Custom Data Grabber with Sky EPG Grabber for 1.16 onwards (2 Viewers)

[rlevis]

I personally don't use or require channel numbers. Perhaps that would be different for 1100 channels. We have less than 200 in NZ. I just have different groups of channels configured in TV Server and can find what I need quickly in the TV Guide. If I find a channel not working due to a frequency change, perhaps once or twice a year, I do a rescan of channels and remove the old one and insert the new one in the TV group.

I deal with the pop-up channels by giving them a dedicated channel name and leave them in the TV guide, even when they have no EPG or signal. I can see when ithe channel is in use in the TV Guide. But as I say, with 1100 channels and perhaps dozens of popups occurring regularly, my method may be too much work in the UK.

 

[Benoire]

When you say grouping do you mean channel numbers would not be present so if I say set a favorite group with list of channels I watch the most as I do now these would be lost if channel frequencies change etc.

Sorry missed this one. The Grouping option in the custom data grabber was able to extract out the grouping codes for the Sky channels so it created the same group you would see on an official box, e.g. entertainment, sport etc. TVH can't or doesn't do this, although you can create tags which are effectively groups within TVH which Kodi can read.

re: channel numbers, it can fully populate those using many of the EPG grabbers installed.

 

[AlunS]

Does the source code for the version included in the latest custom builds still exist anywhere?

 

[Adam86]

This is from a conversation in another thread from a couple of years ago, don't know if it helps AlunS?

There is actually some source code (in VB.net) available for the Sky grabber, @Benoire has some stuff on GitHub here and an explanatory post here.

 

[AlunS]

Thanks for that .. I tried to locate the point at which the error "No PMT Found" is displayed but no luck. The message is preceded by the string "Error occured" (sic), complete with spelling mistake, so that was easy to find, but I suspect the error string is probably being returned by some higher level MP library routine that does the tuning itself. Sadly my programming days are a long way behind me and it's all a bit beyond me.

 

[Adam86]

Thanks for that .. I tried to locate the point at which the error "No PMT Found" is displayed but no luck. The message is preceded by the string "Error occured" (sic), complete with spelling mistake, so that was easy to find, but I suspect the error string is probably being returned by some higher level MP library routine that does the tuning itself. Sadly my programming days are a long way behind me and it's all a bit beyond me.

You've done far more than I'd be able to do with programming!

 

[Benoire]

You should be able to compile the custom data grabber yourself using VS community edition and that should tell you if there are errors in the merging of the code bases together; no one keeps the custom data grabber bit up to date as this was created by DJBlu including the C changes to the TSWriter etc.

My cobbling together of the plugin code is available, it was generally a rebuild due to DJBlu losing the hard drives and then he went overseas on deployment I believe and never came back here, possibly as Sky UK then changed their pairing mechanism and you lost access to the HD channels.

If you're looking for an alternative windows one, then Dot-i from ARgus-tv has reappeared and is about to open source the tv engine; people might be able to edit that one and add in specific code that way...

I can also confirm that TVH on the 4.3 branch and a Kodi 18 nightly now has the series link record option built in to the software and not just via the webgui. The TVH plugin maintainer for Kodi had to do some changes with TVH to expose the API and now it is there. Should roll out in to mainline future releases of Kodi and TVH!

 

[Brownard]

There's a link to the latest source code for both the TV server changes and the grabber in the first post of this thread.
From what I can tell the Custom Data Grabber reads the timeshift file that gets written to disk when a channel is tuned - but the TV server will only create this file if there is a valid video or audio stream which is no longer the case now that the EPG Background Audio channel has been removed. I don't know whether there is a technical reason for this limitation but it seems that significant changes would be needed to remove it and it's not something I have the knowledge or time to implement.

 

[richardc1983]

It's a shame it doesn't run in windows like media portal especially if using the computer for other things.

@Benoire do you know if a windows version is possible or in the pipeline as per above?

 

[Benoire]

Nope, its Linux only; although I wonder if it could run in Linux emu mode on Windows 10: Install the Linux Subsystem on Windows 10

Never tried that but perhaps it might work? Otherwise a virtual box / windows based virtualisation program is the only way without running linux directly.