Hi Pete,

Thanks for the reply - yep 94% signal quality in other apps. It's a fixed dish.

Tried everything you suggested but same error no matter what I do.

Thanks for trying though - it looks like a really useful app. Do you have another version of it coming soon? Maybe my card will like that one a bit more.

Thanks!

One final thing to try on this version is to explicitly set the symbol rate and modulation using the command line switches.  I haven't found this to be necessary but worth a try.

For satellite the modulation will always be QPSK.

For the Freesat home transponder the symbol rate is 27500000 symbols/second.

Pete

I am intending to release a new version soon but the main changes are improvements to the Freesat EPG text decompression.  No current changes planned to the tuning mechanism.

Pete

Pete you're a star!

Worked a treat, thanks very much for the application and also the help sorting it out..

Just in case anyone reads this and has a similar problem I ran DVBguide with the following parameters and it produced an XMLTV format output file containing a week of EPG data within 30 seconds.

Thanks again and looking forward to the next release.

DVBGuide -as -c11427830 -ph -mQPSK -s27500000 -y3002 -z3003 -fX

Interesting. I haven't found it necessary to specify the modulation and symbol rate.  From your experience it looks like this might vary from tuner to tuner.

At a guess, it might be because your tuner does DVB-S2 and can therefore work with 8PSK modulation as well as QPSK (and because of this choice it's necessary to specify which one).

Anyway, good that this is fixed and I'll update the documentation (when I do it!) and batch file accordingly.

Pete

Cheers Pete.

Just one more thing I'm afraid. I've got it exported and had a look at the data and it's all an hour early. I checked the data before I imported it into my DVB software and programmes that should be at 18:30 are showing up at 17:30.

It's the same for everything once it's imported too.

Is there anything I can do, apart from move to France?

Thanks!

No, the times in the XMLTV file are all correct (and correctly presented according to the XMLTV specification).  It's just that they are specified in UTC.  It's up to whatever app you use to display/import the Guide to do the conversion to local time if required.  A PVR app might very sensibly keep its internal representation of Guide events in UTC whilst presenting the EPG to the user using whatever local time applies. Importing the data into Media Center works OK.

Sadly, a lot of XMLTV parsers/importers don't seem to cope well with UTC time.

If you are in the UK, then the issue will become moot (for five months) in a few weeks time when we switch from BST to GMT.

Pete

Thanks for the info.

I might be causing it myself though as I had to slightly edit the XML file your Guide exe produces in order to convince the importer to import it.

I have no idea why, but the importer won't import the file if it has the UTF-8 format entry in the first line. Just for testing, I changed that value to iso-8859-1 as that value was in another file which the importer likes. As changing that value did actually convince the importer to import I stuck with it as it seemed like progress. However it seems like I might have caused myself another problem.

Do you know of another ISO standard I can use which would let the importer know what time zone I'm in?

Sorry for all the questions but it's a really good app that I'd like to get automated.

EDIT - sorry forget this. they're just character sets, I looked them up.

There are some XMLTV tidy up/converter utilities around that will fix the time issue, I think, by adding offsets to every time stamp.  I guess that this could also be done by a bit of Perl scripting.

The problem with changing the character encoding type by just editing the file header is that the file really is UTF-8.  So, accented and other special characters will probably come out incorrect.  If you need a different character representation then the whole really needs to be passed through some sort of converter.  I'm sure such things exist but I haven't investigated.

What are you trying to import the data into?

Pete

Thanks again for the reply.

Trying to import into DVBViewer by using AutoimportXMLTV. Just read a couple of lengthy forum posts and hidden in there is some information about adding a time offset manually so looks like I'm back in business.

Just in case you haven't seen them, there have been some open discussions on various forums about freesat and Sky EPG formats - forgive me if I'm being rude but have no idea what stage your development is but if you think they'd be useful (they discuss hoffman tables and various other things I don't understand) I'll send links to the ones I've seen.

One more quick note on the character sets - was using a perl script anyway which really just opened the original XML file and shipped it line by line into a new one, making the small change required on the first line.

So have now used the Encode module to encode each line into iso-8859-1 just before it writes it into the new file so hopefully I'm reducing the chance of dodgy characters making their way into my EPG.

Thanks for your help and, similarly to the question earlier in the thread, would you mind me sharing the link to this with users of other applications?

Perl to the rescue! I've just had a quick look at the Encode module documentation and as you have found it will convert between character set encodings. Perl's XML parser module looks like it could also do the trick (and would validate the XML too). But actually parsing the XML would probably make it much slower.

Yes, please share any links that will help others (or help me).

Pete

Just announcing a new release of DVBGuide.  This is mostly the same as the 0.89 beta release but includes full documentation and greatly improved Freesat EPG decompression.  The one big new feature that wasn't present in the beta release is the inclusion of an all new Media Center Guide loader utility.  Very simple to operate and (unlike other such loaders) requires absolutely no installation, tweaking the registry, fiddling with security settings, etc.

Full details and download link at start of the thread.

Well, I did say that the Freesat EPG decompression was work in progress. The Christmas schedules have thrown up quite a few previously unseen letter combinations that are not handled by DVBGuide version 0.90. The most glaring example is the letter pair "Xm" in titles. So, any programme with the word "Xmas" in the title will be decompressed as "X..." and decompression terminated at that point.

Another unusual letter combination, O followed by z, means that all those seasonal showings of the Wizard of Oz won't be decompressed correctly. Also, christmas showings of Top Of The Pops have provided the codes for TO and TP in title strings.

All these fixes and more will be in the next release of DVBGuide.