[mythtvnz] Getting the current Freeview icons

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sat, 16 Apr 2022 19:13:08 +1200, you wrote:

>Interestingly, the guide.xml file itself scraped all the icons for me
>when I ran mythfilldatabase using it.
>
>I had a full set of channel icons, but it seems to download its own
>and install them for channels which match in your database and its
>database.

Yes, tv_grab_nz-py will update the channels and the icons unless you
run mythfilldatabase with the "--only-update-guide" option.  So if the
channel data has the icon URLs, as the guide.xml file does, that will
be updated.  But letting the EPG data update the channels has some
hazards, so I normally do not let that happen and use channel scanning
for channel updates.

>I'm quite happy with it's selections. The ones I manually downloaded
>from the Freeview NZ site (https://freeviewnz.tv/tvguide/) are
>transparent PNG's, which look nice in some circumstances, but get lost
>against a dark background in my MythTV setup.

It seems to be scraping the icons used on the freeviewnz.tv guide
pages on the left hand side for each channel.

>On a final note about the guide data, apart from having to chance a
>few channel names (M?ori TV with a macron ; ChineseTV8 ; Parliament TV
>and a couple of others) it's good data.

Now that MythTV's channel scanning is working reasonably well, it pays
to just use the name and callsign values that the scan takes from the
DVB-T streams.  It looks like the NZXMLTV EPG data is not doing that,
so some of the names are a little different.  And, of course, there is
still the problem that MythTV does not use UTF-8 everywhere and
characters do not display properly at times.  But I believe the data
in the database is all UTF-8, so even if it may not display properly,
internally all the characters work (for searching, for example).  If
you have a look at /usr/share/mythtv/sql/mc.sql, which contains the
SQL code used to create the mythconverg database, it has this line:

ALTER DATABASE mythconverg DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE
utf8_general_ci;