EPG sparse data?

[webwalker]

I know in all of the hours (and hours and hours) of trolling I've done on this site, there was *something* about how you may only get full guide data for the next 48-72 hours. I thought there was...anyway, can anyone explain or point me to an explanation of why the guide data isn't fully fleshed out until just days before the event? This makes planning or programming very difficult, and especially difficult when you're going to be gone for a few days on vacation.

Without sounding too much like a whiner, both my Tivo service (just canceled after 7 years) as well as Schedule's Direct feed for MythTV were never this bad. Is this just a 'feature' of getting the EPG data from Zap2IT?

M

[matt91]

The guide data is as complete as Zap2It has available. It is usually 13 days in the future (or maybe 12, I forget), plus "today" and "yesterday".

However, and this may be what you are alluding to, the upcoming recordings are only scheduled 3 days in advance.

Andy covers some of the reasons here: http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...6&postcount=10

There is a setting to change this.

[GKusnick]

What do you mean by "fully fleshed out"? Are you saying you have no EPG data beyond a couple of days? Or you have data for some channels/timeslots but not all? Or full details for some programs but only sketchy info for others?

It's possible that your channel lineups are misconfigured in such a way that Sage can find Zap2It data for some channels but not all of them. So for some channels it's relying on EPG info that comes over the air/cable as part of the TV signal itself. This data is sketchier and has a shorter time horizon than what you get from Zap2It. The fix (I believe) is to make sure the channel names in all lineups correspond to the names used by Zap2It. I'm not a channel lineup wizard so maybe someone else can fill in the specifics.

[webwalker]

Matt: I see the allusion to 'lookahead', so I'll look for that value in my conf file tonight. I don't mind the extra load on the processor: since the server is massively over-powered for the job its doing now (since I moved to a HD200 as the display engine) it sure has plenty of headroom. I queued up about a bazillion transcodes the other night; work that should have kept it busy for 24 hours. It was done before morning. Lot's of spare processing capacity.

Gkusnick: This doesn't seem to be a channel with no content, this seems to be several channels with 'sparse' content: the showid is there, the title is there, but there is no description, no episode title, no other metadata. So if I've got two conflicting shows that are farther out that 3 days, I don't have enough information to decide which to pick up.

I understand that Sage sort of had to balance immediate playback and recording reliability with the compute need to calculate conflicts over hundreds of channels, over 72 hours. I think with their move to an extender architecture, this becomes pretty silly. Example: my Tivo ticked along with a PPC 50 mhz chip in it, because the hard part (encode/decode) was done by hardware. The PPC only had to run the OS, the OSD, and the dependency engine. That made for a leisurely computation of dependencies when the time came. But in 7 years with my wife beating that scheduler's brains out, it was never a problem for the Tivo. I'd expect that the high HP Allendale Core2Duo I've got in the Sage server should be able to handle it.

Thanks so much for your quick replies.

M

[matt91]

are these channels with sparse content from your HDHR or via the STB?

[HelenWeathers]

In your properties file set scheduling_lookahead=691200000 for 8 days.
The default is set at 259200000, which ends up being 72 hours. (259200000 / 1000 / 60 / 60 = 72)

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by webwalker

Gkusnick: This doesn't seem to be a channel with no content, this seems to be several channels with 'sparse' content: the showid is there, the title is there, but there is no description, no episode title, no other metadata. So if I've got two conflicting shows that are farther out that 3 days, I don't have enough information to decide which to pick up.

What is an example Show ID for one of these shows?

If it starts with DT, then you are getting the EPG data from the digital broadcast and either that channel's EPG data is not available to SageTV or your channels are mapped incorrectly.

If it doesn't start with DT, then odds are that Zap2it just has limited info for the shows. There is a FAQ for reporting such shows/channels to SageTV so they can report it to Zap2it, but there isn't always a fix possible on Zap2it's side.

- Andy