Tvheadend

Max,

First, to answer your questions...

1. When you click the "Map DVB Services to Channels" button, all channels that have registered service and channel names get sent to your channel list. And yes, it should happen instantly.

2. The EPG depends on which service you're using. After the channels are in your channel list, go to "Configuration" -> "Channel/EPG" -> "EPG Grabber". Depending on what TV service provider you use, you will either be using an XMLTV source, or EIT or other "over-the-air" source. Set up the grabber on this tab to best match what you use. Once you click "Save configuration", you can go to the "Channels" tab and individually set each channel's "EPG Grab source". Click "Save changes" and you're done. It's a pain if you've got 739 channels, but that's how it works. Oh, and just a warning: EIT doesn't work at all for American ATSC sources.

Now, if you're not getting channels into your list, you might be having the same problem I am. Just to confirm that, could you answer a couple questions?

1. If you go to the "Services" tab, what do you see? Are any channels automatically named, or are they all listed as "Unmapped"?
2. Which version of TV Headend are you using?
3. What broadcast service protocol are you connecting to? QAM? ATSC? DVB-T, DVB-C? You have a lot of channels, so looks like cable or satellite.

I'm connecting on version 3.5.204, and my tuner hardware (Hauppauge WinTV PVR-1950) registers exactly the same as yours ("Samsung S5H1411 QAM/8VSB Frontend"). I'm connecting to ATSC antenna broadcast.

The problem I'm having is that after scanning in services, all service names are blank, and channel names are "Unmapped". In the 2.xx versions and 3.0-3.2, I could get most services to show up, but there were always some that were blank/Unmapped. But in 3.5, I've never had service names come up correctly. In order to get channels in my list, I have to give each channel a dummy name (I usually just number them consecutively: 1, 2, 3, etc.), then watch each one until I can figure out which channel I'm watching and give the channel its real name. Once you give a channel a name, it should automatically be added to your channel list. Being on an antenna, I only have about 50 services to watch through, so it's annoying, but not too bad. But if I were using cable with hundreds of services to go through and this happened, this would be an incredibly daunting task!

Thanks a lot for the reply

1. All of the channels are listed as "Unmapped" and service names are blank
2. The about page lists "HTS Tvheadend 3.5.204~ge343bfd" I checked this out from the git repository and built it a couple days ago
3. I am using QAM over cable

I am also using a PVR-1950 so I think we are having the same problem.

Would reverting to an earlier build help or would you not recommend it for other reasons?

As for EPG, would you recommend the XMLTV or over-the-air grabber? Also would the XMLTV be able to figure out the channels if I have to name them manually?

Since most of the channels are encrypted I am only interested in a subset (thought it still looks to be almost 150 channels)

Max

Max,

Yes, looks like we have almost the identical problem with the identical setup. Only cable vs. antenna is different.

Reverting to an earlier build might help, but you might lose features, especially with timeshifting. If that's not a problem, it might be worth a try. You can always reinstall the newer version if it doesn't work. Also, like I said before, even with the older versions there were still some channels that didn't register service/channel names. Probably about 7 to 10 of the 50 or so channels on my system were blank (they would come and go at random, sometimes messing up my channel settings so you might want to turn off "Idle Scanning" and turn on "Skip initial scan" to prevent that).

For EPG, it depends on how reliant on it you are. I've never gotten TV Headend EIT to work, but it might be different for cable. And depending on your cable company, they might provide an XMLTV source, or not.

The advantage of EIT would be that it is automatic. No channel setup needed. The disadvantage (if it works like MythTV's did) is that it didn't contain very much info, only went about 24 hours out, and you have to view a channel before its EIT data can be read in. In other words, you have to start, then stop, at least one channel in each mux every day to get a full list. Again, that's how MythTV worked. Maybe TV Headend does it better. Doesn't hurt to try it and see.

The advantage XMLTV source has is that it can contain more data, so you get more detailed information, and is constantly available. Your cable company may provide an XMLTV source, or you could find one somewhere. In the U.S., there is Schedules Direct and Zap2It. Schedules Direct is a service you have to pay for, but it's pretty inexpensive and can work directly with TV Headend, I think. Zap2It is free, but you have to manually set up the Zap2XML script on an automatic timer so that it automatically pulls in the data regularly. The disadvantage of using XMLTV is that it might not be as up-to-date as EIT, and doesn't assign the listings to your channels automatically. You have to do that by hand, like I said before.

The way XMLTV works, is that it downloads XMLTV data from a source provider, which contains a list of channels (and sometimes icons for each channel - otherwise you have to assign your own or go without), the names of the shows on those channels for a specific timeframe, and descriptive information for those shows. From my experience (I may be wrong), TV Headend doesn't automatically know how to automatically assign the XMLTV data to a channel. You have to go into the "Channels" tab, and double-click the channel under the "EPG Grab source" column. It will give you a drop-down list of available channels listed in the XMLTV file to select from. Do that for each channel, click "Save changes", and you're set.

Ok thanks, I reverted to 3.0 but it still doesn't look like its grabbing channel names. I am going to try 2.x versions next, then I will experiment with the different EPG options.

On a side note, how much coding experience do you have? Maybe between the two of us we could find out where the problem is, since we have such similar setups

Thanks a lot for your help

Coding? None, for all intents and purposes. I've not done any "coding" since I was in High School in the 80's and early 90's, and then it was only Pascal, Basic, etc. Nothing modern or even really useful, unfortunately. I've always wanted to learn something more up-to-date, but I've not had the time. But, I'm willing to help in other ways, if possible.

Hi,

I think you can also assign channel names in the following way: select the "service name" by clicking on it; the line becomes lightblue. Then you can click " map services" than the service name will become the channel name.
(think this worked for the recent builds of tvheadend, but right now I cant try to check).

Alex.

Alex,

Yes, this is possible. But, the problem is that when none of the channels are automatically given names, you are suddenly faced with the daunting task of figuring out every channel, trying to discover which channel is which (and that could take many minutes for each channel) and then manually naming each one and assigning it to the proper channel number. This is way too much to ask a user, especially if they have 700+ channels to try to work with (that could take 50+ hours of your time just figuring out which channel is which). The correct solution is to fix the problem on a coding level.