[mythtvnz] EPG via EIT after recent channel changes

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sat, 23 Apr 2022 10:42:23 +1200, you wrote:

>After my upgrade to v32 and the recent channel changes  my EPG via EIT has not been quite right (previously it worked fine for at least 3 years)Some channels show only the next 2 programmes, a couple show no data at all and the rest show 7 days.
>My tuner is a dual HDHomeRun and I suspect that is the problem so I have ordered a PCIe quad tuner hoping that it will fix the problem.(Scheduled recordings are still working but I cannot schedule new recordings if they are not showing yet)
>I am not competant enough to use scripts created my the likes of Mike and Stephen and to be honest I like the uncomplicated way that EIT used to meet my requirements.
>So my question is - "for those who have the new channels and use EIT for their EPG, what type of tuner do you use?" 

It does not matter what sort of tuner.  They can all receive the
streams that are being broadcast, including the EIT EPG streams.  So
what matters is the software being used to collect the EIT data from
those streams.  If MythTV was getting the EIT EPG before, it still
will be - there has been no change in how the EIT data works.  So the
problem is simply that the full EIT data is no longer being broadcast.

To check on that, I fired up my laptop on Windows 11 and ran DVBViewer
there.  I had it rescan the channels and then show me the EPG data,
which it gets from EIT.  I also used the DVBViewer TransEdit program
which has an option to analyse the streams on a mux.  From my Wharite
transmitter, there is only now/next EIT data on the TVNZ and Discovery
muxes for most of the channels, which is why you are having problems.
On the TVNZ mux there is full EIT data for TVNZ DUKE+1 only, and on
the Discovery mux there is no full EIT data for any channel.  The
other three muxes still have full EIT EPG data.

My guess is that during the recent lineup changes, some engineer has
managed to turn off the full EIT data for the TVNZ and Discovery muxes
somehow.  Maybe a complaint to the Freeview team or Kordia (if anyone
knows how to do that) would prompt them to fix it.  However, as far as
I know, full EIT EPG is not actually part of the specifications for NZ
DVB-T transmissions - full EPG data is only promised to be available
using MHEG5.  At the start of DVB-T transmissions, there was only
now/next EIT data.  It was a good few years later that they turned on
full EIT data and it was working up until the recent lineup changes.

So the options for full EPG for the FreeviewHD DVB-T channels now seem
to be:

- Collect the MHEG5 data and process it yourself using mhegepgsnoop.

- Use the downloaded data from NZXMLTV, which is created by web
scraping the freeviewnz.tv site.  See
https://nzxmltv.com/xmltv/guide.xml.  This data does seem quite good.

- Use EPG Collector on a Windows machine to collect the MHEG5 EPG and
load that into MythTV.

The latter two options would require changing the xmltvid values for
each channel to match the xmltvids in the EPG data.  With
mhegepgsnoop, it gets it xmltvid values from your MythTV database so
there is no need to change them as long as each channel already has a
unique xmltvid value.