XMLTV not including program images

Marcus W

I'm currently running two different TV headend 4.3 servers locally -- one on raspberry pi and one on a NVIDIA Shield.

I feel like I must be missing something very obvious but neither of them are providing the program images when I download the XMLTV file from the server.

I have checked that the images are there. My data source has then, and when browsing through the browser at the TVheadend web interface I get images for programs that have them so they are successfully importing OK.

But when i go to 9981/xmltv/channels the resulting file contains no program images. I have confirmed this in the XML file itself so it's not an issue with the client.

Help! I figure there is a setting i'm missing somewhere but I can't find it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

K Shea

Maybe it's just me but I feel like your post is much too vague to get help. Where, exactly, are you thinking you should be seeing images that you aren't? "9981/xmltv/channels" is meaningless, that's not a valid URL. In any case if you think you should be seeing individual program images in Tvheadend's web interface, I'm not sure if that's even possible. It's not something I'd personally want, either, because those images get stored forever and just keep using disk space (at least that seems to be the case in Kodi). What Tvheadend might be doing is importing URL's that point to thumbnails for programs on a web site, and then if a client requests them it passes them on (maybe) and then the client is responsible for pulling the thumbnails from the web if it can actually use them. Perhaps someone more familiar with the inner workings of Tvheadend will comment, but my suspicion is you are looking for functionality that doesn't exist in the backend software, and that many users might not want because it would make it more difficult to use Tvheadend on a system with limited storage such as a Raspberry Pi.

But if a developer comes along and tells you something different, feel free to ignore me; just because I've never seen program thumbnails in Tvheadend's web interface doesn't necessarily mean that no one has.

Marcus W

Apologies if I wasn't clear. Hopefully I can break this down.

1. TVheadend has implemented adding program images from XMLTV into the TVheadend XMLTV grabbers and the TVheadend web interface. My EPG source includes these and when i view the programs in the EPG via the web interface +they are there already+. So that function exists and is being successfully imported into TVheadend.
2. I am using 2 different servers and linking to both of them from an android live channels client via m3u/ XMLTV. On both servers when i go to http://<server IP>:9981/xmltv/channels and download the raw XMLTV file that tvheadend is exporting.

3. For both servers tvheadend is IMPORTING the <icon src="http://xxxxxxxx/images/example.png"/> tag for all the programs but it is not including it in the XML file when it EXPORTS the XMLTV to the client

Does anyone know how to change that in the XMLTV settings?

Alternately is there another method I can connect by and get the program images?

Hopefully that's clearer!

K Shea

Okay now I understand the problem, but I don't have any answer for you. Just out of curiosity, under the General and Image Cache tabs, is the Image Cache enabled? If not that may be the issue, or may not. It may well be that Tvheadend simply doesn't include the information in the XMLTV file it outputs, and would require modification of the code to do so. If that's the case, you could open a new issue at https://tvheadend.org/projects/tvheadend/issues

As I mentioned there are probably many users that would not want this because those of us that use Kodi already have the problem that Kodi never purges an icon it has downloaded, even if it was for a show that only appeared once and that you never even watched. I just hate the fact that Kodi maintains this huge database of old TV show icons and thumbnails forever, with no way to automatically expire old images and make them go away. So, obviously I DON'T enable the image cache in Tvheadend, which is probably why I don't see program images in Tvheadend's web interface, and that's just fine by me.

Em Smith

Episode icon support was added a few years ago in 2015 (#3108), but currently the icon isn't output in the xmltv. We haven't always added everything to the output xmltv that was in the input xmltv since some downstream devices have limited memory.

Please raise a feature request (in the Issues menu).

Marcus W

Thanks for the update. I will add it as a feature request.

Brent Bolin

Tvheadend release 4.2.6 using zap2xml version 2018-7-11 with kodi frontends either 17 or 18 and zap2it listings gets me channel icons and program icons. Its one of the main reasons I switched from scheduals direct to zap2xml.pl

Program icons show up in kodi TV guide listing only. Channel icons are everywhere else

Chicago, Il USA

Helge B

Any news here? I still get No program icons...