Sky IT / UK / UK Freesat EPG (2 Viewers)

[DJBlu]

The only dictionary they have used in the past 2 years is the first. They can use the over the air dictionaries but haven't so far.

Also

To know which dictionary to use for which sat, i.e Sky Uk or Italy

Use the NID

Sky Uk = 0x2
Sky Italy uses 2 NID's - 0xFBFF or 0x13E
Australia = ???

 

[wonkyd]

thanks djblu,

progress is going very well actually, i'm hoping to start testing tonight after work.

One question - Looking at sky's patent, they use 3 huffman tables - 1 is hard wired in firmware (the one used by the loadepg plugin) and there are 2 dynamic tables (broadcast on pid 0x85 I believe). Do you know if Sky ever reference these dynamic tables? - I believe each epg data item has a dictionary Id, but it always seems to be set the same...

Any update mate?

 

[miroslav22]

Hi,

Nearly there, all the information is being lifted off the pid streams correctly now. Unfortunately theres a page fault crashing tvservice thats proving really hard to track down. I could just catch the structured exception and discard the data item causing it, but I try not to take the lazy way out these days!

I'm confident I'll be able to post a first release by next weekend. Once any issues are sorted out, I'll also post an SVN patch file so anyone can compile the code into other (older, branch or in-between) MP releases. (I'll also post binaries for any future official MP releases). Unfortunately the code cannot be integrated into the SVN until after 1.1.0 final is released.

I'll post another update early next week

 

[sjb]

miroslav22: Did you figure out what the unknown bytes were in the title data.

I have a working EPG grabber for Sky in Australia (Foxtel) and New Zealand and I have 2 bytes in the title data that are 'undefined'. Finally managed to figure out that the right hand 'nibble' of the second byte was parental rating so the decode will be different for each country. I do have an inkling of the other 1 1/2 bytes - looks like widescreen/subtitles/captions flags - but I need more evidence.

Did you manage to decide what they were?

 

[miroslav22]

miroslav22: Did you figure out what the unknown bytes were in the title data.

I have a working EPG grabber for Sky in Australia (Foxtel) and New Zealand and I have 2 bytes in the title data that are 'undefined'. Finally managed to figure out that the right hand 'nibble' of the second byte was parental rating so the decode will be different for each country. I do have an inkling of the other 1 1/2 bytes - looks like widescreen/subtitles/captions flags - but I need more evidence.

Did you manage to decide what they were?

Hi,

To be honest I havent really looked at any of these unknown fields yet. I think your probably right that they are widescreen/subtitle/stereo/(hd maybe?) flags. DJBlu will be able to clarify this.

Quick update on the Sky UK/IT grabber - It seems to be running stable now, but ive noticed some of the summaries are not being parsed correctly. Perhaps 1-2% of the packets. It seems to get 'out of sync' somehow (with the data lengths?) - DJBlu - Are there any extra fields occasionally sent down in some of the summary packets? I'm going to debug it tonight, this is quite a painful process unfortunately! Things like this can be quite time consuming to solve im afraid :-(

I'll keep everyone posted...

 

[DJBlu]

The first byte is the parental code

As the previous poster said it is the right hand 'nibble' of the first byte.

The UK uses the following:

5 = 18
4 = 15
3 = 12
2 = PG
1 = U
0 = Unclassified

The second byte has a Series termination flag, If I remember rightly I think it is the left hand nibble of the second byte, use AND 0x40. If this is true then it is the last epsiode in the series.

As for the summaries the length field is always correct, there is sometimes trailing bytes at the end which contains the series link ID. I will have to look through my code to get you the info on getting the series ID as its ages since I've looked at it.

Are the summaries that are not parsing the Adult Channel ones?

If so then these equate to Box Office events that are on pid 0x50-0x55

Sky pushes out the Summary details of these events on another pid to save bandwidth. Then they put the titles and a link ID to the summary on another. Its well complicated which is why I left it out.

 

[miroslav22]

Hi DJBlu - Many thanks for that, I think I know what is wrong in that case, think the code is using the length of the huffman data plus a constant to move to the next summary, which explains why it gets out of step.

Thanks again, saved me lots of time

 

[ma9mwah]

has there been any development in extracting the SeriesID and ProgrammeID from the Freesat EPG? there was some talk of this around a year ago but doesn't seem to have been mentioned in the thread since.

 

[miroslav22]

I didnt know Freesat had an equivalent to Sly's 'series link' - It should be fairly easy to add in, I'll have a look at this when I get around to implementing it.

 

[DJBlu]

Freesat use a simple Series ID system as they use CRIDS.

The problem is MediaPortal as it doesn't allow for series information from DVB-EIT.

Sky system is very basic and easily implemented.

If you wish to record the series. You add the series ID to the database for the program to be recorded. You search the database for other programmes with this series ID and add them to the scheduler. Then when the EPG scanner finds the program with the termination flag for the said Series ID it removes the series ID from the lookup database.

Media Portal needs a database redesign to allow this(1 new field "DVB Series IDs")

This has been flagged up and will hopefully be a feature in MediaPortal 2.