[mythtvnz] Sky is renumbering its channels on 1-May-2013

[Stephen Worthington]

On Tue, 30 Apr 2013 19:16:14 +1200, you wrote:

>On 30/04/13 17:13, Stephen Worthington wrote:
>> And you probably need to set up epgsnoop to use the new
>> channels.conf.sky I posted.  The old one is rather out of date now.
>> Remember to comment out any channels you do not have configured in
>> your database, as epgsnoop adds in any channels it finds in the
>> channels.conf file that it also finds in the EPG data.  If you are
>> still using the unmodified channel.conf file that comes with epgsnoop,
>> it will likely be adding in some invalid channels for you eg Fresh.
>> The way it adds them does not cause any problems, but does clutter up
>> your database.  They end up with NULL in the channum field, so you can
>> easily find and delete them.  Incidentally, NULLs are not allowed in
>> the channum field, so I am not sure how epgsnoop is managing to do
>> that.
>
>epgsnoop does not touch your database.
>
>hads

It must be something else then, as the five bad* channels in my old
channels.conf.sky get added back into the database every day.  I have
not checked exactly when it happens, but I am betting that it is when
I do my EPG updates at 15:10 each day.  Maybe it is mythfilldatabase?
Or tv_grab_nz-py?

*bad = do not match an existing channel in my database.

Anyway, once the renumbering is done tonight, I will have more time to
look at automating the process of getting the channels database right,
based on the data from scanning the multiplexes. Getting the channels
right manually is a bit of a nightmare.  It is fine for the few
channels on Freeview, but Sky has far too many to be able to handle by
a manual process.  It took me hours of cross checking various web
sites and an old copy of Skywatch magazine I had to make a reasonably
good Sky database.

For automating things, I have my script to create the scan_s2_channels
database I am using for the channel renumbering, and using that and
the data from the channel table, I have a script that produces a rough
channels.conf file for epgsnoop.  But there needs to be a process of
creating xmltvid values (I have just made them up where there wasn't
an existing one), and there are some other mysterious fields such as
channel.default_authority (crid:// values).  How is that supposed to
be populated?  And is MythTV actually using it for anything?  And of
course there is no source I know of yet for the channel numbers.  I
presume they are buried somewhere in the EPG data, but I have yet to
dig too far into epgsnoop to see.

I have put the above scripts here, should anyone like to have a look
at them:

  http://www.jsw.gen.nz/mythtv/channel-scripts.tgz

They are not designed to be robust scripts used by the general public
yet, but they may be useful to someone.  The scripts are:

freeview-satellite-scan.sh
  (scans the Freeview satellite muxes and produces a text file)
FreeviewHD-scan.sh
  (scans the FreeviewHD DVB-T muxes and produces a text file)
skynz-satellite-scan.sh
  (scans the Sky satellite muxes and produces a text file)
import-channel-scans.sh
  (reads the scan text files and creates the scan_s2_channels table)
create-epgsnoop-channels-conf.sh
  (creates epgsnoop channel.conf files from the scan_s2_channels
  and channel tables)