Scanning for new/updated channels results in a mess (2 Viewers)

doveman

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Because all code would need to be changed to take this into account so all code would be changed by even this simple setting change. The other issue is that Freeview is UK only and I guess makes up a lot less than 10% of MP users. That and people already complain about how complicated setup is with the number of options.

Anyway this is not a bug as it is working so if you want something post a new thread in the improvement section

All code would need to be changed? What, the entire code for MP? I think you're exaggerating a bit there aren't you? Clearly if the suggested tick-box is not ticked, then the code that's used can be exactly the same as it is now. It's only if the tick-box is ticked that different code needs to run.

If you don't think it's worth fixing then fine, that's up to you, but it seems a bit strange to say that something that leaves the user with a messed up EPG is not a bug, particularly when the cheapest STB can manage to update the channel list/EPG without any problem. Freeview might be UK only but don't other countries (Australia?) have something similar over DVB-T?

One thing I've been looking forward to with MP2 is channel updating from the GUI (so no need to close MP, load TV config and update from there, which is clearly not user-friendly), but if MP2 has the same problems, then I'm afraid I won't consider it Freeview compatible, nor suitable to provide to non-techie users as I've been hoping.
 

jameson_uk

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    All code would need to be changed? What, the entire code for MP? I think you're exaggerating a bit there aren't you? Clearly if the suggested tick-box is not ticked, then the code that's used can be exactly the same as it is now. It's only if the tick-box is ticked that different code needs to run.
    But it is not as simple as that. I am talking about tuning code, scanning code, scheduler code... Then you have to code the logic to cope with channels changing so you need lots of code to update all existing recordings (they can only work if linked to a channel so you also need to cope with recordings where the channel no longer exists). Then you need to update all schedules to link to the new channels and again cope with any channels that no longer exist (eg. if you had a schedule on Virgin 1 how can you know that this now should be Channel One?). Then you would also need to sort out the EPG. I am guessing that most freeview users probably untick thing like QVC and the community channel so they do not appear in EPG. If you delete and re-add these channels this then data needs transferring across too. If you use XML-TV that data needs converting too.

    So you end up touching most of the areas of code within TV-Server. You can not simply say do this if your tuner is a freeview and this if it is not as things like tuning as generic and there is one set of code. You will need to do things like interweave freeview specific code and then you need to regression test massive amounts.

    It is not that I don't think this would help it is that I think it is a massive amount of change for what would benefit a relatively low number of MP users. Your comparison to a cheap STB does not hold true as they have none of the functions of a PVR. They can (and do) simply delete everything and start again as I have stated before. Freeview PVRs are Freeview only so that do not need to cope with most of these issues.

    Remember that mediaportal is open source you are more than welcome to submit a patch to change how this works for consideration :)
     

    doveman

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    Oh well, I'm not a coder so I'll have to defer to you if you say it's that complicated.

    I clearly don't understand what's involved in making changes, but as I suggested before, rather than writing loads of code to try and deal with channels that no longer exist (which would probably not work particularly well anyway), why not just alert the user to those particular scheduled recordings and let them set the correct channel? You seem to be overcomplicating things.

    OK, my comparison to a Freeview STB was invalid. What I should have said is Freeview PVRs don't seem to have a problem with these things. I'll have to look at other software and see if they manage channel changes any better. I'm quite happy with MP, but as it is it's way too awkward for my brother and I don't really want to be remotely managing his PVR for him all the time.
     

    kkendall

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    just to let you guys know, scanning is a big mess at my end too. Luckily there is a table on the internet and I have a spare STB to get the proper tuning details. Scanning for channels always results in messed up channels, missing channels, wrong frequencies or other parameters. Luckily I export/import my channellist every time...otherwise I have to spend ages manually updating, adding and changing channels.
     

    doveman

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    Well I had a quick look at SageTV and that seems able to rescan from the GUI without any trouble. Obviously I haven't been able to test what happens when the channel lineup is changed, but I don't see that it would cause any problems that couldn't be dealt with by allowing the user to manually reallocate recordings to the correct channel.

    I still prefer MP, not just because it's free and SageTV isn't, but because I prefer the look and the way it can be extended with plugins, so I'll stick with it and keep hoping/nagging for it to be improved.

    I was thinking about what you said about Freeview users being a minority of MP users and can't help thinking that perhaps this could be because it's not particularly user-friendly in this respect and if it was improved, perhaps we'd see more Freeview users choosing MP rather than other software. I'm sure we all want to get more people using MP.
     

    jameson_uk

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    not going to read the whole discussion now:
    But for 1.2.0 we are working on:
    0002128: Improve TVE3 channel identification - MediaPortal Bugtracker

    That should fix a lot of issues when channel scanning. This was mostly name based instead of using ID's (That caused most of the trouble).

    For the home compilers: It has just been commited BTW.

    :D this hopefully should resolve a fair few issues we have been seeing but it only a start towards solving this properly. As I said it is a massive job where lots of things can go wrong. Just look at the amount of code Rik has changed
    WebSVN - MediaPortal - Path Comparison - Rev HEAD and HEAD[]=/trunk@27192&compare[]=/trunk@27193

    This should address the issue of channels changing tuning details but there is still a massive amount of work to handle channels that get deleted etc (and there is very little chance we will get anything in for this in 1.2)

    This however should be a good stepping stone towards better scanning :D
     

    doveman

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    not going to read the whole discussion now:
    But for 1.2.0 we are working on:
    0002128: Improve TVE3 channel identification - MediaPortal Bugtracker

    That should fix a lot of issues when channel scanning. This was mostly name based instead of using ID's (That caused most of the trouble).

    For the home compilers: It has just been commited BTW.

    Great to hear this is being tackled. I note it says "We should start to use more unique identifier for the channels (maybe channel and broadcaster IDs combined would be the correct way, needs some study...)". Why can't just the channel ID number be used, as this seems to be unique to each channel on Freeview?

    There also still seems to be a bug, whereby the only way to re-enable an unticked channel is to exit TV Server config immediately after ticking it under Channels. Switching to All Channels or any other group after ticking it, shows it unticked there and on switching back to Channels shows it unticked there again. Ticking it in a group and exiting config doesn't work. When I forget about this bug, I spend quite some time chasing my tail before chancing on the right procedure :rolleyes:
     

    riksmith

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    not going to read the whole discussion now:
    But for 1.2.0 we are working on:
    0002128: Improve TVE3 channel identification - MediaPortal Bugtracker

    That should fix a lot of issues when channel scanning. This was mostly name based instead of using ID's (That caused most of the trouble).

    For the home compilers: It has just been commited BTW.

    Great to hear this is being tackled. I note it says "We should start to use more unique identifier for the channels (maybe channel and broadcaster IDs combined would be the correct way, needs some study...)". Why can't just the channel ID number be used, as this seems to be unique to each channel on Freeview?

    I don't know what field in the DVB specs the channel ID in your quote relates to, but because we have to support combinations of multiple sources we have to adhere strictly to the DVB specs. They say that the original_network_id + transport_stream_id + service_id is the unique indentifier (within one source). For us that means we have to add one identifier: The type of channel (dvb-s, dvb-t).]

    So our unique identifier is: ONID + TSID + SID + channelType.
     

    doveman

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    I don't know which of those is the channel ID I mentioned either :) It's what I see in TVServer config when I click on a channel and it shows under ID, a number from 1-xx.

    I appreciate you can't just use this, as other sources might also use these numbers, but why not just (for DVB-T/Freeview) T-1, T-2, etc?
     

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