Tvheadend

In the 2.12 version you can not turn this off. In the latest git version there is an option to disable EIT scanning per service.

But I am not sure how good the EIT support for ATSC (assuming you use that) is within tvheadend.

Hein

Like the OP, I would like to use EIT to populate my EPG. You say there is no way to turn it off in 2.12, but how do I turn it on? Thanks.

in 2.12 it is turned on by default, but only if the EIT information is transmitted on the same transponder as the service. If there is EIT information on a different transponder then it is not picked up (only the eit-actual information is used)

There is EIT information on the service transponders, MythTV can see the information, but the Electronic Program Guide section of tvheadend is completely blank, and I can find no way to get it to feed any EIT information into it. I am in the United States, so I'm running with ATSC. Please help!

because the original developer was not based in the USA, there was no real access to ATSC feeds. So it could be that the ATSC EIT support in tvheadend is not a great as it should be. Does the ATSC EIT data follow the same standard etc as it does for DVB?

Hein

I cannot find information on how the ATSC and DVB compare when it comes to EIT, at least not in a quick Internet search. I'll keep looking. Perhaps getting in touch with the MythTV people would answer that?

Maybe our providers are using a hidden guide bit? http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/EIT

Also maybe libucsi of dvb-apps has the answers? http://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/LinuxTV_dvb-apps

Any progress on this? Anything I can do to help?

Is there any sort of external program or script that can run alongside tvheadend that can read the eit data (maybe using libucsi) on a timed schedule (say every few hours), turn it into an xmltv data file, and pass it to tvheadend? This wouldn't be the best solution, but it might help until tvheadend completely supports atsc eit. I'm not sure how possible this is, though.

I did a little searching, and while I didn't find a script to pull in EIT data and parse it to xml for tvheadend to use, I did find the perl script zap2xml. Does anyone know how to use that with tvheadend? I got my zap2it account set up, and I can manually get zap2xml to create an xmltv file.

What I need to know how to do is:

1. set up a cron job to automate xml file creation
2. get that xmltv file into tvheadend somehow.

There are some vague references to doing this online, but most refer to links to pages that no longer exist, or are not understood by me.

Any ideas?

This would definitely be a good stop-gap measure until U.S. EIT is figured out in tvheadend. I'd appreciate the help! Thanks!

step 1 you already have done ...
and for step 2 you can use;

http://code.google.com/p/tv-grab-file/

make sure you install this script in one of the following locations:
(taken from the FAQ)

Electronic Program Guide (EPG)

Where does Tvheadend scan for XMLTV grabbers?
•/bin
•/usr/bin
•/usr/local/bin
•/usr/bin/perlbin/vendor
•All directories specified in the $PATH environment variable

And then place the XMLTV file at:
~/.xmltv/tv_grab_file.xmltv (so in the home directory that runs tvheadend)

Hein

Thanks for the info, Hein! I do have some additional questions, though:

1. I copied (as root) tv-grab-file to the /usr/bin directory, and made sure it was set as executable. Tvheadend's web interface doesn't show tv-grab-file in its XML-TV Source drop-down, even after restarting tvheadend. I can only see the services that were listed before. What should I be looking for exactly? Have I done that right?

2. The tvheadend daemon seems to run from root. I can access it from a remote computer no matter which account I'm logged into on the media center computer, or even if logged out. Where exactly should the tv_grab_file.xmltv file go? Should I place it in the {home folder}/.xmltv/ of every account that accesses tvheadend, including remote computers, or somewhere in the root directory of the media center computer?

3. How do I automate the actual data grabbing with zap2xml? I've read that I need to set up a cron job that daily runs the zap2xml script to create up-to-date xmltv files. I don't know how to create that cron job, however.

I've been using Linux for many years, but when it comes to scripting and installing/configuring things like this by hand, I'm a complete noob! Give me a .deb file to install, and I'm fine, but something like this is a bit foreign to me. I appreciate your patience and help!

Ok. I figured out that when you download tv-grab-file, you apparently have to rename it to tv_grab_file, otherwise it won't be recognized. They should probably fix that, so that when it's downloaded it will already be named correctly.

So now I just need to figure out where to put the xmltv file, and how to set up a cron job. I keep seeing others say, put the file in ~/.xmltv/, but which account? And what if I'm accessing tvheadend from a remote system? Either I don't seem to have enough information, or this is just way too complex for my feable brain!

Ok, I can confirm that putting the tv_grab_file.xmltv file in the ~/.xmltv/ folder of the user account that I'm accessing tvheadend from does not work. I get the following output on tvheadend's System Log window:

Mar 09 11:09:35 xmltv: Grabbing "tv_grag_file is a simple grabber that just read the ~/.xmltv/tv_grab_file.xmltv file" using command "/usr/bin/tv_grab_file"
Mar 09 11:09:35 xmltv: No output from "/usr/bin/tv_grab_file"

I also tried creating a .xmltv/ folder in my /root directory and creating the file there, as root. I still get the same System Log output.

So where do I put it?

Mike Freeman wrote:

So where do I put it?

well ... like I said:

~/.xmltv/tv_grab_file.xmltv (so in the home directory that runs tvheadend)

In must cases that is /home/hts/.xmltv/tv_grab_file.xmltv

and or your question 3:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CronHowto

Hein

Ah! I didn't know about tvheadend running on in its own hts user account (or had forgotten, at least). That was my missing bit of info. Now it all works! Thank you for the info and link!

Ack! New problem.

So, I got the XMLTV grabber working with zap2xml. Everything worked perfectly for almost a week. Now tonight, XBMC crashes while trying to load the EPG from tvheadend. It gets stuck loading info from the same channel every time and exits with a segmentation fault. Everything seems fine within tvheadend. There are no errors. The EPG on the tvheadend side seems fine with no errors or unusual things going on in it. But now I cannot get XBMC to NOT read the EPG data from tvheadend. And I cannot get tvheadend to clear out its data (and it has about a week's worth in it). I tried deleting the epgdb file (suggested in a post I read), but that didn't do anything. The EPG data that is apparently causing the problem is still there. So I cannot use the Live TV side of XBMC at all now, which means that we cannot watch Live TV at all right now (and probably for the next week, while tvheadend is still using the data). Any suggestions? I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but I'm pretty flustered right now. Thanks for any help you can give!

did you shutdown tvheadend BEFORE you delete the epgdb file?

Hein

I figured it was something simple I was overlooking. I ended up uninstalling tvheadend, deleting the hts user and renaming the folder (to keep its contents to maybe figure out what happened), and reinstalling.

Any idea why this problem may have happened in the first place? I don't want to have to manually delete files every week because XBMC crashes reading the epg. I might as well be back to square one without an epg/eit.

maybe some weird corrupt character in your xmltv feed? or something else ... not sure what might cause it.
Keep track of it .. and if it breaks again ... we might need to have a look at the epgdb and/or the xmltv feed that was used to create that database.

But I hope it does not come back.

Hein

Well, it's back. After I got rid of the hts user/directory and reinstalled tvheadend, I created a new xmltv file with zap2xml and imported it into tvheadend with the tv_grab_file script. Again, tvheadend seems to read it just fine, but XBMC crashes when loading the epg data. It's crashing while loading the same channel as before. I'm attaching the xmltv file to this post. If it helps, when XBMC crashes, it says "This TV" (the name of the channel). I'm not sure if it's that specific channel that's causing it, or the one after it and I just don't see the name of that channel getting displayed. Hopefully this can get sorted out, because this is really getting to be more work than I've got time to do.

Also, I just tried disabling grabbing in the XMLTV tab of tvheadend, deleted the epgdb file, completely restarted tvheadend, and even removed my .xbmc folder. The epg data is still there somehow, and still causing the XBMC crash. Looks like I'm going to have to remove my hts folder and reinstall tvheadend again. :/

only removing/renaming the .hts directory under the hts users home dir should be enough. But you should do this when tvheadend is not running. so first stop tvheadend then remove/rename. When tvheadend starts, it reads the epgdb file into memory and keeps it there. When it shuts down it saves the EPG from memory back into the epgdb file again.

So there is no need to reinstall tvheadend each time.

Also, try to see if you can create an smaller xmltv file with only the suspect tv stations epg data in it. You can do that with a simple text editor by removing the other sections from the xmltv file.

Hein

Has there been any progress on the ATSC EIT scanning?

Fortunately, there have been a ton of channels added in my area. Unfortunately, the Zap2It data is far out of date, and they don't seem interested in remedying the situation. In fact, they've made site changes in the last few weeks, and now I can't access their data at all through zap2xml. Most other sources (such as the Schedules Direct pay service) also base their data on Zap2It, so my missing channels are still a problem if I switch. My only hope at this point is EIT. Anything new to report on that? Thanks!