[TV] DJBlu's Custom Data Grabber and plugins Integration into MP (1 Viewer)

[ay129]

Hello

First of all, many thanks to all at team mediaportal for this fantastic product from my whole family. I think its great that a community can pull together and make this happen. In this spirit I would like to ask the community about integrating what I and many others think is a great plugin into Mediaportal going forward.

I am one of many users of DJBlu's data grabber patch for sky and other TV networks that pulls down EPG and channel icon data, and also schedules recording of series. This project has been running for at least 3 years and if I'm honest, next to MovingPictures and the tv shows plugin, is the standout feature for MP for me.

There is a sizeable community using this - there are 266 pages on this thread as of today:
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/...r-including-sky-uk-channel-epg-grabber.96767/

The issue is DJBlu's code has to be distributed as a patched / SVN build of both MP and the TV server each time new versions of MP come out. This obviously puts strain on DJBlu - I dont envy him with having to sort through these issues every time a new version comes out. As I understand it, DJBlu has previously submitted his code patch, but I cant find any more info about what happened next. With MP now on this more rapid development cycle, I cant see why we cant just integrate DJBlu's code into the main trunk?

I hear that there is a development freeze on the TV Engine, but if we could at least integrate the necessary code into the main MP application, that would be a step forward. Looking further down the tracks, we would also hope that this feature is fully baked into MP2.

Thanks for reading my long post. And DJBlu, sorry if I am stealing your thunder and speaking for you here, but I hope that if this happens you work will be more widely shared, and easier to maintain.

Cheers,
Ay129

 

[CrashUK]

This plugin saves so much time. 2 mins and its done. I only use it for freesat.

 

[Spragleknas]

@elliottmc - as Release Manager, perhaps you can have your say here? Also calling @DJBlu to this thread.

 

[elliottmc]

Could someone add the latest version of the changes to this thread and I will have a look at it - need to see the impact on the TV side and discuss with the relevant team members.

 

[elliottmc]

I have had a quick look at the thread. Fundamentally this seems to be a patch for the TV server.

Because of major working being done on the TV server, the team has agreed a code-freeze until version 3.5 of the TV server is ready. Therefore I think it is fair to say that we cannot include this fix at the present time.

Hopefully the changes with TVE3.5 will allow this sort of thing to be done more easily.

 

[Benoire]

mm3152000 is very much aware of the thread and what it does. You'll see my post in the devs section that talks about it and his response.

I personally support this style of plugin / core for EPG work, but would prefer to see TVE3.5 complete enough for something similar to this to be rolled in without compromising other important features.

 

[ay129]

I have had a quick look at the thread. Fundamentally this seems to be a patch for the TV server.

Because of major working being done on the TV server, the team has agreed a code-freeze until version 3.5 of the TV server is ready. Therefore I think it is fair to say that we cannot include this fix at the present time.

Hopefully the changes with TVE3.5 will allow this sort of thing to be done more easily.

Thanks for the reply. There is also a patch for the main MP application to make this work - you have to pull down SVN versions of both mediaportal.exe and the tv server. Is is possible to at least have the main MP stuff integrated some how?[DOUBLEPOST=1389213767][/DOUBLEPOST]

I have had a quick look at the thread. Fundamentally this seems to be a patch for the TV server.

Because of major working being done on the TV server, the team has agreed a code-freeze until version 3.5 of the TV server is ready. Therefore I think it is fair to say that we cannot include this fix at the present time.

Hopefully the changes with TVE3.5 will allow this sort of thing to be done more easily.

Hey @elliottmc - Thanks for the response and for keeping us all in the loop. I fully understand about version 3.5 of the TV server - and am pretty excited about that. Just wanted to put this back on the radar so that we can take all of this great work forward into TVE3.5 and to MP2 and infinity and beyond.

When installing this patch we need to pull down SVN versions of both Mediaportal.exe and TVServer. So it seems like the there is some code in the Mediaportal part of that install that can possibly go into the main mediaportal application, removing the need for SVN installs of Mediaportal? This will ease the installation - am sure many users will agree that just applying a patched TV Server is far less painful than having to do a full MP reinstall each time a new version of MP arrives - even though this app is worth it.

This is especially so as MP is on an accelerated release schedule through to MP2.0. Do you or @mm3152000 have any thoughts about this?

 

[Sebastiii]

Some review about the code (from friend of mine) : (in https://github.com/djblu/Custom-Data-Grabber/blob/master/Custom Data Grabber/CustomDataGrabber.cs)

--
        while (!(Filestream.Length > 5000))
        {
            a += 1;
            Thread.Sleep(500);
            if (a > 100)
            {
                Log.Write("Not Enough Data to process");
                if (OnComplete != null)
                {
                    OnComplete(true, "Not Enough Data to process");
                }
                return;
            }
        }
--

1) Better to do something else, is reading the file directly is the only solution ? A better integration should be done for "read from file". TVE should pass that data directly to the EPG plugins
2) sleeps in a loop...
3) uses goto
4) hard coded values

@DJBlu @mm1352000

 

[DJBlu]

Some review about the code (from friend of mine) : (in https://github.com/djblu/Custom-Data-Grabber/blob/master/Custom Data Grabber/CustomDataGrabber.cs)

--
        while (!(Filestream.Length > 5000))
        {
            a += 1;
            Thread.Sleep(500);
            if (a > 100)
            {
                Log.Write("Not Enough Data to process");
                if (OnComplete != null)
                {
                    OnComplete(true, "Not Enough Data to process");
                }
                return;
            }
        }
--

1) Better to do something else, is reading the file directly is the only solution ? A better integration should be done for "read from file". TVE should pass that data directly to the EPG plugins
2) sleeps in a loop...
3) uses goto
4) hard coded values

@DJBlu @mm1352000

There are better ways yes. This was a quick dirty hack to get to the data as I didn't at the time have the skills required to modify the direct show filter to pass the data I required.

The easiest method would be to take out all the TSWriter code and convert it to managed code in C#. Take a look at EPGCollector and how they have implemented the direct show filters.

It connects to the stream and passes it directly to c# which does all the data parsing and such.

 

[TheBatfink]

Not to diminish the clearly excellent TVE, but this plugin makes MePo a replacement for a Sky box for me. I won't upgrade MePo without DJBlu's version and if he gave up I'd probably go back to the sky box.
It doesn't need spelling out, if you're in a country that can use this it's THE MePo version to be using.
MePo is great for advanced tweaking and worldwide support, but you simply can't beat a 3 or 4 click setup - I used to spend hours setting TV up and the EPG was still sketchy most of the time. If his work shouldn't be part of MePo general release I'm not sure what should!

Did I mention the love I have for this mod?

(PS it needs its own sub forum somewhere too because there are so many people that struggle with TV and EPG that this could solve and its not visible enough!!)