• XMLTV

  • My XMLTV EPG is 24 hours out (*some channels*)!

Hello, and looking for any guidance on this issue.

I am using TVH with the OTA EPG on Freesat UK (server and I am in France...)

Been frustrated by lack of EPG on "minor channels" e.g Horror Channel (+1) and CBS group channels (if I am lucky I get 1-2 progs - basically almost just EIT) so tried to use the tv_grab_uk_tvguide XMLTV grabber.

Have successfully created conf file; enabled and run grabber; have correct channels (I believe...) in the EPG Grabber Channels page and EPG fills

But...

"Major" channels i.e. BBC; ITV; Channel 4/5 etc all seem OK and EPG matches the Freesat listing on Freesat web pages

"Minor" channels e.g. Horror; CBS etc all show EPG for thenext (i.e. following) 24 hours; "playing" channel from TVH web interface works fine and the channel is correct but quite definitely the wrong program

Anyone else seen this?

Apart from running the "conf" file creation from CLI; rest has been done in TVH interface; server is running in CET but TVH settings are to use UTC and all OTA recordings for "Major" channels work fine

Ideas please...

John W
6 months later
I have the same issue, did you ever solve this ?

Sadly, no.

I'm sure it's a channel/mux issue as it affects only a few channels. Tried all sorts; changing timezone of server (it's in France so 'moved' it to UK TZ) - but this played havoc with watching on frontends as I had to change these so nothing appeared in 'local' time

I was using Bouquets for channel groups and noted for these 'minor channels' that I had same service name but different Service IDs and MUX as +/- 0.5 i.e. 11344 for CBS Drama and 11344.5 als CBS Drama. The " .5" channels had no broadcast.

I kept both as enabled in "Services" but selected the 11344 as used channel for "Channel" channels. This resulted in the broadcast EPG working..

You're they only person to respond but I cannot believe I'm one of only two affected. I think that several factors may make this more acute for me.

1. In general, the EIT for FreeSat is hopeless - only broadcast EPG is viable for a full quide
2. I'm watching UK FreeSat in France but with guide showing times in local (UTT+1/Paris) time
3. IONLY use FreeSat as a dish system, I refuse to use a Murdoch company for TV subscription due to the Murdoch's business practices/ethics. Most people have Sky subscription as route to FreeSat channels so probably get the Sky EPG and use that instead
4. Due to 3, I had to look into xmltv (which was a pain to set up - I ended up importing channel.conf into a spreadsheet to bulk edit and exported via CSV to edited file...) there's something in the retrieved xml for these minor channels which is different to 'major channels' - as the cache is huge - I'm not looking into it in detail (too much else to do) as I found a 'solution' to the 'no EPG' issue

Perhaps you can use my solution, which is to use a simple php script which edits the start and stop timestamps of the programme's in the xml file. You could extend this method to only edit programme items in the XML which are shifted by adding a check against a predefined list of channel ID's.


<?php
$xml  = simplexml_load_file('/home/hts/.xmltv/xmltv.xml');

foreach ( $xml->programme as $programme ) {
    $programme['start'] = str_replace("+0100", "-2300", $programme['start']);
    $programme['stop'] = str_replace("+0100", "-2300", $programme['stop']);
}
echo $xml->asXML();

?>

php /tvheadend/shiftonedayforward.php > /home/hts/.xmltv/xmltv2.xml