[mythtvnz] epgsnoop

[Stephen Worthington]

On Tue, 16 Mar 2010 20:33:56 +1300, you wrote:

>Given the problems with Sky I've resorted to getting epgsnoop going. I'm 
>using version 0.81.
>I have copied channels.conf.sky to channels.conf and epgsnoop.sqlite to 
>.epgsnoop.
>
>Freeview seems to work OK but sky the config is not, all I get is
>
>myth at mercury:~/epgsnoop-0.81$ epgsnoop
>/usr/local/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/epgsnoop/snooper.py:8: 
>DeprecationWarning: The popen2 module is deprecated.  Use the subprocess 
>module.
>   import popen2
>
>Processing packets: 02500
>Total programs:     0
><?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
><!DOCTYPE tv SYSTEM "xmltv.dtd">
><tv generator-info-name="epgsnoop/0.81" 
>generator-info-url="http://nice.net.nz/epgsnoop" date="20100316202828 ">
></tv>
>
>I'm assuming that mythbackend must not be running for this to work??

I will be getting epgsnoop going tomorrow when my DVB-S2 card arrives,
so I have been looking at how this works.  epgsnoop needs to have a
card tuned to the signal it is going to get the EIT data from.  Take a
look at this from the list archives:

http://lists.ourshack.com/pipermail/mythtvnz/2008-December/006085.html

What the epg.sh script does is to check if the DVB-S card it needs to
use is being used by mythbackend.  It does that by checking if any of
the virtual tuners associated with that card are busy (7, 8 or 9 in
this case).  If they are busy, it sleeps for 30 minutes and then tries
again.  When the card is not busy, it uses dvbtune to tune the card to
the correct satellite transponder (Freeview or Sky) and then runs
epgsnoop to collect the EIT data from that transponder.

Note that for this to work you need to set the option that makes
mythbackend only grab a tuner card when it needs it and release it
when it is finished.  I forget where that is - I always set it anyway
when I first install a MythTV system.

Looking at the dvbtune commands in epg.sh, I am not sure how the
correct tuner card is selected.  I would have thought that a -c option
would also be required to set the correct card.  In my case, I will
only have one DVB-S card, and getting the EIT data from one of the
other three DVB-T tuners would not get the right EIT data.

I have never done python before, so I am finding it a bit difficult to
follow the epgsnoop code as yet.  It will help when I have a DVB-S
card to actually try it with tomorrow.