Are there any TV servers that can auto-update channels and populate Sky EPG?

Forums › Home Theatre (including HTPC and EPG Collector) › Are there any TV servers that can auto-update channels and populate Sky EPG?

Benoire

2755 posts

Uber Geek

#217775 11-Jul-2017 20:13

I have traditionally been using MediaPortal with the DJBlu custom sky grabber to allow full population of the Sky EPG in to MediaPortal including HD channel data, 14 day EPG and channel numbers. This had been working well until my system went kaput. I'm now trying to transition back to a decentralised TV Server from the Sky box and installed the latest version of the custom MP build with my modified Sky NZ plugin. Unfortunately while it will still pick up channel names and the general titles/contents, it now won't get the numbers.

The plugin suffers from a large number of issues:

It was rebuilt using the final DJBlu DLL which was decompiled and then the code transferred across to an old version of the SKY UK source code. DJBlu lost all his code in an HDD crash and only had a really old version backed up. It did LCN, Channels, Titles and content but doesn't anymore.
It is built in VB, hard to debug in comparison to MP and EPGC as they're in C# and I can't follow their setup correctly - This is definitely a me thing as I'm sure someone could look at the code and move it to C# and fix these issues really simply.
It has a fixed reference point for decoding the DVB stream rather than following the proper offsets which leads it to occasionally not finding the titles or content and now appears to not find any channel numbers.
It requires a custom MP build which is awkward to maintain.

In light of the above, does anybody know of a TV Server on the PC (windows preferably at this stage) that can do the following:

Act in a decentralised manner, e.g. decouple the server from the client
Can auto-update/delete of channels within a user set channel range, e.g. Sky NZ publishes to LCN 0 > 520ish, on a defined schedule. There are tons in the 900 range which are not required and the ability to type this range in would be fab.
Can access the Sky NZ Channel numbers from the stream as well as the OpenTV data to get the full EPG including HD (unless Sky EIT data now has all channels etc.) including the regional variations so I only get Prime or TVNZ for Auckland.
Supports the standard FW/RW/Skip/Pause/Play etc. similar to MP although a proper fast forward above x4 would be great.
Ideally runs on Windows as my TV cards are in a Dell R310 which runs my Windows Server 2016 Essentials server and I can't be bothered to virtualise this as it will take some time to resort out my Domain Controller and connected PCs.

Anyone know of a system that can do all this?

Cheers

Chris

PANiCnz

984 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1819866 11-Jul-2017 20:29

Admittedly not exactly what you want to hear but in my experience this all works out of the box with oscam and tvheadend on linux.

Getting full EPG and channel numbers without any clever scripts or customisations.

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Benoire

2755 posts

Uber Geek

#1819908 11-Jul-2017 21:21

I'm not opposed to switching OS if it works. My HTPCs run windows and MP has always been good for me compared to the likes of Kodi and Emby as the EPG is better and general TV actions are more refined.

reven

3734 posts

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#1819934 11-Jul-2017 21:33

i use to use fortherecord with oscam to get sky channels. this worked well, perfectly even. fortherecord became (well it split, and became 2 things) argus-tv.com

havent used it in years though...

Benoire

2755 posts

Uber Geek

#1819937 11-Jul-2017 21:38

Yeah I've used 4therecord and Argus but they don't do what I want and argus doesn't even capture the LCN data from the stream, has to be manually inputted. Honestly, the MP core engine with the plugin was fantastic but the code to make it work is partially in the custom data grabber dll, the actual C++ code in the custom MP build, and then in the plugin... DJBlu did well but its quite cumbersome and IO heavy. I was hoping that MP at some point may pick up the ability to do auto-updates and full sky epg along with series linking as then it would be fine!

CYaBro

4532 posts

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#1819989 12-Jul-2017 00:30

PANiCnz: Admittedly not exactly what you want to hear but in my experience this all works out of the box with oscam and tvheadend on linux.

Getting full EPG and channel numbers without any clever scripts or customisations.

Is there a guide somewhere on how to set that all up?
I'm thinking of changing my server from windows and dvblogic tvserver to the above, as the tvheadend client app on the Apple TV looks to be much better than dvblogics one.

Opinions are my own and not the views of my employer.

sbiddle

30853 posts

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Biddle Corp

Lifetime subscriber

#1820015 12-Jul-2017 07:48

Have you ever looked at NextPVR?

Benoire

2755 posts

Uber Geek

#1820021 12-Jul-2017 08:01

sbiddle:

Have you ever looked at NextPVR?

Yep, have used it for a while too but only does EIT grabbing and can't focus its scan on a networkID, so you get the full list. I effectively want to focus on a networkID to only bring in channels from Sky and those linked, e.g. TVNZ 1 etc.

DVBLink with EPGCollector is viable, except that the TBS tuners do not say which tuner is locked so running epgcollector while streaming from DVBLink will break the link stream as the tuner drivers do not say tuner 1 is locked and in use by a programme. I'd need to buy either a new set of tuners or an individual tuner for EPGc only. It will still only do the guide from EPGC and channel scanning is built on EIT so cannot get the Sky LCNs

TVHeadend appears to have a full OpenTV set of grabbers but I'd have to rebuild my entire tvserver as its currently on my essentials server and therefore running windows. Until I install, I'm not sure what it can do. It can't do the auto-update and perhaps the regional stuff either.

PANiCnz

984 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1821360 12-Jul-2017 16:30

CYaBro:
PANiCnz: Admittedly not exactly what you want to hear but in my experience this all works out of the box with oscam and tvheadend on linux.

Getting full EPG and channel numbers without any clever scripts or customisations.

Is there a guide somewhere on how to set that all up?
I'm thinking of changing my server from windows and dvblogic tvserver to the above, as the tvheadend client app on the Apple TV looks to be much better than dvblogics one.

Unfortunately not one single guide that I'm aware of, I had to piece it together from multiple guides. Something like this looks fairly accurate for the Oscam setup, it assumes the use of RPI as the host but should be fine for x86 too. Only thing to mention is if using an Omnikey reader you need to install the libpcsclite1 libpcsclite-dev packages and also need to tell Oscam to compile with PCSC support.

The installation of Tvheadend is fairly straightforward, and once that's done all the config is done through the Tvheadend web gui.

The whole reason I went Tvheadend in the first instance is I found the guides for MP and Windows to be way to complicated.

Benoire:

TVHeadend appears to have a full OpenTV set of grabbers but I'd have to rebuild my entire tvserver as its currently on my essentials server and therefore running windows. Until I install, I'm not sure what it can do. It can't do the auto-update and perhaps the regional stuff either.

Have you considered grabbing a cheap USB tuner and trying a proof of concept on a RPI or similar single board PC? Plenty of guides on the internet about running Tvheadend on a RPI.

Benoire

2755 posts

Uber Geek

#1821362 12-Jul-2017 16:33

PANiCnz:

Benoire:

TVHeadend appears to have a full OpenTV set of grabbers but I'd have to rebuild my entire tvserver as its currently on my essentials server and therefore running windows. Until I install, I'm not sure what it can do. It can't do the auto-update and perhaps the regional stuff either.

Have you considered grabbing a cheap USB tuner and trying a proof of concept on a RPI or similar single board PC? Plenty of guides on the internet about running Tvheadend on a RPI.

I'm doing a P2V conversion for the essentials server. Demoted it from being a domain controller and will transfer it on to one of my vSphere hosts, that will free up my wee little R310 server to install Esxi 6.5 and then run linux as a VM with the two tuner cards passed through. I've been wanting to test 6.5 with tuner passthrough as I've had trouble with esxi and tuner cards, xenserver always worked better.

PANiCnz

984 posts

Ultimate Geek

#1821370 12-Jul-2017 16:50

I'd be interested to hear how well passthrough works for you, I've historically avoided the temptation to virtualise at home for this reason. All my experiences have been with Esxi 5 so hopefully things have improved with 6.5.

Benoire

2755 posts

Uber Geek

#1821376 12-Jul-2017 16:52

ESxi 6 onwards is pretty good for passthrough, I have a virtualised Xpenology server with two LSI HBAs passed to the VM, never miss a beat and performance as if it was baremetal; but I've always found esxi bad for tv tuners for some reason... Xenserver was always good though, but lacked features in comparison to ESxi.

Jasmeet181

4 posts

Wannabe Geek

#1821414 12-Jul-2017 17:36

Benoire:

It is built in VB, hard to debug in comparison to MP and EPGC as they're in C# and I can't follow their setup correctly - This is definitely a me thing as I'm sure someone could look at the code and move it to C# and fix these issues really simply.

Brownard converted the grabber and UK plugin to C# - https://github.com/brownard/SkyUKGrabber

Benoire

2755 posts

Uber Geek

#1821446 12-Jul-2017 18:22

Ohhh very interesting! The main issue with the code is that it doesn't decode properly and instead has some fixed positions it reads the data from rather than use the official offsets that EPGC and the MP tv engine that mm1352000 was working on, this means that if the stream changes or has random issues then it misses things like LCNs or titles.