[mythtvnz] Channel name & Live TV

[Stephen Worthington]

On Thu, 03 Jul 2014 10:39:41 +1200, you wrote:

>I have a couple of DVB-S mythtv machines I look after.
>When channel flicking on Live TV, the channel PID comes up on the 
>information bar rather than the channel name making it difficult to know 
>which channel you're switching to.
>I've found the call sign and channel name / callsign formats in the 
>setup, but they don't seem to have any impact on the Live TV information 
>bar.
>
>Any pointers appreciated.

There is no difference between DVB-S and any other sort of channel.
LiveTV uses the channel number (channel.channum in the database) to
select channels.  If you use the up/down channel buttons, the channel
number is displayed, along with the icon (channel.icon) (although that
may vary according to the theme uses - I use MythCenter-wide).  So if
you do not have your channel icon fields filled in for each channel,
it will be hard to work out what the channel is.

To check if you have all the channel icons working, bring up the
programme guide screen.  You should have an icon on each channel
there.  In MythCenter-wide, the icon is displayed in the leftmost
position on the line for each channel, to the left of the channel
number and callsign.  If they are all not working, then you probably
do not have the path to the icons directory set up properly.  The way
that works has changed in recent versions - you used to have to have
the full path to the icon file specified in the channel.icon field,
but now you just put them all in /home/mythtv/.mythtv/channels and
just specify the filename without any path.

If you are comfortable with SQL, then this command will display the
icon fields for you:

select chanid,channum,callsign,name,icon from channel order by
channum+0;

and this will show any channels where you do not have the icon field
filled in:

select chanid,channum,callsign,name,icon from channel where icon is
null or icon='' order by channum+0;

But even if the icon field is filled in, if it does not match a file
in the /home/mythtv/.mythtv/channels directory, there will be no icon
displayed.