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Any Way to Easily Suppress Encrypted Channels?

Added by Prof Yaffle almost 11 years ago

I know I can go through them one at a time and disable the services, but there are hundreds of the blighters, and it's taking forever...

Here's the real use problem (happened last night): there are channels in the UK that are broadcast encrypted on satellite, but unencrypted on terrestrial (e.g. Dave). I have weighting set up on my tuners so that the satellite tuners are preferred (signal quality reasons, really - plus, de-prioritising my DVB-T versus my DVB-T2).

So, autorec comes along and says "ooh, there's a programme you want to record" and pops it in the schedule. However, if the DVB-S tuners are free when the programme commences, tvheadend will get stuck in a loop waiting for a decodable stream from the preferred (S) tuners rather than giving up and trying the T tuners from where it would actually get a signal.

Thoughts:

1. A menu option on the tuner to ignore encrypted channels
2. A better bulk alteration on the webUI - you can select multiple services and delete them (but they'll be rediscovered) but you can't bulk select and disable them
3. Manually search through and disable the relevant muxes, although there's a very high chance of taking out FTA channels as well (e.g. if the BBC channels are on the same mux)
4. Piddle around with grep and sed to select the services that have NDS encryption and disable them from the command line
5. Dump the priority so that at least my DVB-T2 tuner has equal weight to the DVB-S2 ones, leaving only the DVB-T in reserve
6. Manually search and rename channels that this might happen on
7. ... err ...

Any other ideas?


Replies (5)

RE: Any Way to Easily Suppress Encrypted Channels? - Added by Prof Yaffle almost 11 years ago

Well, I'm impatient, so I've tried this:

hts@Server: ~/.hts/tvheadend/dvbtransports$ grep -l -r "\"scrambled\": 1" . | xargs -e sed -i 's/\"disabled\": 0/\"disabled\": 1/g'

It seems to have worked, though I'm sure I'll find out in due course. It'll all change when I eventually upgrade to master, anyway, as I know the file format will change - with that and a decent backup (with permissions intact ;-) ), I can always dig myself back out.

Thoughts still welcome, though!

EDIT

The power's gone to my head: why not stop them from cluttering up the EPG while I'm about it...

hts@Server:~/.hts/tvheadend/dvbtransports$ grep -l -r "\"scrambled\": 1" . | xargs -e sed -i 's/\"dvb_eit_enable\": 1/\"dvb_eit_enable\": 0/g'

I'm sure Adam will be along at some point to tell me that I've just done something terribly, hideously bad, and that a black hole is appearing under Geneva even as I type...

RE: Any Way to Easily Suppress Encrypted Channels? - Added by Prof Yaffle almost 11 years ago

The good news is that this worked perfectly. The bad is that it seems to have fallen completely by the wayside in the move to 3.9.x.

The new structure under input/linuxdvb contains much of the same information, but not all of it. I don't know some is a WIP, but:

1. There doesn't appear to be any way of supressing EPG updates on a per-channel basis any more - if they're enabled, you get the EPG.

2. There's no specific "scrambled" or "encrypted" flag any more... I think it's working it out from the caidlist information (i.e. if the Conditional Access information is there then the channel is encrypted).

I'll keep looking to see if I can solve this one, as I don't need an additional 70,000+ events in my EPG for channels I can't get - plus all the hassle with wildcard patterns in PVR rules.

I was careful when I mapped the channels to make sure that Include encrypted services was disabled. I suspect that this should have solved my problems, and maybe it's because I used the migration script which perhaps brought my disabled-but-mapped channels over and can't now undo them easily.

Any thoughts appreciated from anyone else...

RE: Any Way to Easily Suppress Encrypted Channels? - Added by Latty Jordan over 10 years ago

Any reason why just deleting those encrypted channels from your channel list doesn't work? My EPG on the old version was always filled with stuff from encrypted channels, but mapping using the new option to ignore them has cut loads out.

RE: Any Way to Easily Suppress Encrypted Channels? - Added by Prof Yaffle over 10 years ago

Deleting them would be fine - except there are 300+ of the things, and I can only identify them by service, not by channel. By that I mean that the services tab allows you to sort by encryption status and thus select-and-delete, but the channel list doesn't carry the encryption status over, so the only way to tell which is which is by individually hunting for the names. After doing this, the channels may well then re-appear the next time an autodiscovery picks everything up and maps them over (although maybe the "exclude encrypted" would work then).

I think the right approach is to nuke 'em all and remap, but I haven't found the idle time to do it just yet. The kids would be most upset if I missed Mythbusters :-)

RE: Any Way to Easily Suppress Encrypted Channels? - Added by renne - over 10 years ago

In my opinion it should be possible to disable services by attributes automagically.

Example: Ingore all services which are (encrypted|type != (SDTV|HDTV|Radio)).

EPG/Teletext of unmapped services should be ignored, too.

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