WisconsinEric

EPG from XMLTVListings

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I also use EyeTV Hybrids but I noted this: I ended up with two recordings of "Face the Nation". One that was a half hour long as XMLTV listed showed (last half hour pre-empted by an infomercial, error in listing). And one that was the correct full hour. This one may have gotten its data from the ATSC guide. 

Still poking at it.

BTW Angela at Geniatech says they have a solution that is ready to test and offered me a chance to be  tester. I said yes. Now crickets.

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7 hours ago, Phillie14586 said:

If you quit and restart EyeTV it will read the multiple schedules and you will get multiple recordings.

Thanks. I never directly edit what is in the Schedules list and use the Guide.  EyeTV is running all the time. A hard reboot of the HDHR had no effect. Most annoying.

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I have experienced this when the same channel (same broadcast station) is broadcasting on two different frequencies (but with the same logical channel).  In the channel listing, the channel shows up twice, and in the channel guide it may show up twice (unless it is unchecked in the channel listing).  Usually the reception is better on one frequency than the other.  (One might be VHF and the other UHF.)  This is probably not your situation, but just thought I would mention it...

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1 minute ago, UnixGuy said:

This is probably not your situation, but just thought I would mention it...

Thanks. That is the case for this channel. I had hoped that unchecking one of the frequencies would fix the problem, but it doesn't seem to have. Unchecking one causes the corresponding Guide listing to go away, unchecking the other has no effect. I'm going to try deleting one channel from the channels list.

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Unchecking one of the frequencies didn't get rid of future scheduled programs.  In my case, it was a "record all" situation.  I used some combination of "record all" and "remove all" clicks to get it so that only one copy of the "record" led was lit in the Guide window.  Then I unchecked the channel to avoid future confusion.  After all that, I only got one copy of recordings even though the doubled channel was still present in the Channel list (but unchecked).

I think it is also possible to directly disable future recordings in the Schedule window, but I'm not sure if that will unschedule more than one would wish.

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Heard from Angela. She gave me a patch to test. Still not getting EPG data to fill in but not getting "server error" and series recordings I set up prior to the death of the EPG are back.

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Earl...with PBS affiliates the local station often broadcasts multiple program signals...a welcome feature of digital broadcasting. In my market (Tampa, Florida) the local PBS affiliate has five additional broadcast channels.

         "...WEDU’s other broadcast channels (WEDUQ, Create TV, The Florida Channel (local government programming), PBS Kids, and PBS World) in providing a robust collection of quality programming throughout 16 counties in West Central Florida."

In my 'xmltv' "pull-down" list of possible stations to associate with a given channel number, unless it shows you all of the PBS "sub-channels" in your market, you may have mis-associated two different PBS channels with the same (and often only associative choice).That could cause you to be getting two recordings of the same PBS channel program. Check your xmltv choices in the EPG pull-down for the two channels that recorded the same program.

Note: A few of the "Indie"channels in some markets also broadcast one or two separate and distinct programming offerings along with their main signal.

 

 

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3 hours ago, Holden said:

Check your xmltv choices in the EPG pull-down for the two channels that recorded the same program.

 

Thanks for the suggestions. All three subchannels of my local PBS broadcast on two different frequencies. XMLTV had a listing for all of the subchannels, and though they were not named identically, a close inspection of the names allowed me to match them up. I did mis-assign the listing for one subchannel, but fixed that by deleting it from the Channels list, rescanning >Update scan, then assigning the right matchup.

The duplicate recording bug SEEMS to have been fixed by deleting one of the two frequencies in Channels for the offending Channel. Odd thing is, the duplicate recording bug has never happened with either of the other two subchannels, though they each have two frequencies. It was almost certainly caused by something I did, though I don't know what.

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This probably won't be news to some of you, but I thought I'd post my experience anyway. Overnight recently, my venerable HDHR went dark. I checked the brick with a voltmeter, about the extent of my electronics expertise, and it seemed to be putting out 5 volts, so I assumed the tuner itself had gone blooey. Since it had served me so well, I ordered what appeared to be a new, identical HDHR-US. When it came today, out of curiosity, I plugged the new brick that came with the new unit into my old tuner, and it lit up. Idiot. There was something wrong with the brick, and before ordering a new unit I should have gone out to the box o' bricks in my shed and seen if I had something with the right voltage/plug and tried that.

Also, out of curiosity, I visited myhdhomerun.com as suggested by the literature that came with the new unit. It said "no hd homerun connected" with the old unit hooked up. Nowhere on the Silicon Dust website was any mention whatsoever of EyeTV as compatible software. There were big pitches for the free app and the subscription guide and DVR services. Really curious now, just to be cautious, I booted up into a clone of my boot drive with the new unit connected. It works just fine, exactly like the old HDHR-US. The only discernible difference is that now myhdhomerun.com can see my homerun. Probably it is just new firmware. Presumably, I could now subscribe to the guide and DVR services, but I'm perfectly happy for now with EyeTV and xmltv guides.

FYI

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My email address has changed, and I can't figure out how to change this setting in this forum, so I am not receiving notices about new posts or replies.

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PS. The tuner I'm using is a HDHomeRun CONNECT 104F1993  Version 20170930 Model: HDHR4-2US , Firmware: 20170930. 

The device shown in EyeTV prefs is Geniatech HDHomeRun HDHR-US with the same firmware version.The Silicon Dust website is prompting to install a new firmware version. If that were to break EyeTV compatibility, I have no idea how to revert. Since it's working fine w/ EyeTV, I'm going to pass on upgrading the firmware.

 

 

 

 

Edited by Earl Noe

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I finally got the xmltvlistings listings to update daily. The pdf in another thread here helped alot. The last thing I tried finally made it work. I used the shell script from the pdf, but never got the plist script part to work. What finally worked  for me was buying Lingon 7x, and using its create script feature. Its "create a script" feature starts by showing you a script with one line at the top and a blank line below it. Apparently I read somewhere in Lingon x7  I needed to leave that blank line, and past my shell script from the pdf, below the blank line. And finally the thing that made it work was telling lingon 7x to create the script as "root". But that didn't work ether untill I used the chmod comand from the pdf to make it executable as I always did with each test. Then it finally worked. I think saveing as root was the breakthrough for me. I should also note that I was rebooting every time I created or changed a lingon x7 job. But I don't know for sure if that was really nessasary. Lingon 7x is just an mac program that creates the "tricky" plist for me. I found the best way to know if it worked for each test was to watch and reload the dashboard page on xmltvlistings dot com, and keep an eye on the 5 downloads per day limit, current count.

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The reason the shell script from the pdf wasn't working for me and needed root to work at all was I wasn't using he's absolute change directory path. So it was trying to write the xmltv.xml to the root level of my boot drive which it wasn't aloud to do until I made the my version with no path, root. I was thinking at the time, that not cd changing path would default to puting the xmltv.xml file in my user folder. I put the his cd path change back into his shell script and it works now with out being root.

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I don't use the plist approach to automate the daily update.  Instead I set EyeTV itself to record a 1 minute segment each day.  Then I use an EyeTV script that is triggered by the recording to do  the update.  If anyone is interested, I can give more detailed instructions on how tp do this.

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These old discussion threads are now quite long, making current topics hard to find. So I just started a new topic under Discussions "EyeTV 3 Version 7528 release Experiences" so we can focus discussion of the new version there and make it easier for people to find. Thank you.

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It is not necessary to use EyeTV's built in EPG. There are 2 alternative EPGs: xmltvlistings.com (which I use, see next paragraph) and schedulesdirect.org. Both are proven to work well with EyeTV, both produce 2-week listings for the channel lineup of your choice, and at a lower cost than EyeTVEPGPremium.  On screen they look just like TV Guide. It is not necessary to upgrade to EyeTV's latest build (#7528) to use them, they work perfectly with earlier builds. There has been a lot of discussion about them on various parts of this forum since TV Guide disappeared from EyeTV in the US in February.

About 6 months ago I worked out and posted a step-by-step guide to installing the EPG for xmltvlistings.com. There have been a few suggestions for improvement, especially in the past 2 weeks, so I've updated it and the revised Guide is posted here. Most of this is other people's work, which I simply collated and organized for convenience; be sure to see the Credits at the end of the Guide. Since various threads here have discussed EPGs, I'll post this in a couple of other relevant threads as well.

XMLTVListings EPG with EyeTV-Guide.pdf

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Thanks for the update Eric!

If the document Eric posted isn't available to you, it's probably because you didn't log on.  If you can't get a eyetvforum account because you can't get the verification email (I couldn't using a comcast.com account), then try using a mail.com address to sign up here.  That worked for me.

As far as any other suggestions:

The instructions say XML listings work with at least build 7524, which is what Eric tested on.  I tested on 7520, so I suspect the instructions will work on any build of EyeTV 3.6.9.  YMMV.

If you go to your dashboard at xmltvlistings.com, you will see a support note about complaints from EyeTV users saying stations are in the wrong order.  That is not an xmltvlistings.com issue.  The problem can be fixed in EyeTV by going to the "Channels" screen and dragging each station to the order you would like it displayed.  EyeTV will automatically remember the new order until you 'rescan' or 'auto tune' your channels again (something you only do when a TV station in your area is new, or changes frequency -- a very rare event).

If you don't like the yearly auto-renew of your xmltvlistings.com subscription (the default), then you can change that under "Manage Subscription" on the xmltvlistings.com dashboard page.

Enjoy!   😁👍

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Hi- Earl Noe here

I have been happily using the method outlined in this thread and in Wisconsin Eric's handy manual to automatically  load schedules from xmltvlistings.com into EyeTV 3.6.9 (7528) without any problem. Last night I tried to manually update the EPG listings while something was recording and crashed the macmini. Now, although EyeTV retained my channel listings it will display no guide information at all, the windows are blank. I can manually load the last xmltv.xml file into EyeTV but it has no effect. EyeTV will not even display generic EPG listings. The Program Guide window and the PG favorites widow I created are stubbornly blank. Schedules retained the information on programs set to record, and I could manually schedule a recording, but absolutely zip schedules info. Anyone out there? Any suggestions?

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Yup, I'm still out here. Unfortunately I just accidentally deleted 20 minutes of typing and the stupid discussion software doesn't allow for "undo." Here's a short version, I'm not going to do it all over: (1) quit and restart EyeTV; (2) reboot the computer. (3) In EyeTV check all the setup preferences for sourcing from xmltv files. When none of that works, go through pain & suffering: (4) write down all your settings, reset EyeTV to defaults (there's a button in there for that), and set up XMLTVListings in EyeTV like you did the first time; and finally if that doesn't work, (5) delete EyeTV (write down all your Preferences first), download a clean copy, and reinstall. I had to do that once, took hours. Sounds like you corrupted something; I remember making a mental note last year to not do anything else, including recording, while EyeTV was updating. I only tried updating manually the first two times after I switched to xmltv listings, have been using automated at 5 am ever since (Feb 2019) without issue. Good luck solving your problem. Stay safe!

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Thanks! Good to hear from you. The whole setup has worked like a dream until this foulup. I am thinking of going straight to using EyeTV Helper to uninstall, installing a fresh copy, and rescanning, etc. I can back up the more important recordings in the archive, just in case they're affected by an uninstall. I can do this all on a clone of my boot drive on an external, so if it blows up in my face I can clone the boot drive again and be at worst back about where I started. I expected to just  merrily boot into the clone and that EyeTV would work properly there, but it, too seems banjaxed, like a perverse kind of quantum entanglement or something. When things go haywire,  they really seem to go haywire. I made sure I can find my activation key before even thinking about this. I'll post here how it goes. I have lots of time these days. I have been sick for about 20 days with something that is not serious enough to get tested for, so I myself am trying to reboot.

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Ok, good luck. I'll be interesting in hearing how it goes. The archive is a separate folder and should not be affected, but if you're concerned move it to a separate (disconnected) external drive during your reinstall. I actually have my archive divided into 2 parts so I can spread it out onto an external drive; EyeTV allows only one archive location, but if you put an alias within the archive folder to a second external archive (on a 3TB drive, so plenty of room), it will find the aliased archive folder as well and combine them when it lists your program library. There is no deficit in playback when playing recordings from the external drive. I figured that out (with a little hint from one of their tech support guys) and wrote up a user tip on it around 2010 or 2011, which the folks at the original EyeTV company (forget its name) liked so much they added it to their site. They said they were going to add it to the user guide, but I don't know if they ever did.

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Hi-

I backed up my boot drive to the clone, and then unmounted that drive, just to prevent any funny business with the uninstaller and networked installations of  EyeTV. I used the EyeTV Reporter app to uninstall EyeTV. It required a restart, and to my surprise on restart, EyeTV (a new copy, apparently?) was in the Applications folder. So I didn't need to reinstall from tthe dmg I had on my desktop. The setup assistant ran, and I entered the relevant info and did a channel scan. There was some funny business where I declined to subscribe to the EyeTV guide that required me to ForceQuit ETV. On starting up again, I found the xmltv.xml file that downloaded last night in the Scripts folder and dragged that onto the EyeTV icon in applications, which loaded it. Then followed the tedious business of changing all the Channel entries to xmltv and assigning a channel from the lineup. This seems to have been quite successful, so all that remains is cleaning up by unchecking duplicated stations in Channels and creating a new program guide of favorites in the preferred order. Then I'll back up again to the clone.

Thanks again for all your work on this. I keep your PDF guide handy in case I ever need to rebuild the whole setup. I haven't upgraded to the 64 bit version because it has been sorely badmouthed in other forums, and the version of High Sierra I am running is supposedly the ultima thule OS I can run on this mini anyway.

 

Earl

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PS. Some things about EyeTV continue to mystify me. Despite a supposed complete uninstall, the new installation remembers the recordings that had been scheduled beforehand.

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