Plugin: DVB4Sage EPG Importer

[Jabroni]

Description:

This plugin works in conjunction of DVB4Sage. It requires to have the EIT/EPG part configured on the DVB4Sage so it will parse and add the corresponded data to lineups / channels. It works by opening a TCP Port on the SageTV server which listens for the events that DVB4Sage sends every day for EPG updates.

It has been tested to work on DVBS setups with NA providers (Dish Network and Sky Mexico).

It features automatic channel mapping from the data sent from DVB4Sage, so new channels should appear automaticlly on your Program Guide without manually adding the channel

Expect a DVB4Sage beta release soon which supports the use of this plugin (current exe on google code doesnt support it, this additions are on SVN repo). We will try to include a documentation of the syntax we are currently using to send the data, in case some other developers want to try to send other epg events to the same plugin

Big props to CodeMonkey for working on the EPG parsing on DVB4Sage and mpogr for developing DVB4Sage

Enjoy

Other links

DVB4Sage Thread

DVB4Sage Google code Project page

[rmanna]

Hello.......Was just wondering if you could please point me in the right direction for this? I love dvbe4sage and definitely like to use its full features. I've seen an eit.ini file in the source code but no where is there a guide on how to set this up. Is it still supported? Any help would be much appreciated.

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by rmanna

Hello.......Was just wondering if you could please point me in the right direction for this? I love dvbe4sage and definitely like to use its full features. I've seen an eit.ini file in the source code but no where is there a guide on how to set this up. Is it still supported? Any help would be much appreciated.

I assume your tuners are not natively supported by SageTV and therefore you need a network encoder, however if you don't, SageTV automatically read the EPG out form the DVB transport stream when you are manually configuring your physical channel lineup this way:

onid-tsid-sid-channelnumber

for example BBC1 one would be

2-2045-6301-<your channel number on the FRQ file>

Hope it helps
Eddy

[Oddity]

You could take a look at this post for the download:
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...t=49610&page=7

[rmanna]

Thanks for the tip!

[rmanna]

Thanks Oddity I would have never found that. I'm going to give it a try

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by rmanna

Thanks for the tip!

No problem, I guess you know that the EPG on the DVB transport stream is quite basic and very limited indeed, so I would personally recommend richest data source like the WebGrab+Plus or mc2xml which works very well with SageTV in conjunction with the Stephane's XMLTV importer.

Eddy

[Oddity]

If you want to use the EPG data from the stream I suggest using EPG Collector, its really simple as long as you have XMLTV Importer.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/epgcollector/

I have just noticed that XMLTV Importer no longer seems to be available as the site has been down for some time

http://www.lmgestion.net

[wubdich]

Originally Posted by routerunner

SageTV automatically read the EPG out form the DVB transport stream when you are manually configuring your physical channel lineup this way:

onid-tsid-sid-channelnumber

for example BBC1 one would be

2-2045-6301-<your channel number on the FRQ file>

Very interesting ... will EPG be read from DVB transport stream every 24 hours, or when tuning to the channel, or acording to another schedule ?

Is it possible to get EPG-Data from different sources for different channels in one lineup ?
e.g.: EPG data via mc2xml for channel 1 and EPG data for channel 2 from DVB transport stream ?

[routerunner]

Originally Posted by wubdich

Very interesting ... will EPG be read from DVB transport stream every 24 hours, or when tuning to the channel, or acording to another schedule ?

The DVB-TS EPG is only read while tuning a channel, and if I recall properly you will notice that if you have, let say, 10 channels in your SageTV EPG configured this way (onid-tsid-sid-channelnumber) and belonging to the same transponder, by tuning to one of them you will see all the other channels populating with the EPG data as well, so apparently the EPG is sent per transponder and not per channel. I recall this happened to me whilst testing the "decrypter plugin" for the German channels and as I didn't have any cheap EPG source available at that time I just configured few channels of the same transponder this way and tuned to one channel only, but after few minutes all the other channels had some very basic EPG as well.

However please be aware that depending from the country the DVB-TS EPG could be very limited, with poor or non-existent metadata, sometimes with errors and it doesn't normally contain data for more than 7 days, also it is time zone dependent, that is supposed you are in Germany (GMT+1) and wanted to see some UK channels (GMT) the UK data in your EPG will be shown 1 hour earlier.

Is it possible to get EPG-Data from different sources for different channels in one lineup ?
e.g.: EPG data via mc2xml for channel 1 and EPG data for channel 2 from DVB transport stream ?

Yes, knowing the limits you can mix and match, because the DVB-TS EPG is independent and configured via SageTV directly via the syntax above. I have UK data from DigiGuide, part of Italian channels via mc2xml and other Italian channels with WebGrabPlus+ (the latter merged via the XMLTV Importer) all happily together.

IMHO, unless your server doesn't have access to the Internet or only dial-up available, it is better to get your EPG data from other sources.

Hope it helps
Eddy