Tvheadend

You don't say what channel or even what country you're in. My UK Freeview listing has no such program.

Freeview is a UK based service and I'm in the UK, receiving via antenna OTA. The channel is CBeebies (SD).

Both Australia and New Zealand also have their own Freeview, so while Freeview[UK] is indeed a UK based service, just saying 'Freeview' doesn't tell anyone which country you're in.

Right, OK. Apologies for not originally stating the country that I reside in. If anybody could offer anything more useful than a lamentation of the way I phrased the question, I'd be most grateful.

Normally when these things happen it's because there are several EPG grabber modules enabled and they are providing conflicting information for the same programme. So, one will be saying "Duggee" and the other "New: Duggee", so whichever one is seen last is the one that's used.

Ah, thank you. I did wonder if it was something like that, so I tried unchecking and rechecking some of the grabbers, but perhaps I didn't do the correct ones or give it enough time.

These are the grabbers that are enabled:

Over-the-air: EIT: DVB Grabber (Pri: 1)
Over-the-air: PSIP: ATSC Grabber (Pri: 1)
Over-the-air: UK: Freeview (Pri: 5)

I'll try just leaving the last one active and see if that works.

Thanks again.

I managed to fix this somehow just by stoping the tvheadend service, removing the epg database file and starting tvheadend. The 3 grabbers were still enabled as before. Very strange. Perhaps the data it had was out of date and it didn't want to update it.

Edit: Spoke too soon, some of the programs had it and others didn't. Each time I repeated the process of stopping the service, removing the database and starting it another set of the programs would randomly have the prefix where others didn't - even with just the Freeview grabber enabled. Perhaps the data contains both randomly!

That would be unusual. Occasionally the "now and next" has different data to the x-day guide, but you shouldn't see a difference on listings several days away.

The other thing that can happen is you have merged channels, such as an CBeebies HD and CBeebies (SD), and they have different data; but merging HD and SD is a bit difficult to do in 4.2.8. I'm assuming you only have one DVB-T/T2 tuner, not merging with satellite, and that tuner is only picking up from one relay.

I don't think 4.2 has any filtering for "fixing up" listings, since I only introduced that in 4.3.

You checked that the service was definitely stopped before removing the db?

Assuming no merged channels and only one EPG module then it shouldn't do that. A lot of changes have been made in that area in 4.3 so it's probably it's already fixed in there. If you choose to upgrade, then you should do a backup since the on-disk formats have changed.

I have a single tuner and while I do get most of the HD versions of the channels too, we don't currently get CBeebies HD.

I'm not combining data from other sources and actually I don't think I changed anything in this area from the default installation.

I definitely did make sure the service was stopped before removing the database and I'm able to consistently reproduce this "randomness" each time. The first time I thought I'd cracked it because "New:" was shown on one of the entries, but I discovered it wasn't the one that has "New:" on my TV's EPG and that it doesn't have the prefix on the other new ones. Then I discovered by repeating the process I was getting "New:" on some of the others instead.

I think I may need to wait until TVHE is updated in the platform I'm using (it installs via Kodi/OSMC) as digressing from this seems like it might be more trouble than it's worth.