Tvheadend

Does your server have BBC News HD channel?

A L, freesat and channel 4 have had a falling out over fees as have many of the other channels, hence why they've vanished!

See this.

I believe Freesat is an EPG, as is Sky. So channel providers pay to be listed in the EPG, the more they pay, the nearer the top of the EPG they get. When they fall out then they get delisted from the EPG.

But the channels are broadcast regardless of if they are in an EPG since they also pay the satellite for broadcast space (I believe they get rebates from Sky to offset that cost if they encrypt their service). I also think it's a legal requirement for proper Freesat boxes to allow you to tune in to muxes even if they are not in the Freesat EPG, but I guess they then only get now+next information.

I don't use bouquets. But, if I did, I'd hit "Services Seen" in the bouquet tab to get the one with the most and map that. Not sure if it will screw up your channel numbers though.

I'm guessing you're probably mapping something like England Default, which mine reckons has 287 services, whereas my DVB-S bouquet has 1219 services. You might need to hit "create bouquet" on the DVB-S entry in the Networks tab first to get the DVB-S bouquet to be created. (Or whatever you call your DVB-S network, perhaps you called it Freesat or Astra or something else).

Thank you - this makes perfect sense now (all this time, I have misunderstood what Freesat and Sky were - d'oh!)

I ended up changing from the Freesat London bouquet to the London Sky bouquet and, once I had unticked the option to map encrypted channels, I have suddenly got masses more channels. I have lots of rubbish channels but that seems a small price to pay, to have things like Channel 4 HD back.

One slightly odd thing - I updated my Schedules Direct grabber to Sky HD channels. However, I note that there are some channels that are still missing EPG channels - I guess Schedules Direct does not provide data for every single Sky channel.

Pham Josh - just in case it assists your setup, yes - I do get BBC News HD.

SD seems a bit of a mess with Sky/Freesat channels since they don't have one which is just "all channels from 28.2E" (well, they do, but it only has about 10 channels).

I'm not sure if the Sky bouquet has all the channels though, since there are others which don't pay Sky but still FTA, but probably gives you most of the good ones.

You can download data for sky and freesat using perhaps tv_grab_combiner (very slow/memory hungry) or perhaps just copying the grabber script to multiple different filenames and running with different config files for the different SD lineups. Even then, there are some holes in the schedule, but mainly on the obscure channels.

FWIW: I don't use the grabber directly, but enable the "xmltv sock" option in Tvheadend grabbers.

Then I have a system crontab (man crontab) to run a script that does something similar to:

#! /bin/sh
cd .xmltv || exit 1
for i in *.xml
do
  OF=/tmp/grab$i
  rm -f $OF
  tv_grab_az_sdjson_sqlite --output $OF --merge-split=5 ...etc
  wait
  nc -w 5 -U $HOME/.hts/tvheadend/epggrab/xmltv.sock < $OF &
done
wait

So that basically goes through all the files named ".xml" in your .xmltv directory, does a grab, sends the output to tvheadend, then waits for them to all finish. (Assumes your xmltv filenames don't have spaces in them).

That way you can combine data from multiple fetches and if two SD lineups have the same channels then they just overwrite each other in tvheadend.

You'd probably have to fixup paths (such as where xmltv.sock is).

My actual grabber script is a bit more complicated since I use "channel-regex" and "channel-exclude-regex" options to only fetch multiple days for "interesting" channels and just a day for the other channels and do a few other things; but you get the gist.

So your crontab would be something like:

30 07 * * * tvheadend /usr/local/bin/my_grab_schedule > /dev/null 2>&1

Nice, could I use your server for recording? Very appreciate if you agree!

FYI Channel 4HD has been removed from FreeSAT. But its still available as a FTA Channel.