Schedules Direct for Tvheadend addon

  • SUGGESTION:

    Can you try setting sd4tvh Configure Settings and Options as:

    • HDHomerun Channel Filter to None
    • File Based Channel Filter to enabled

    Optionally limit channels with sd4thv Add & Remove Channels from Lineup.

    And Re-run the internal grabbers.

    Then see if you can then select the 2nd lineup channels/XMLTVIDs for each channel EPG source?

    Okay, I did your 2 suggestions on sd4tvh Configure Settings. Then Re-run the internal grabbers. Only sd4tvh is enabled, no ATSC OTA grabber.

    Then I went to the tab where you associate the EPG source to the channel. I found the 8 channels I needed among the others which were mostly the channels from the home zipcode.

    So it worked, but from a user perspective it's no intuitive. To me it makes no sense, but worked.

    Hopefully, that will help you diagnose the problem. When I think about it the channels that can be received are scanned as a part of the web setup of DVB's. Having a HDHomerun Channel filter to discover or use the IP seems a duplication. Not clear what the file based channel filter does. Since I setup the exact channels to include in the SD4TVH config, I think the list the grabber returns should be only those channels and onlu the zipcode you selected.

    Thanks, for the help. If you need me to test other things, let me know. Where we are camping this week has 73 channels of cable TV, so having the RPi4 up and running is not needed, but I'm playing with it since I'm in another Zipcode for the first time in 6 months.

  • 'Glad to hear that you got it working.

    I'm no expert on the code base but I think that one has two options with this add-on for limiting the channels seen by tvheadend. One is limit the channels to those seen by an HDHomerun (Channel Filter). The other is to limit the channels using a File Based (Channel Filter) method. At least that is how I see it working.

    With the current code I think it comes down to the following:

    A: One SD Provider Lineup

    For users needing 1 lineup only, all of the options work (Channel Filter can be either HDHomerun or File Based). This is the situation where a user has a single TV signal source that has the TV listings covered by a single SD provider lineup. I think this would be the most common use case.

    B: Multiple SD Provider Lineups

    For users requiring multiple lineups, only the File Based channel filter will work. This means setting the sd4tvh Configure Settings and Options as:

    • HDHomerun Channel Filter to None
    • File Based Channel Filter to enabled

    This would be the situation where a user has more than one TV signal source and this necessitates the need for more than one SD provider lineup for the TV listings. This is the case that you and I have encountered. In your case it is driven by the need to support a mobile PVR that can move from location to location. In my case it is driven by the need to support channels provided by an Over-The-Air aerial, and by HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) over the Internet.


    I am grateful for the work that edit4ever did to pull together the sd4tvh add-on. While my primary PVR remains MythTV 0.27.6 running on Intel hardware with Mythbuntu 14.04, this add-on has enabled me to turn my RPi3 into a useful PVR. I only recently investigated the sd4tvh code base to fix a bug with SD listings missing artwork. Then I took it a step further to fix the add-on to work under LibreELEC 9.x. At this point the add-on works well for me.

    Fortunately the add-on is open source licensed so I could look at it and propose improvements. Please also feel free to contribute improvements.

    Edited 3 times, last by gedakc (July 8, 2020 at 5:46 PM).

  • Thanks. Having this detail will help me remember how to work around the multiple zip code issue for the foreseeable future.

    I'd like to help fix the code, but it's not in Fortran and my key punch is broken :)

  • This isn't specific to LE, more about Schedules Direct and TVH. I had a need to test and work with TVHeadend more directly as a backend only and installed it on a RPi4 with Raspberry PI OS (formerly Raspbian) using the normal Raspbian repository. When I did I discovered that the latest version has a lot of XMLTV grabbers and the one I usually use on mythtv was there, tv_grab_zz_sdjson_sqlite for Schedules Direct EPG. So I disabled all grabbers except that one and configured it the same way I do for mythtv with minor exceptions and it worked perfectly.

    Just like sd4tvh I had to rerun the grabber to populate the channels sources and then manually assign the EPG source to each channel that the setup found on my HDHomerun. The second rerun of the grabber populated 18 days of EPG data. That's why I use tv_grab_zz_sdjson_sqlite grabber.

    If you could get that grabber installed into LE it could be configured with ssh from another computer.

  • If you could get that grabber (tv_grab_zz_sdjson_sqlite) installed into LE it could be configured with ssh from another computer.

    The tv_grab_zz_sdjson_sqlite grabber source code appears to be written in perl. However, the perl language does not seem to be installed in LE. Because LE is "Just Enough OS for Kodi", I suspect that it may be a difficult time to convince the LE developers to add tv_grab_zz_sdjson_sqlite to LE along with the perl language and all of it's requirements. Then again I may be wrong so do feel free to ask the LE folks in the Feature Requests forum.