[mythtv-users] Recovering when zap2it screws the pooch---a warning & some questions

f-myth-users at media.mit.edu f-myth-users at media.mit.edu
Wed Jul 19 02:27:59 UTC 2006


So a couple weeks ago I had a conversation here about zap2it and how
to edit my channels because they'd misplaced a couple channels in my
listings for months.  They fixed the problem, but my Myth never
recovered---it never picked up the changes to those channels no matter
how many days of listings it had scooped up.

Today, I deleted and re-added all my channels via mythtv-setup, which
-would- have worked fine, apparently, except for one small detail I
failed to notice at the time---zap2it has -severely- blown it on half
of the -rest- of my lineup!

The OTA channels (2,4,5,7) all got moved into the 30's.  The stuff
that normally hangs out in the 30's got moved to another place.
Several other channels are either missing or wrong.  But the channels
I'd -originally- been complaining about were in the right place, so I
didn't notice until -after- I flushed everything and reran mythfilldatabase.

I took a DB backup, but unfortunately didn't notice that half the
channels in that lineup were scrambled until after a few shows had
recorded, so I'm now in the unenviable position of either (a) merging
my DB backup with the data about the shows that have since been
recorded, or (b) going into mythtv-setup and manually changing
freqid's, which was what I'd been about to do in the first place
when I was complaining about the original pair of misplaced channels.

So first the warning:  BE PARANOID about zap2it apparently rearranging
half your listings without warning.  Since I have several listings
sources and they overlap, this could have happened days or more ago
and I might not have noticed, because Myth's program listing grid was
papering over the problem---fetching program data from one place while
using frequencies from another, which just happened to work in this
case because of the overlaps among the listings.

Second, the questions:
(a) Is there some easier way of recovering?  I think editing the
    freqids to rearrange my channels might be relatively straightforward,
    although an enormous hairball because there are about 20 channels
    misplaced.  (If I hadn't flushed & re-updated, there would have
    been fewer out of place, but...)
(b) Do current Myth versions make it easy to track what's going on wrt
    lineup changes, e.g., by making deltas available from one update
    to another?  (I'm running 0.18.1, so I'm not totally up on this,
    though I've noticed code that seems to, e.g., turn off newly-added
    (at zap2it) channels automatically when they pop up in listings).
    [The TiVo is kind enough to warn you about lineup changes, so it's
    possible to see if they're real or the result of a screwup; I'm
    not so sure about Myth.]

I'm strongly considering writing a little wget-based script that just
fetches my various lineups from the labs.zap2it.com site once a day
and diffs them against the previous day---that way, if they rearrange
anything, I'll have a chance in hell of noticing it before it leads to
a week of missed recordings, or whatever.  [And if they fix it---I
sent them a long bug report, complete with the entire table of channel
numbers & callsigns my TiVo uses for the same feed, which are
correct---I'll find out without having to remember to check daily and
will know to -un-fix my Myth assignments before they cause trouble.]

Has anyone else written this sort of script, or should I just whip it
up?  Would anyone be interested in it?


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