[mythtv] on combining multiple guide sources per MythTV video source (was: Please explain the usage (valid arguments) of the mythfilldatabase "--sourceid" option)

[Karl Dietz]

tl;dr, don't reinvent the wheel, try to stand on the shoulders of giants 
instead.

long version:

On 16.04.2014 07:28, Jan Ceuleers wrote:
> So here is reason no. 1 why I mess with xmltv files: the channels
> available to the analogue video source are a subset of those available
> to the digital video source. I want to avoid two grabbing runs where one
> will do.

This is a sign that caching is broken in your grabber or that you are 
not only grabbing (download guide data via some kind of API) but rather 
scraping from websites (pulling thousands of HTML/JSON snippets apart to 
get to the data) and its dog slow even with caching. (hint then your 
caching on application level is broken as plain old web caching may not 
be enough)

> Furthermore, good data is hard to come by here. So I need to grab data
> for my lineup in multiple places, using multiple grabbers. I can't count
> on the encoding of the xmltv files produced by these grabbers all to be
> the same, so I can't just tv_cat them together.

MythTV works well with tv_grab_combiner. But its a pain to set up...
Sadly that's a known limitation of tv_cat.

> So this is reason no. 2: I wouldn't know how to grab from multiple
> sources and create a combined xmltv file, all in a single command for
> mythfilldatabase to invoke. I know that this is what shepherd does for
> Australian users, but I'm not in Australia.

Shepherd appears to be a generic toolset plus a ruleset for Australia, 
but open for other rulesets. But you might also find inspiration in 
tv_grab_fi.
The third option is to fill the gap and become a guide provider yourself 
with tools like NonameTV or Atlas.

Regards,
Karl