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This is the Extended EPG (EEPG) "plugin" for the Video Disk Recorder (VDR).

Written by: Dingo35

Mainnained by: Dimitar Petrovski <dimeptr \at\ gmail.com>

Project's homepage: VDR EEPG Plugin

Latest stable version available at:
master
Latest experimental version available at:
experimental

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.
See the file COPYING for more information.

DESCRIPTION

This plugin parses the extended (2 to 10 day) EPG data which is send by
providers on their portal channels. This EEPG data is transmitted in a
non-standard format on a non-standard PID.

Currently the following EEPG formats are supported:
  • Mediahighway 1 (CanaalDigitaalNL, CSat, Cyfra+)
  • Mediahighway 2 (Digital+)
  • Sky Italy
  • Sky UK
  • Freesat
  • Premiere
  • NagraGuide (CanaalDigitaalNL, only in test)
  • NA Dish and BEV

INSTALL

Unpack, make and make plugins like any other plugin. Call like any other
On the first run, in the vdr-plugins directory a subdirectory eepg is created
where all necessary files are created.
One can define equivalent channels in the eepg.equiv file to "copy"
EEPG data to other channels.
E.g., CanaalDigitaalNL still sends Dorcel EEPG data on S19.2E, which can be used
for Dorcel on S13.0E.
Some sample eepg.equiv files are included.

Scripts

The provided scripts in the package can also help generate the eepg.equiv file.
For more information see README in scripts/

USE

The plugin has no mainmenu entry, and only a few settings for Premiere.
When one of VDR's devices is tuned to a transponder (by tuning, a recording or
an EPG scan triggered by VDR), the plugin scans all channels on the transponder
for the supported EEPG formats. When all of the supported formats are detected,
all available EEPG data is loaded into the schedule of VDR.
Additionally, the EEPG data is loaded into additional channels if they are specified
in the eepg.equiv file (not for Premiere).
Everything is done automatically and transparently, all is done concurrently
with recordings and live viewings.
Freesat and Premiere are loading their EEPG info continuously.

The plugin is designed to use as less recources as possible: it only uses 1 Pid
(especially important to users of FF cards, which have a max. of 32 Pids),
and allocates and frees memory according to its needs.

If one needs to reload EEPG data periodically, it is sufficient to create
a cron job which tunes to the proper channel through the SVDRP interface.
In practice, viewing and tuning to your favourite channels reloads the EEPG data daily,
which is often enough since EEPG data is valid for 2 - 10 days.

New, unknown EEPG transponders will be detected automatically (MHW1, MHW2, Freesat) or
have to be added (Sky uses different huffman decoding tables for every country).

Currently known transponders that send EEPG data:

Sky Italia       S13.0E:11881V (OpenTV)
Sky UK           S28.2E:11778V (OpenTV)
Cyfra+           S13.0E:10719V (Mediahighway 1)
CSat             S19.2E:12363V (Mediahighway 1)
Canal DigitaalNL S19.2E:12515H (Mediahighway 1, NagraGuide)
Digital+         S19.2E:10847V (Mediahighway 2)
Premiere         Sport Portal, Premiere Direkt Portal
Freesat          all freesat channels
Dish and BEV     S119.0W:12472H S91.0W12224R

Please note that the NagraGuide broadcasts of Canal DigitaalNL are stil in betatest;
therefore its information is not always reliable. It seems that sometimes, when no summaries
are available for certain titles, random summaries are chosen by the broadcaster.
This could, of course, also be a bug, since the protocol of NagraGuide is not published.
It can be further investigated only when NagraGuide is taken into production, and
certified receivers will be able to decode Nagra... in the mean time YOU can already
enjoy the 7-day EEPG schedule!
The unreliability of Nagra is compensated by having Mediahighway 1 overwrite Nagra-events it
detects.

For Premiere, the plugin can tag option events i.e. the same event with the same time on
different channels e.g. F1 sub channels. The tagging format (e.g. before or
after event name) can be selected in the plugin setup menu.
In addition there are two switches in the plugin setup menu to control inclusion
of order and parental rating information into the event description.
The plugin setup menu is only for Premiere protocol!

THANKS

This code is based on:
  • Premiere plugin (C) 2005-2007 Stefan Huelswitt <>
  • mhwepg program (C) 2002, 2003 Jean-Claude Repetto <>
  • LoadEpg plugin written by Luca De Pieri <>
  • Freesat patch written by dom /at/ suborbital.org.uk
  • Dish/BEV patch written by
  • cAddEventThread from EPGFixer plugin by Matti Lehtimaki matti.lehtimaki /at/ gmail.com
    Thanks to mrgandalf, and the others who helped map NA eit.
    Thanks to VDR User for testing and providing makeequiv.sh script for S72.7W channels.

We wish to thank all authors for the great work they have been doing, decoding
this EEPG data; this plugin tries to combine the best of all worlds.
Specific improvement has been done on Mediahigway 1 protocol: all software known
tries to combine titles and summaries on the basis of the event-id, but several
channels can use the same event-id at the same time. This leads in practice to
20-25% erroneous summaries. The plugin uses the same technique as more simple
satellite receivers, which take into account the order in which titles
and summaries are sent. This leads to 99-100% accuracy.
Also, the "number of replays" technique for CSAT is implemented correctly; not all
software supported this information, which leads to loss of 80-90% of the EEPG
information.

KNOWN BUGS

-Equivalents file is not used for Premiere.
-On Sky Italy and Sky UK, a lot of "summaries not found" are reported. This is
because it is not (yet) known where the "summary available" flag is coded in the
OpenTV protocol used, so all titles are assumed to have a summary available.