Not getting epg data on radio stations

Sean Warner

Hello,


Tvheadend version 4.3.0~pre+202207172121-0~built202207172246~git1c65e8b0f~ubuntu22.04.1

I am receiving Satellite channels from Astra2 28.2E... just the Free to Air channels. They are coming through a ZgemmaH7S with minisatip installed which feeds the tuners to TVHeadend.

I can see and hear free-to-air TV and Radio stations fine.

I am using OTA Grabbers only to get EPG data:


EPG Grabber Module
• Over-the-air EIT: OpenTV: Sky UK -- [Priority 1] -- 11778V, DVB/S, QPSK, 27500, 2/3 -- OpenTV: Sky UK
• Over-the-air UK: Freesat -- [Priority 2] -- 11425H, DVB/S, QPSK, 27500, 2/3 -- UK: Freesat
• Over-the-air UK: Freesat (EIT) -- [Priority 3]

I am getting 7-day epg on TV Channels but with the above settings I get no EPG on radio stations.
If I instead use the Freesat Grabber only and disable the OpenTV: Sky UK grabber then I DO get EPG data on "some" radio stations. It's not consistent. I get BBC Radio Cymru but nothing for BBC Radio Wales. I get Heart but not Heart 80s (both on same MUX). I get Absolute and Absolute 80s but not Absolute 90s (all are on the same MUX).
But it's inconsistent because yesterday I WAS getting EPG data for Classic FM but today nothing.

A similar issue was reported as a bug https://tvheadend.org/issues/2925 a few years ago but that was just one report so I wonder is anyone else getting FULL EPG data on FTA radio stations on Astra2 28.2E?

Cheers,

Flex

davep

I believe (but don't know for certain) that OpenTV doesn't have EPG for radio channels - certainly TVH doesn't grab radio EPG from OpenTV.

Heart 80s and Absolute 90s are not Freesat channels so won't appear on the Freesat EPG.

I've tried enabling both the Freesat grabber and the OpenTV one, and I get EPG for all of the radio channels which are part of Freesat (including BBC Radio Wales and Classic FM).

Sean Warner

That's very helpful, thanks Dave.

Yes now I am getting epg on BBC R Wales and Classic FM using the freesat grabber. Wasn't running it for long enough previously I think.

Can I ask a few more questions please?

When I run those grabbers together I still get no epg on radio channels. Do you make the Freesat grabber a higher priority than the OpenTV one? Cannot test until later.
If I need to do it that way that's not ideal because I will end up missing epg data onTV Channels that are not on Freesat right? (I think Channel 4 HD is one?)

Not sure if you can schedule different combinations of epg grabbing at different times... e.g: Just the Freesat grabber on 11425H then after that's finished just the OpenTV Sky grabber on 11778V. Can those grabbers be started separately using a script from the command line maybe?

Also, do I need to enable the Freesat (EIT) grabber at all? Looking for 7-day epg on free-to-air Astra 28.2E satellite channels.

Cheers,

Flex

davep

> When I run those grabbers together I still get no epg on radio channels. Do you make the Freesat grabber a higher priority than the OpenTV one? Cannot test until later.

On my test system I'm using the default priorities; OpenTV at 2 and Freesat at 5, and the radio EPG is working fine.

> If I need to do it that way that's not ideal because I will end up missing epg data on TV Channels that are not on Freesat right? (I think Channel 4 HD is one?)

TVH uses the highest-priority source for each individual channel. With the default priorities the OpenTV data will be used for channels which are not on Freesat. What TVH will not do is merge the sources. Channel 4 HD is on Freesat (though I believe it was removed for a while).

> Also, do I need to enable the Freesat (EIT) grabber at all? Looking for 7-day epg on free-to-air Astra 28.2E satellite channels.

I believe the Freesat (EIT) grabber is for EIT-based ("Accurate") recording. I've never been able to make that work reliably.

Sean Warner

Thanks Dave. I was running the OpenTV Sky UK grabber with Priority 1 and the Freesat grabber with Priority 2 and set up like that I wasn't getting any epg data on radio channels. So I don't understand why making them Priority 2 and 5 makes the grabbing of epg data for radio channels now work? Maybe I was doing something else wrong, it's a mystery now.

What are the alternative options to getting EPG data from internal and external grabbers? I don't like the way the tvguide.co.uk grabber works, it sort of scrapes that whole website and then parses everything down to xml. Really inefficient and a waste of bandwidth and it doesn't have all channels.

Is the Radio Times XMLTV grabber finished now? So is paying for Schedules Direct the only alternative to the Over-the-Air grabbers for EPG on Astra 28.2E free to air channels?

Thank you,

Flex

davep

Looking at the setup of my test box, the only other change I have made is to set the "EPG Scan" parameter to "Disable" on all muxes except 11425H and 11778V. I don't see how that would make a difference to radio channels though.

The box I use to actually watch TV also has a Freeview tuner, so yet another EPG source.

Sean Warner

So you DO have satellite radio stations from Astra 28.2E with NO epg?

Is it these channels?

Heart 80s, WRN Europe, Panjab Radio, Heart Dance, EWTN Catholic, Sukh Sagar, KhushKhabri, Kiss, Magic, Hits Radio, Absolute 90s, Jazz FM, Classic Rock, Scala Radio, Heart 90s, LBC News.

I have no epg for them despite running OpenTV: Sky UK (11778V, Priority 2) and UK:Freesat (11425H, Priority 5) EPG grabbers.

I'd like to know is it just me who has this problem, or is this a limitation of tvheadend, or maybe those channels simply don't transmit epg OTA on OpenTV: Sky UK or UK: Freesat?

There is a program: openTVtoXML, https://github.com/dave-p/openTVtoXML that can extract the EPG from the transport stream of OpenTV: Sky UK to an XML file. This could be used to show if epg for those channels is being transmitted on 11778V or not. In my case I don't think I can use openTVtoXML because it listens (for the EPG stream) on device block /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 as though it exists locally but in my case my satellite tuners are on a set top box running minisatip and I cannot install anything on that box its linux OS is so minimal. Unless I could pipe the stream from the set top box to my Pi 4 running TVHeadend or maybe make a recording of the stream copy that file to my Pi then somehow pipe it to a device block on the Pi. Don't know how to do any of these things!

Any help and advice much appreciated!

Flex

davep

> So you DO have satellite radio stations from Astra 28.2E with NO epg?

> Is it these channels?

> Heart 80s, WRN Europe, Panjab Radio, Heart Dance, EWTN Catholic, Sukh Sagar, KhushKhabri, Kiss, Magic, Hits Radio, Absolute 90s, Jazz FM, Classic Rock, Scala Radio, Heart 90s, LBC News.

Some of those (LBC, Hits Radio, Jazz FM) are on Freeview so I have their EPG.

> There is a program: openTVtoXML, https://github.com/dave-p/openTVtoXML that can extract the EPG from the transport stream of OpenTV: Sky UK to an XML file. This could be used to show if epg for those channels is being transmitted on 11778V or not.

Yes I know about that; I wrote it...

More accurately I modified an existing application to produce a TVH-compatible XML output. At the time, the TVH OpenTV grabber was badly broken and it was easier to start again than fix the grabber. It has since been fixed.

> In my case I don't think I can use openTVtoXML because it listens (for the EPG stream) on device block /dev/dvb/adapter0/dvr0 as though it exists locally but in my case my satellite tuners are on a set top box running minisatip and I cannot install anything on that box its linux OS is so minimal. Unless I could pipe the stream from the set top box to my Pi 4 running TVHeadend or maybe make a recording of the stream copy that file to my Pi then somehow pipe it to a device block on the Pi. Don't know how to do any of these things!

From reading the SAT>IP specification it should be possible to command the STB to send a raw mux stream which could then be decoded on the client, however it's probably not a trivial task. A sample from openTVtoXML (created yesterday) is at https://www.dropbox.com/s/1neuq5jfphn5meq/skyuk_28.2.xml?dl=0

Despite its name, the OpenTV EPG format is definitely not open. It's been reverse-engineered of course, but no-one seems to have written any documentation - the only documentation is the software. Sky STBs have EPG for radio channels but it's not clear where that comes from.

Sean Warner

Really interesting stuff.

I suppose the radio stations epg data is also Huffman encoded just no one has (?yet) figured out how to decode that data.

I wonder how the tv data got decoded? Shame no one involved has written a paper about how it was reverse engineered. It could be published anonymously, on wiki-leaks!

About getting a raw mux stream of 11778V from my set top box to my Raspberry Pi running TVH (and openTVtoXML)........ I've opened numerous threads around the net about this! There's a tool called w_scan_cpp (mentioned on these forums) that might be useful... https://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/W_scan_cpp. Well you can use it to scan the tuners on a remote host (e.g: running a sat>ip server) for frequencies of channels broadcasting on a given satellite. OK maybe it's not that helpful in this case!

I was thinking maybe a tool like gst-launch-1.0 (gstreamer) or ffmpeg could pipe the stream from one host to another but then how do I direct it to the /dev/dvb/... device block that openTVtoXML is meant to be listening in on when that dev block does even exist on the host running openTVtoXML (because there are no tuners on that host). Copying a couple minutes long .ts recording of 11778V to the host running openTVtoXML then piping that to openTVtoXML might be easier. All this could be avoided if I could compile the program on my set top box but I'm not going to try cross-compiling OpenATV to include the make and gcc build tools (unless someone else has? hmm) Either way probably code would need to be written and that's beyond me currently.

Anyways,
Thanks for all your help Dave.