Custom EPG source / fake XMLTV data, any one done?

[CollinR]

1. I have a DVD changer with 400 disk capacity.
2. I have an access database that tracks the contents of the changer
3. I have control over the changer via EventGhost+USBUIRT
4. I have EXEMultiTunerPlugin running and triggering events in EventGhost

What I want to do is make a fake EPG linup where the channels are the disks in the changer.

So I can make say channels 400-800 be DVD disks rather then channels on the STB, when you change channels to this area EventGhost will trigger the changer to play the desired disk.

What I want to do is create a custom xmltv file or whatever EPG data source would be easiest to contain the disk slot number (channel#) and title of the disk.

I really don't care about start/end times so I'll do whatever is easiest.

TIA

[steven017]

Hi CollinR,

I noticed nobody's responed to your post. Have you managed to figure anything out?

I thought it might be possible to do this using a script to create an xmltv file with your "new" channel lineup. I am, however, unsure of what you would do about the program times. Would you need to have multiple entries to fill up each day, or could you just have a program last for the whole day, week, whatever? What would happen if you did that, I wonder.

Steven

[mickp]

Some thoughts...

Seems to me that you'd be better off doing this as an external player for a particular made up e.g. disc1.foo file type.

When you select to view a file of type .foo the request could be handled by a batch file or app that calls girder with teh correct commands to launch playback.

You could then put the movies or whatever into the video library with metadata, pictures etc and not interfere with tv operation.

As you have an external database for tracking the contents of the library you could generate a file in the same format as dvd profiler's collection.xml. Sage (or SAGEMC) should then automagically update the contents for disc001.foo through disc100.foo for you.

Mick.

[CollinR]

Originally Posted by steven017

Hi CollinR,

I noticed nobody's responed to your post. Have you managed to figure anything out?

Nope.

Originally Posted by steven017

I thought it might be possible to do this using a script to create an xmltv file with your "new" channel lineup. I am, however, unsure of what you would do about the program times. Would you need to have multiple entries to fill up each day, or could you just have a program last for the whole day, week, whatever? What would happen if you did that, I wonder.

Steven

We are on the same page, I dunno about timeslots either but just from Sage's normal behavior I'm thinking 2 hour blocks otherwise you could run into issues if you accidently fell asleep on an infinitly long program.

Also I have already manually added disks 1-50 just using the add channel to lineup build into Sage. This doesn't let me shoe the titles but it does use a default timeslot.

Originally Posted by mickp

Some thoughts...

Seems to me that you'd be better off doing this as an external player for a particular made up e.g. disc1.foo file type.

When you select to view a file of type .foo the request could be handled by a batch file or app that calls girder with teh correct commands to launch playback.

You could then put the movies or whatever into the video library with metadata, pictures etc and not interfere with tv operation.

As you have an external database for tracking the contents of the library you could generate a file in the same format as dvd profiler's collection.xml. Sage (or SAGEMC) should then automagically update the contents for disc001.foo through disc100.foo for you.

Mick.

Before long all I will have is hardware clients so I really need something that will work on MVP / HD100s. I'll have to think about that. Also there is a hidden bonus, since the changer can only play one disk at a time I have it limited to a single tuner. This way if I am watching disk 1 and someone else wants to watch disk 2 you'll get the normal Sage popups about tuner in use and all that. Sage normally would allow all to stream any local video file, with a changer i dunno how to get around that.

[mickp]

Originally Posted by CollinR

Before long all I will have is hardware clients so I really need something that will work on MVP / HD100s. I'll have to think about that. Also there is a hidden bonus, since the changer can only play one disk at a time I have it limited to a single tuner. This way if I am watching disk 1 and someone else wants to watch disk 2 you'll get the normal Sage popups about tuner in use and all that. Sage normally would allow all to stream any local video file, with a changer i dunno how to get around that.

Does the changer give you access to the files on the discs or just output video?

Mick.

[CollinR]

Just baseband outputs this is a $100 unit, it doesn't even have RS232 EventGhost is controlling it via IR.

However it does reliably work.

[GKusnick]

If it were me, I'd forget about trying to shoehorn it into an EPG/STB paradigm, and just create a new screen in Studio similar to the SageTV Recordings screen, but taking data from your Access DB instead of from the Wiz.bin DB. You would then have complete freedom to filter, sort, and format the displayed data to suit your needs. You can also code a Play command listener on items of this type to execute whatever code is needed to activate the changer.

If you're worried about contention among multiple clients, use a semaphore file or something to indicate when the changer is in use, and disable the Play command if that file is present.

[cowsr4eating]

Any update to this topic? I am new to SageTV, but am very interested in integrating my 400 disc changer with my media center. I started ripping them and putting on a NAS but that is a lot of disk space ... especially when I have a perfectly good changer with DVD's right there.

[wayner]

Even if you don't reencode them, and assuming 8GB per DVD then 8*400=3.2TB - or just over 2x1.5TB hard drives. That's not that expensive these days and you have the advantage of watching multiple DVDs at once.