Re: Automatically notifying about SD-JSON lineup changes

On Wed, Jul 6, 2016 at 11:28 PM, Kevin Groeneveld <[email protected]> wrote:

> If you configured tv_grab_sd_json to use the entire lineup instead of
> selecting specific channels then you would always get all the channels in
> the output even when the lineup changes.

Excellent reminder.  Yes, and that is the way I nominally
recommend using advanced grabbers with MythTV (see
below for a bit of info), and the way I do so.  Note that
for grabbers that truly take significantly more resources
to pull additional channels this may not be the best
solution, but the Schedules Direct formats (shared
program data and grabber local caching) means that
there is far less "wasteful work" done by downloading
it all.

> Depending how MythTV is configured
> I think it can automatically add new channels to it's
> database if they are present in the XMLTV output.
> Although I seem to recall having issues with
> this when I last tried it.

Yes, there are some "issues" there, and I have a few on my
(overly large) TODO list to address, but while I really want
to see the --get-lineup improvements, a more mundane
fix is far more likely to get done sooner (at least by me,
although we are still talking not real soon), and likely
easier to get accepted by the MythTV devs.  On the
other hand, the mythtv project is always looking for a
some new devs, so if someone has an itch and wants
to scratch it, I am sure the MythTV devs want to talk.

In particular, I do not think MythTV will add channels
for scannable sources (at this time) because it
cannot properly create the entries (which requires
the network/service/program ids available with
--get-lineups).  And there is a "feature" where
unscannable lineup channels can be added
again and again which is also on my TODO list.

mfdb does, however, try to match existing entries
based on some of the description and update the
first channel with the updated xmltvid.  The matches
sometimes work, and they sometimes do not,
depending on many factors.

>  And if the lineup has a lot of crap in it you
> really don't want this could be more annoying than your current situation.
> Although I think you can hide channels in MythTV?

Yes, you can mark channels as "not visible"/"invisible"
(I forget the term on the page).  That is often the easiest
solution (as with much else, your particular use cases
will vary).  It is what I do for (about) 300 channels that
I do not subscribe to in my lineup.  MythTV will fill
in the guide data (it is just a little more database space),
and then it will not (by default) use them to display
the guide or schedule recording.  And it moves all
the control to one place (MythTV) rather than trying
to coordinate it two places.  Rather than "deleting"
channels you are not interested in, or you cannot
really receive, one can mark them as "invisible".


As I suggested above, in this case, I am not sure if
MythTV's automatic updating would have resulted in
goodness in this case, so I am not going to say
it would have worked if only you did not filter the
list, but it would have been interesting if the OP tried
it (if nothing else, it would be an interesting data
point).

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