[mythtv-users] grabbing epgdata and related questions

[Stefan G. Weichinger]

Nick Morrott schrieb:

> I think all MythTV/XMLTV users feel your pain. This issue is currently
> being discussed on the xmltv-dev mailing list. We are trying to get
> configuring XMLTV as simple (and automated) as possible.

Good to hear ...

> You need a grabber configuration file, which lists the channels that
> you want to grab listings for, and any grabber options you are asked
> during configuration. If you already have your channels setup in
> MythTV, it's probably easier to configure XMLTV outside of MythTV, and
> then manually edit the channel entries to add the correct XMLTV IDs.

I have done that for at least some of the channels already.

> If you are mixing XMLTV and EIT data, you *must* ensure that you do
> not have EIT enabled (via the useonairguide flag) for channels using
> XMLTV data.
> 
> When you create a new video source, you can select the XMLTV grabber
> *and* you can also select "Perform EIT Scan". This should allow you to
> mix both EIT and XMLTV data. This single video source can then be
> linked to the card inputs on the Input Connections screen.

Yes, I discovered that already after reading another thread. This lead
to at least some program data again, coming in via EIT slowly (I also
wonder when and how often this data is transmitted ...).

>>  channel-infos? Why do all the howtos tell me to fiddle around with all
>>  this ... (and some scripts which promise to help are offline) ?
> 
> Because no one (or group) has yet spent *their own time* getting this
> working. We are working on this problem now and would hope it's
> available for users of the 0.23 release of MythTV (likely release Q2
> 2010).

Hm ... quite some time to go.

Hard to believe that noone uses this grabber successfully?

Right now I have the situation that the grabber downloads some zips and
then crashes again:

$ /usr/bin/tv_grab_eu_epgdata --days 5 --output epg-daten.xml
Downloading zip file for day 1
Downloading zip file for day 2
Downloading zip file for day 3
Downloading zip file for day 4
Downloading zip file for day 5
Downloading include zip file
Your PIN will expire around Fri Aug 27 00:00:00 MEST 2010
Can't call method "text" on an undefined value at
/usr/bin/tv_grab_eu_epgdata line 402.


--

As I seem to hit some download-limitation at epgdata.com and the grabber
seems not to be able to re-use already downloaded zip-files this is
rather hard to debug ... any way to work with the local zips? Would
using a proxy (squid) help here?

I wonder if looking at the source-code of the grabber will help me in
any way, I am not a very good coder ....

>>  I had more program-data available yesterday, with epg only ... *sigh*
>>
>>  I really tried hard, starting over several times, removing cards and
>>  sources, rescanning etc ........
> 
> It's due to a misconfiguration of the XMLTV grabber and your channels
> in MythTV. You need to ensure that all of the channels that you have
> configured with an XMLTV ID are included in the grabber's config file
> and do not have the useonairguide flag set in the MythTV DB.

Ok, I will continue to check this asap (currently ill here, in bed :( ).

Could this misconfiguration lead to the mentioned crash above?

I use gentoo here, which gives me xmltv 0.5.55 and tv_grab_eu_epgdata
1.27, as mentioned before I also tried tv_grab_eu_epgdata 1.30 ... are
these releases known to work?

It's hard for me to find out which parts to change and which to keep ...

> If you configure the epgdata grabber outside of MythTV, the default
> grabber config file is probably called
> ~/.xmltv/tv_grab_eu_epgdata.conf. However, when MythTV runs the
> grabber automatically it expects the config file to be in a different
> location (~/.mythtv/<videosourcename>.xmltv). If you do configure the
> grabber outside of MythTV you can copy/move your XMLTV config file so
> that MythTV can find it).
> 
> You can also run the grabber manually via a daily cron job, and then
> run mythfilldatabase using the "--sourceid n" option with the
> grabber's XML listings file. If doing this, configure the video source
> as "EIT only" but remember to assign XMLTV IDs to those channels you
> want the grabber to provide listings for and disable useonairguide.

OK, thanks for your helpful reply, I will try to follow your suggestions.

I am really looking forward to get this working although until now I am
somehow frustrated by the complexity of all this. I had imagined this to
be a much more straightforward task ...

Thanks anyway, Stefan