[mythtv-users] Australians: can you help me gather some data?

[Max Barry]

On 15/11/13 22:21, Xander Victory wrote:
>> Is this Freeview EPG via DVB exactly the same as this:
>> http://www.freeview.com.au/tvguide/
> 
> Thats the one!
> 
>> ... or are there some differences? Does the version available over DVB
>> offer more up-to-date schedule changes or something?
> Indeed it does offer about as up to date as EIT gets, with better (and actually
> consistent) formatting

Huh, that's interesting. So the web site, and not just the DVB version,
is as up-to-date as EIT? I've glanced at it before but never thought it
offered anything special.

> I'll explain this in more detail off-list (at least off here), but I need more data
> than Shepherd provides (currently; I do my own channel scan so it's not tied to
> Myth). All I was going to have in the way of config initially was changing the
> XMLTVIDs that are output, for those who already have them set up.
> 
> While I'm not completely averse to the idea of combining forces (since I'm only
> starting out again in Perl that would likely be a huge benefit, though perhaps
> slowing down my learning), I think there are a few philosophical/technological
> differences in approach. Last time I tried feeding Shepherd with this data I don't
> think it did anything else to it!
> 
> I'm quite happy to discus these developer oriented points on a more appropriate
> medium, you (and other Shepherd devs) can possibly/probably come up with things I've
> not thought of; and explain Shepherd better than what I've figured out alone.

I see you posted to our mailing list, so we'll chat Shepherd-specific
stuff there. Overall, though, I think this would be very promising if
that Freeview EPG via DVB is both reliable (always accessible) and
accurate (has correct time & titles). The main reason we developed
Shepherd was the absence of a reliable datasource; all of them would
regularly change format, breaking everyone's grabber. Hence the need for
a system that wasn't dependent on any particular one. If you won't
suffer from this problem, though, it would remove a large part of
Shepherd's reason for being.

The main advantages I see from a DVB grabber:

(1) Speed! Shepherd is incredibly slow.

(2) Up-to-the-minute-ness! Shepherd tends not to catch schedule changes
that occur within a few hours of broadcast, mostly due to (1).

On that second point, last I checked, MythTV will only run a grabber
once a day. Which may be an issue, since I imagine you'd want this thing
checking the schedule quite often, maybe even scanning the next few
hours' EPG every 20 minutes or so.

Of course, even better than this would be accurate EIT... we can dream...

Max.