United Kingdom
The excellent ability of MP to handle multiple input cards very quickly leads to the possibility of being overwhelmed by the number of TV channels. On my setup I get around 40 DVB-T channels and then several hundred more channels per satellite via DVB-S
The existing mechanism to ease this is via the XML export and import buttons. However the xml file does not lend itself to ease of manipulation of the potential large number of channels. It seems to me that a spreadsheet is the ideal tool to facilitate this. Clearly, adding a spreadsheet functionality to the channels dialog is probably hard work and (given the existance of fine spreadsheet packages from numerous sources) unnecessary.
It seems to me that the ability to export (and reimport) the channel list as a CSV file (or similar) would be ideal. This would then allow channel data to be pruned, renamed, cleaned up etc in a tool ideally suited to the job.
I have had a look at the existing XML file and a suitable format for this might be as follows.
The CSV file would be channel based. Each channel would appear as a row in the CSV file. The first row being the headings for the columns.
Card to channel mapping section of the xml file would translate to a new column with Card1,2,3 etc as data.
Group mapping data would be a new column with group name in it.
There is a snag howvever in the proposed scheme which affects multi satellite DVB-S systems. There appears to be no field to uniquely identify the satellite name or ident. This would be necessary to allow stallite channels to be effectively sorted and handled. The only fix I can think of (without the dreaded change to channel database format) is to have a
channel number key prefix e.g. 01 for astra so channel no on astra is 01xxxxx, 02xxxxx for hotbird etc. This satellite key could be parsed externally to allow motorised dishes to be controlled as required. 99 satellites is probably enough especially if the satellite key to sat name was defined in an external text file.
Might be worth considering for later releases.
Kev
The existing mechanism to ease this is via the XML export and import buttons. However the xml file does not lend itself to ease of manipulation of the potential large number of channels. It seems to me that a spreadsheet is the ideal tool to facilitate this. Clearly, adding a spreadsheet functionality to the channels dialog is probably hard work and (given the existance of fine spreadsheet packages from numerous sources) unnecessary.
It seems to me that the ability to export (and reimport) the channel list as a CSV file (or similar) would be ideal. This would then allow channel data to be pruned, renamed, cleaned up etc in a tool ideally suited to the job.
I have had a look at the existing XML file and a suitable format for this might be as follows.
The CSV file would be channel based. Each channel would appear as a row in the CSV file. The first row being the headings for the columns.
Card to channel mapping section of the xml file would translate to a new column with Card1,2,3 etc as data.
Group mapping data would be a new column with group name in it.
There is a snag howvever in the proposed scheme which affects multi satellite DVB-S systems. There appears to be no field to uniquely identify the satellite name or ident. This would be necessary to allow stallite channels to be effectively sorted and handled. The only fix I can think of (without the dreaded change to channel database format) is to have a
channel number key prefix e.g. 01 for astra so channel no on astra is 01xxxxx, 02xxxxx for hotbird etc. This satellite key could be parsed externally to allow motorised dishes to be controlled as required. 99 satellites is probably enough especially if the satellite key to sat name was defined in an external text file.
Might be worth considering for later releases.
Kev