EPG Collector for MHEG5, EIT, OpenTV & MediaHighway (1 Viewer)

[blaloli]

Firstly, many thanks for your hard work and effort.

I have one DVB-C card for Foxtel cable and I have to stop the TV Service before the grabber can access the card to run.

Am I correct in assuming this is a MP issue, is there any known workaround?

Thanks in advance

Hi There,

EPG Collector does require exclusive access to a tuner only whilst collecting. I run MP with a dual DVBT card I'll do a test with my single USB tuner to see if TVService 'holds' the card.

I am assuming it wasn't recording or timeshifting live TV when you tried to run a collection?

Brad

 

[qawaali]

Thanks for the quick response.

The card is shown as 'idle' in the TV-Server Configuration>Manual Control and I have no clients connected to it.

It will only scan for services in the EPG Collector Configuration Utiltiy or grab with EPG Collector if I stop the TV Service.

I suppose I could run a bat file to stop the service etc but wondered if an integrated solution was available.

 

[blaloli]

No worries. Sorry, but there is no funtionality built in to stop whatever application is using the card when a scan runs. We might hack off a few people if we did that whilst they were recording - my wife being one We simply loop through the devices available and, if there is no specified 'Tuner' parameter in the INI, use the first free tuner we find that is cabpable of the configured collection type (ie. we won't try to use a DVBS tuner when the ScanningFrequency is a DVBT frequency).

I'll still do that test tomorrow and let you know what I find.

Brad

 

[qawaali]

Understood. Thanks for the reply.

 

[sjb]

We have decided to move the support for EPG Collector from the individual forums we currently monitor in NZ, Australia and the UK to the EPG Collector open discussion forum on Sourceforge which is located here

SourceForge.net: EPG Collector: Topics for Open Discussion

With around 800 users now and more appearing in different parts of the world it was becoming more and more difficult for us to coordinate support and to make sure users in each country were aware of releases, faults, tips and tricks etc so it makes sense for us to centralise everything in one place.

We can also make use of the Sourceforge bug tracking and enhancement request forums that are available to us.

You will need to create a Sourceforge account if you want to post but it's a fairly painless process. We also suggest you set monitoring on for the forum so you will be notified of any new threads.

If anyone has any concerns or complaints please let us know.

Steve/Brad

 

[rickd]

Just tried to install version 3.2 on windows 7 64 bit with mepo 1.2.2 and get a popup asking to shut down tv service as it needs to replace files tv service has in use .

Have not continued with install but can some one advise what to do? or if this is the norm?

Do not want to toast my install.

 

[RonD]

With EPG Collector and XMLTV you can grab USA ATSC Over The Air (antenna) TV Guide/EPG info directly from the TV station without using a network connection. EPG Collector grabs the OTA EPG data and creates a TvGuide.xml file, XMLTV imports the EPG into MePo. This works for my local USA ATSC TV stations. I don't know if this will work for cable/QAM, but I don't think cable sends the needed EPG info. The ATSC EPG has some limitations.

1. For my local stations the ATSC EPG provides basic Program Time, Program Title, and Description but does not have SubTitle, Episode Name, Episode Number, or other info. This is the EPG data you see when you push the "Info Button" on your TV remote control. Some channels provided limited EPG data. My ABC channel has Description = ProgramTitle.

2. The ATSC EPG data provides 12 hours of data for most channels, a few channels provide 1-2 days of data. Since most channels only have 12 hours of data you need to run the grabber 2 or more times a day. See attached EPG_CollectorLog.txt file for more details.

3. EPG Collector is not integrated with MePo TV Server so you need to use Windows Task Manager to run the Collector and control how MePo and Collector share the ATSC tuners. On my test system I have 1 ATSC tuner, so I can only View, Record, or EPG grab 1 station at a time.

you can find EPG Collector at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/epgcollector/

See the attached file EPG_CollectorSetup.txt for some setup info if you want to give EPG Collector a try.

 

[Pat Clark]

I just started to try using EPG Collector, and it seems to be working great here. I get 14 days of EPG data from all the local stations (Tampa, FL, USA) over the air (ATSC). Your case may well be different.

Not mentioned above (perhaps its new since then), is that it can interrogate thetvdb and imdb to get better details on movies and series. It also can get thumbnails, star ratings, and more from there, but I haven't found a skin that will display them and can't find the "tv.guide" properties (used in skinning to display info from the guide) to see if these items are available to the skin.

I also don't know if the ".dtd" file needs to be revised to accommodate the additional information -- but it's working for "normal" guide data. Its generating season and episode data, but it seems to be unavailable or something, since they end up -1 and -1 in the .xml file.

So if anybody knows about TV.guide properties or .dtd files, I'd like to keep working on this, Right now, in many cases the guide data in my case is superior to that from mc2xml or schedules direct or zap2xml2. (A channel that is missing from these is present in the PSIP data, for example, and the descriptions are often superior and never worse.)

 

[RonD]

interesting, I never tried the tvdb/imdb stuff, what EPG Collector version are you using? looks like I used v4.0 or so, When I tried it I only got 12 hours for most channels, 1 or 2 had 24/48 hours. Could you upload your tvguide.com file?

link to another posting on this topic https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/threads/atsc-epg.129413/#post-1122631

attached is what I get for 1 local channel KNTV(NBC)/Cozi, note: the tvguide.xml is from jan2015 so you can't import the file, just open with a web browser to see the XML info.

 

[Pat Clark]

COZI is the channel I was referring to that is not present in zap2it.

Here's my tvguide.xml file. I think I was wrong about 14 days. I was going by what was in the tv guide, but maybe that was residual data from previous import. I hadn't known how to empty the database.

If that's the case, then a combination of zap2it for long-term data plus EPC Collector for short term might work. But the MP plugin doesn't seem to like changing channel-ids, so a way would have to be found to make them the same.

Version is 0402.