Sky IT / UK / UK Freesat EPG (4 Viewers)

[DJBlu]

DJBlu,

Im not sure if ive found a problem with the latest version you posted....

I had it running for 2 days and it seemed to keep crashing the tvservice every time the EPG was refreshed (the service completely froze and became unresponsive, had to manually kill the process).

Ive put the old tswriter.ax back and it seems ok again now.

When the EPG was refreshed with the new version, the memory usage of tvservice grows to around 650MB and then it seems to freeze.

With the old version (that works ok), the memory usage grows at a similar rate, but only gets to around 550MB. The EPG grabbing ends and shortly after the memory is released and drops to around 100MB.

Sorry I know this is a bit vague - I will try and test more tonight and get some logs.


I have also noticed the occasional title entry in the EPG that seems corrupted somehow. Ive noticed it on Sky Sports HD1 & 2 a few times. The program after the Arsenal/Liverpool game last night was just a jumble of characters eg "AGjhiog8" - i will try and find another corrupted entry tonight. It could be one particular character or phrase that isnt right in the Huffman table.

Thanks for all your hard work on this, its much appreciated

I am looking into this as I have had a few crashes too.

I have fixed the problem with the Sky Box Office channels not being found. All the Unknown channels are now labelled correctly.

I am close to releasing another TSWriter with this feature and the grouping feature.

 

[jobyrne30]

Hi DJBlu , Thanks for the excellent work , I found your latest TS writer works perfectly with SVN 24669 , but I could not get it to work with the releases after that 24923 and 24975 . I found that the TV service would freeze and become none-responsive. I've reverted back to SVN 24669.

By the the way the OpenEPGtoXMLTV on page 4 of this thread still works for Sky UK if you offset the Tvguide.xml by -1 hour when using the xlmtv plugin by Frodo . There are some issues with foreign characters and one or two channels but for the most part it will work with the latest SVN's.

 

[DJBlu]

Ok,

Another Update.

This is a TSWriter that can now group as per the Sky Box. i.e. "Entertainment","Sports","Movies" etc.

To enable this to work there are two new files called "groups_uk.dict" and "groups_it.dict".

If you are going to use the UK version then rename the groups_uk.dict file to

groups.dict

If you are going to use the Italian version then rename the groups_it.dict file to

groups.dict

You can edit these files to your liking, just make sure you do not remove the = sign or add any = sign's

Format must be : 112=Any text you like(do not use ='s)

If your group name is more than 255 characters it will be trimmed automatically.

In your TV server setup there is the option to group by provider, if you ensure this is selected the this TSWriter will group your channels and number them as per your region.

If you want to group by Provider ID then just delete the groups.dict file.

You will need to delete all channels and rescan again.

Enjoy.

View attachment TSWriter_LatestSVN.zip

All feedback welcome.

 

[wonkyd]

Does this version also give the correct naming of channels? Or is that still to come? Cheers for all the hard work!

 

[DJBlu]

Does this version also give the correct naming of channels? Or is that still to come? Cheers for all the hard work!

Forgot to mention that, yes it does for the Box Office Channels. I am working on the others.

Re-download, just done a quick change to stop the channels with numbers greater than 999 getting into the groups.

The next step will be to get all channels from 1 transponder, but this is going to take some time.

Edit :- If you downloaded a file before 00:20 12th Feb 10 then re-download as there was a fault with the EPG grabber. All is fixed now.

 

[miroslav22]

Thanks again DJBlu will test again later,

Quick question - can you view the box office channels in MP? How do you do this? - do you ring Sky to order an event/film and they add the temporary entitlement to the card? Or do you have to put the card back in the box and order it through there?

Apologies if this breaks the rules, I know its a grey area...

 

[DJBlu]

Thanks again DJBlu will test again later,

Quick question - can you view the box office channels in MP? How do you do this? - do you ring Sky to order an event/film and they add the temporary entitlement to the card? Or do you have to put the card back in the box and order it through there?

Apologies if this breaks the rules, I know its a grey area...

You can order it through the sky box or call and you are right they will add an entitlement to the card that allows you to watch, usually 24 hours.

 

[jobyrne30]

The new TS writer seems to be working very well with SVN 24669 , just one or two issues I've noted on my Win XP 32bit test system. In the task-manager the memory usage jumps up to 900,000K and CPU usage to over 50% , this might cause problem for some lower spec systems. I found that if a manual update is done through the tv-server configuration the Setuptv.exe appears to hang and become non-responsive about 3 minutes into the grab, you may be tempted to "end-task" it but it will become responsive about 2-3 minutes later. I think this is down to the high memory usage on my 2GB memory test system.

I also noted that in the TSwriter log there was the following entry "Could not Sky Dict file, please ensure it is placed in the directory with the TSWriter" . All the files where present and correctly placed so I'm not sure if this is a real issue.

 

[Jay_UK]

DJBlu,

Apologises for not replying earlier, only just had chance to look into my previous "issues".

I have installed your latest release (and applied the groups option)

I am happy to say its looking good...if not great

The scan has found the channels, allocated the correct channel numbers (haven't checked all channels yet), and created groups for the various categories

My memory usage/CPU is fine, TVServer is using about 90MB of RAM, and virtually no CPU. I get no erros about the missing dict file either - are you sure you haven' got a hidden extension to the file?

Many thanks,

J.

 

[jobyrne30]

@ Jay_UK , The test system I'm using is kinda lower spec running with an Athlon X2 5000+ with 2GB of ram. On my main HTPC running an Athlon X4 630 with 4GB of ram I'm sure it wouldn't be an issue. I just thought I'd let those with lower spec system know so they don't "end task" and they can give it some time for this super add-on to work it's magic.

The only reason I noticed the high ram usage was the tv-service screen locked up and became non-responsive. During a non-manual update I didn't notice anything everything worked in the background perfectly.

All the file extension are as they should be, I'm currently not using the groups.dict or region.dict files and have them deleted as I only ever use 35-40 TV channels mainly the HD one's so this excellent feauture it's a requirement for me. I've checked logs with and without the groups.dict/region.dict files included each time stopping the tv-service restarting the tv-sevice deleting the channel list and doing a clean channel scan and preforming an epg update. Each time an epg update is done the TSwriter log reads :- "Could not Sky Dict file, please ensure it is placed in the directory with the TSWriter" the times for this entry match the times when I see the ram usage spikes at 900,000K.

I do have DVB-T card on my system with 4 channels selected for TV DVB-EPG update. I'm recording some programs at the moment if I get a chance tomorrow I'll deselect those channels from the DVB-EPG TV update and see if that makes a difference.