[mythtvnz] Channel Icons

[Tony Sauri]

On 20/05/14 22:30, Stephen Worthington wrote:

>
>>
>> You mention lyngsat so I guess you source your tv from sat.  I am a dvb-t consumer so I have taken a different approach.
>>
>> The mheg stream contains icon images which are used ( I assume ) by the freeview guide displays.
>>
>> So as I am already grabbing my epg from mheg I also grab the icon images and then process them with a little ImageMagick script.  As for naming convention i decided on using the mheg service id so the TV One icon is called 1200.png.
>>
>> I see the benefits of my approach as follows:
>>
>> I automatically get icons for all new channels
>> I automatically get any changed icons if a chanel rebrands
>>
>> I feel it is a total soution for dvb-t users but does not address sky channels or those people that use freeview sat.
>>
>> Tony
>
> That is an excellent trick.  What software are you using to grab the
> icons?
>


OK ... A lot more interest than I had anticipated

Before I start here is a link to a pair of directories that contain the 
freeview images grabbed from the MHEG stream and the icon images I have 
created   ...   best to make sure you are happy with the end result 
before you waste any time :-)

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/8qhgulvsgk6rg9x/AAAulIpjftFOwDQIlUcnG9Uta


Now just a little history ... back in 2011 I wrote a small perl proc as 
a proof of concept for grabbing the MHEG EPG data and parse it.  At the 
time I could not spare enough time to the effort and SolarVox took the 
initiative and eventually produced and announced the MHEG2XMLTV project 
on SourceForge.

So far so good but I always thought there could be a better 
implementation and have been quietly working on my original idea (Which 
is a work in Progress).

I use rb-download to actually grab all the data in the MHEG Carosel and 
store it on the local pc.  This choise is not without it's Issues:
A) The latest source as downloaded from sourceforge will not compile and 
the raised bug is marked "Will Not Be Fixed".  The bug report however 
gives a work around and I have patched the source so it compiles and 
runs at least in Xububtu 12.04.  I have not tried it in 14.04 yet.

If anyone decides to go this route I will provide a copy of my patched 
version.

B) rb-download was not written to be run in an unattended scenario and 
has to be cancelled   ... not the best when we want to run via cron at 
3:00am.

So I have written a wrapper for rb-download (in Perl which has been my 
language of choice for a long time and I am too old to devote enough 
time to learn Python)

In essence the wrapper does the following:

1)  Determines the most suitable physical tuner to use for grabbing by 
querying tuner status and scheduled recordings looking for a tuner that 
can be guaranteed to remain in a predictable state of doing nothing or 
recording a programme for at least the next 200 secs.

2}  Having made that decision it schedules the execution of rb-download 
in a separate thread and then monitors the files created by rb-download.

3)  When all required files are on disk (which takes less than 60 secs 
on my system) the master thread kills the rb-download thread and then 
cleans up.

My experience with the above process is very good but in the last 18 
months there have been 2 instances where the processing has gone awry
and I have not yet been able to trace the reason.

I am currently thinking of implementing a watchdog timer to cancel the 
whole job if it exceeds 180 secs.

In the context of grabbing the freeview icons we are finished.  Just 
remains to run some ImageMagick to reformat the captured images to what 
we want.

I am more than happy to share the code I have developed but need a day 
or two to cleanup some of the uglier stuff that I buried in there as I 
was in a rush at times.

Perhaps people wanting to share the code could message me off-list and I 
will get back to them by end of the week.

Regards

Tony