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How can you schedule recurring programs if there is no guide data available?

Added by K Shea about 10 years ago

I'm using TVHeadEnd to receive free-to-air satellite feeds, and where I live there is no guide data available for these (there might be if I could get the grabber to work, but so far no luck). I want to set TVHeadEnd up to record a particular channel every week at a certain time, and I can't figure out how to do it. I can set up an individual recording under Digital Video Recorder | Upcoming Recordings | Add Entry but there doesn't seem to be any way to specify that the recording should take place every day or every week, There's also the Automatic Recorder tab, which doesn't really make sense to me because I cannot see how you specify the exact start or end times of a recording - my guess is that only works on stations where guide data is available, and it takes the start and end times for that.

Is there really no way to set up a recurring recording on stations where no guide data is available, or am I just missing it?


Replies (5)

RE: How can you schedule recurring programs if there is no guide data available? - Added by Rob vh about 10 years ago

You are best off getting the EPG data from the provider. A google on the satellite and/or provider name and the keyword EPG may show you the mux id that holds the EPG. For example, with freesat on Astra 2, the EPG data is not on the actual muxes that stream the programs, but on 11428H. You will have to have idle scanning active on the Network, or code a Mux scheduler in the DVB Inputs.

RE: How can you schedule recurring programs if there is no guide data available? - Added by K Shea about 10 years ago

Rob, perhaps you missed the part of my original post where I said "where I live there is no guide data available". See Wikipedia's Free-To-Air page at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-to-air and note the section on North America - it explains the differences between the signals available here and most of the rest of the world. The very first bullet point is:

  • No schedule information is provided with most of the signals, therefore satellite receivers cannot show a proper electronic program guide (EPG).

I actually wish all headend software authors (and the authors of the embedded software used in free-to-air satellite set top boxes) would read that entire section; it would save us a lot of headaches here if they understood that free-to-air here is not the same as in most of the rest of the world.

That said, I finally did figure out how to get guide data from an online source for some of the channels, though it was not exactly a straightforward process.

RE: How can you schedule recurring programs if there is no guide data available? - Added by Quentin D. about 10 years ago

We need a "repeat" option (weekly, daily) when creating a recording. I really need it to schedule radio shows.

For the moment I use the excellent script by Daramora Kaminari : https://tvheadend.org/boards/5/topics/7382

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