Freesat and Freeview listings.
As far as scheduling is concerned I have found TVWishlist to be just as good as Series Link, and in some respects better, I haven't been a Sky user for about 6 years now so can't say whether they have added to the functions, but with TVWishlist I can add a program that has never broadcast in the UK and have it picked up years later if it becomes available, Latest example is a show called Last Man Standing which we caught on a holiday in the US about 4 years ago, liked it, put in on the TVWishlist list in case it ever came here - and it started here a couple of months ago. Recorded without any further input from me,
Why don't you just pay for an EPG feed such as that from Schedules Direct? I have never used the custom code (my years in IT taught me NEVER to rely on something unique for anything other than to solve a one-off problem) but always used the XMLTV route to get data from an internet source and then map it to the right channel. You only need to do this once - and it works every time. I used to use the free Radio Times source but switched to Schedules Direct (about £20 per year) when the BBC stopped doing and I use the MC2XML free grabber (there are other sources and grabbers). Yes, you will need to spend some time setting up, but it's not really that hard. From Schedules Direct you get 14 days of data, major updates every Friday to get the next 14 days and so on with minor updates daily. They have a very comprehensive service for the UK (can't speak personally for other countries but I believe it's pretty good) covering all the Sky, Freesat and Freeview listings.
As far as scheduling is concerned I have found TVWishlist to be just as good as Series Link, and in some respects better, I haven't been a Sky user for about 6 years now so can't say whether they have added to the functions, but with TVWishlist I can add a program that has never broadcast in the UK and have it picked up years later if it becomes available, Latest example is a show called Last Man Standing which we caught on a holiday in the US about 4 years ago, liked it, put in on the TVWishlist list in case it ever came here - and it started here a couple of months ago. Recorded without any further input from me,
@wjw For me, it isn't just having a blank EPG, the series link thing is useful, however, I didn't know about TVWishlist. Seems interesting - I'll have a look. The other thing was the lack of integration/usability issues of online shows via Online Videos (although I have never tried other mediaplayers - I've been loyal to MP since I began!).
As I write, I'm just trying out MP2 on my server to see if that works OK - although for some reason it is failing to see both TBS video cards in the server.
As I write, I'm just trying out MP2 on my server to see if that works OK - although for some reason it is failing to see both TBS video cards in the server.
@FR
There is a comprehensive guide in the documentation XMLTV mc2xml. I suspect the bit you need (how to get the data from the grabber into the MP EPG) is pretty grabber independent.
@porky996t
I don't do much viewing other than recorded TV and for what little I do I've not really done beyond OnlineVideos. This certainly works with iPlayer, but I've not been so successful with Amazon. It did work, then stopped quite recently for no apparent reason. It's not the Amazon second verification thing because I can see from the log file that I am logged into Amazon successfully, but nothing will play. What's more I can't get it to work on either MP2 or Kodi. Never used Netfilx.
There is a comprehensive guide in the documentation XMLTV mc2xml. I suspect the bit you need (how to get the data from the grabber into the MP EPG) is pretty grabber independent.
@porky996t
I don't do much viewing other than recorded TV and for what little I do I've not really done beyond OnlineVideos. This certainly works with iPlayer, but I've not been so successful with Amazon. It did work, then stopped quite recently for no apparent reason. It's not the Amazon second verification thing because I can see from the log file that I am logged into Amazon successfully, but nothing will play. What's more I can't get it to work on either MP2 or Kodi. Never used Netfilx.