Feature request - auto select channels

[John Lockwood]

I am currently using EPG Collector with WMC and it is working very well. (Thanks once more for this tool.)

If anything it is far more reliable than the Microsoft EPG was - even before they started having deliberate outages as part of the process of weaning people of their product. I used to have a lot more corruptions of the channel/guide data when I was using the Microsoft source and this required periodically doing a full reset.

Anyway, moving on to my request. I use a SiliconDust HDHomeRun DVB-T2 tuner to access Freeview and as the author knows, some channels - mainly the HD channels use a different format for the DVB guide data which I believe entails Huffman coding. Whilst other channels can have their guide data automatically extracted by WMC itself the HD channels cannot. This is pretty much the only aspect lacking in WMC itself as WMC supports the video of both SD and HD channels, DVB subtitles and even MHEG-5.

What I have therefore done up to now is set EPG Collector manually to only scan the HD channels. The benefit of this is that -

1. It allows WMC to use 'opportunistic' scanning to update the guide i.e. whenever it has an unused tuner.
2. It in theory means the time for EPG Collector to run is quicker.

(I do schedule EPG Collector to run at a time of day where I am not myself going to be using WMC so it does not directly impact me but I have to say that the time EPG Collector takes to run seems absurdly long especially when compared to other products and this is with TVDB etc. disabled.)

My suggestion therefore is that since the different types of DVB guide format are already detected by EPG Collector that it would be possible to add an option to only scan channels using the format(s) that WMC itself cannot decode. This would save having to manually set up the channel list in EPG Collector. Related to this would then be an option to automatically update the list of channels in EPG Collector. Any newly discovered channels using the unsupported formats would then be automatically added to the list.

[Steve Bickell]

EPGC detects Huffman coding because there is a prefix at the start of the text on each EPG record. There is nothing at the channel level.

So you could only really add an option that says something like 'Collect only HD channels'. This would mean you wouldn't need to set up the include/exclude channel tab..

[John Lockwood]

Hmm. Thanks always good to learn new things.

I believe there have been times when Freeview has used Huffman on some SD channels, possibly ones sharing the same multiplex as HD channels. A different approach that would work then would be to grab all EPG data - which I presume you already do, filter only for Huffman encoded records - whatever channels that might relate to and then import those to WMC.

I am presuming from what you say that you currently grab all EPG data and filter for records for the manually enabled channels only.

[Steve Bickell]

Yes, there is no other way.