Hey All,
Although I dont class my setup as complete, its 99% done.
I have a Server in my loft/attic which is capable of VTd (hardware passthough) which runs ESXi 5.
So I thought I'd give it ago trying to passthough some PCIx dvb tuners to a virtual machine. I had limited success, especially with windows. The setup was very unstable. So I moved to linux with tvheadend and usb dvb devices. I installed a usb 2 controller and setup passthough in vmware esxi then hooked up the following devices
1 x PCTV 461e dvb-s2
1 x PCTV 290e dvb-t2
1 x pctv 292e dvb-t2
My clients are 2 Zotac BI320 mini pc's with MCE Remotes.
They run windows 7 with Kodi and have the following addons
Rom Collection Browser
TVHeadEnd client
Steam Launcher (for streaming)
Plexbmc (I have a premium plex server on another virtual machine)
The system has been running stable for about a month. But what is annoying is the lack of organising tv channels.
I live in the UK and found that the FTA providers have a mix of what I want. So I wanted to consolidate all channels from both systems and merge what are both freesat and freeview. So I wrote a windows application that would scrape freeview and freesats websites and build me a merged configuration.
The result is a 95% completely automated channel manager (it still requires a little bit of manual work)
I now have all the matching channels merged and everything is numbered correctly.
The only problem is, sometimes when I reboot the USB DVB devices register in a different order which means I have to enable them before they will work.
I've attached the app if anyone is interested. Its very much a alpha as I spent most of my time figuring out how the data was stored in tvheadend and building a test framework for it.
Note: make sure you have a full list of services available in your hts. The app only finds the services and creates channels and tags.
1. Download your hts config to your desktop (I usually compress it by using the following command "tar -zcvf /tmp/tvheadend2.tar.gz /home/hts/.hts/tvheadend/"
2. Open the attached app and click "file > open". Select the root folder of the hts config you downloade. (selected folder should contain the folder called "input") This should load all the services that your dvb adapters have found.
3. I clear all tags and channels (optional). I then run the web scrapers for the services freesat for dvb-s and freeview for dvb-t.
4. Once its complete I then click tools > merge. I select the Source as freeview and the destination as Freesat (this merges all matching channels and uses the channel numbers from freesat/destination)
5. I also merge channels that didnt auto match (hold ctrl and click the channels u want to merge then right click and select merge)
6. I then set the channel numbers of the unmatched freeview channels to something relevant (the only column in the channels tab that is editable).
7. Click save.
8. Import back in to tvheadend server and restart the service.
The freesat region is setup for South Yorkshire, U can edit the RegionalChannelMapppingFile.json file in notepad and change your regional channels
use
http://en.kingofsat.net/tv-28.2E-fta.php to match the SSID's with your region
We'll use "ITV" in the example.
The way it works is any channels that start with the word "ITV" will be matched with the list of numbers/ssid's. If the channels ssid is in the list then its mapped as a channel.
Note1. "CITV" wont match as it is doesnt start with "ITV" theres a "C".
Note2. U can add as many mappings as u want.
Check the Log.txt to see what got mapped and what didnt
