[mythtv-users] MythTV in Europe (The Netherlands)

myth at fsck.ch myth at fsck.ch
Thu Jan 15 04:28:51 EST 2004


On Thu, Jan 15, 2004 at 09:48:59AM +0100, Henk Poley wrote:
> Beginning to setup MythTV, heard (it's not really in the docs) that you use
> xawtv to setup your channels in Europe. Well, in The Netherlands about no
> cable company pays attention to the 'europe-west' table (yeah, why should
> they?), so scantv doesn't work.

same here in switzerland. well, sort of anyhow. the europe-west channel
table is matched pretty well, with minor locally dependend offsets.

> So I would need to calculate the
> 'europe-west' values from the MHz values (á 45 channels). So MythTV can
> import them and convert them back to the right MHz values for the tv-card,
> when it reads them from the database.

i am planning to do a script to convert a cable provider webpage with exact
frequencies (and icons) into an xawtv file. if will do it this weekend if i
find a few hours.

whats needs to be done is getting the exact frequency from the website, match
it to a europe-west standard channel by using the frequencies perl module
found on the ivtv website, calculate the local offset, apply the formula
to turn that offset into the format of the mysql finetune attribute of the
channel table and either write an xawtv file or directly import it into the
database (i prefer the former because i eliminate the perl mysql support
dependency and because i don't know if just filling the channel table will be
enough or if mysqlfilldatabase does more than that).
the formula by the way can be found in the archive, i don't know it offhand.
the europe-west channel names (such as E5) al refer to a fixed frequency.

> Can't this be done easier? AFAIK the database itself doesn't take MHz
> values but only the 'europe-west frequencies' (etc.), is this right? Why
> not make a(n extra) MHz column?

that would be nice.

> And how will XMLTV (or MythTV when
> importing) know what channelname binds to what frequency?

that's in the channel table/the xawtv file. i will just use the exact name
stated on the provider webpage. the bigger challenge is to set the ordering
of the channels that the user desires.

please note that i did not really look at the whole tv part of mythtv as
i do not even have all my channels entered (obviously...). i will though,
before starting to code.

please correct me on anything i stated, the above are all my assumptions and
have not been verified yet.

cheers, t.


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