tokyovigilante: The raw DVB-T stream from EyeTV can be captured using the EyeTV plugin SDK. I did it when I was experimenting with adding live TV support to the Plex media centre.
If EPG Collector could be ported or run under Mono, it's entirely feasible that an EyeTV plugin could be created to automatically extract the MHEG-5 info from the stream, convert it to XML, and import it into EyeTV. I'm planning some further research into this, but am a little time limited.
If anyone has links to a high-level overview of EPG collector, and what it requires in the way of DVB stream length, and from which muxes, that would be very useful.
pretty sure the epg collector is all directshow so cant port that.
Thats only the portion that integrates with the tuner. That can be replaced with the EyeTV plugin. The issue is parsing the MHEG-5 data. MHEG2XMLTV (which admittedly is older) can use a DSM-CC dump from the MPEG transport stream, and that is obtainable easily, so that is another option.
Basically if I can work out how to get a MHEG parser (either EPG collector or MHEG2XMLTV) running on a Mac we should be in business.
mheg2xmltv seems less well supported than EPG Collector. Also, it's a little more than a shell script, it's a MHEG-5 parser. It does already run on a mac though. I'll probably start with it.
EPG Collector can take a dump of a transport stream instead of a live feed. I use it for testing/developing when I don't have access to the live stream.
Unfortunately this feature still accesses the tuner using DirectShow. That would need to be changed. Not a big deal though.
SJB: EPG Collector can take a dump of a transport stream instead of a live feed. I use it for testing/developing when I don't have access to the live stream.
Unfortunately this feature still accesses the tuner using DirectShow. That would need to be changed. Not a big deal though.
That sounds very promising, I've already got code that can automatically export a short TS segment from EyeTV. Do individual channels contain the EPG for the entire mux, or just for each channel?
That sounds really good, it would be pretty straightforward to capture 60s or so from EyeTV late at night, then run EPG collector on the TS dump, then reimport as XML.
I'll try to take a look at the code this weekend, although most of my experience is straight C and Obj-C on the Mac.
Not so far as I know, I think the WinForms bindings are a bit dicey, but most of the non-GUI APIs are fairly robust. Once you've made the changes to read directly from a TS, I'll see if I can get it building / running on OS X and let you know if I have any problems.
I've done the changes to run withuot a tuner. I also took a look at the Mono site and did some other changes listed under guidelines there to make it portable. They mostly involved dealing with directory paths in a generic way.
We won't bother with the GUI part of the Collector as it's only a convenience and none of it is needed to do a collection.
Probably all I'll need is the binary and relevant command-line switches. I'll just use the EyeTV GUI to export a 30 second segment and test it manually, then once it's working just integrate it into the plugin with an NSTask wrapper.
If every channel carries the entire EPG then I won't even need to stop playback/recording to parse it.
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