OTA EPG listings in Canada?

[view836]

I've been searching the forums for a few days looking for a solution to get Canadian listings (specifically OTA digital broadcasts in Ottawa, ON). I've seen old threads that indicated there was no plan to add an interface for SageTV to import data (so DIY appears to be out). I've seen reference to remapping but from what I've read that doesn't do what I need. What I'd like to do is to be able to specify a channel mapping for guide data purposes only (having nothing to do with anything else so I do not want to rename, change numbers, etc.) that essentially says 'this channel is equivalent to channel <blah>' where <blah> is a channel that there is EPG data for (as all these OTA channels are also available on Cable). Is there any solution at all? It's very much a pain to go to web sites to get program info, then manually enter recording schedules based only on time of day. This is aggravated by not being able to name the show you are trying to record when you manually enter recording times. :-(

[view836]

Originally Posted by dkardatzke

We currently don't have any plans of opening up SageTV to imported listings. However I do see a possibility of allowing an interface with SageRecorder in the future.

The reason we can't do it with SageTV is that it would conflict with the data we are paying for from Zap2it. Our current goal is to cover our costs with the subscription based service. We will actually lose money on offering the EPG data for quite some time. Once we begin to break-even on the cost of the monthly data, we will reconsider the fees we charge to customers. We also feel that having a fully integrated EPG that is user friendly and easy to setup is the best offering over a third party interface.

Dan

7 years later and Canadian guide data still not supported - that's not what I would call a user friendly offering!

Why not simply allow users to enter the zap2it channel number that will be used for guide purposes only as part of each channel entry, and allow it to be edited at will. Then make it work (pull in the appropriate guide data from the cable TV listing for the same channel). Bonus points for telling the user if the number they just entered has no guide data available to SageTV from zap2it, and suggesting some alternatives based on channel name and market location.
As a new user struggling with this it's really irritating to see just how long this has gone on with apparently no serious attempt at making it better for your Canadian customers.

[peternm22]

Not sure what you're talking about, Canadian listings have been available in SageTV for at least a few years now.

Before that, SageTV DID make it possible for people to import their own listings (Lester Jacobs actually made a plugin to do it). But once SageTV added native support for Canadian listings, the plugin is no longer of use.

With SageTV, just enter in your postal code when doing the EPG setup and it will show a list of available lineups in your area. Choose the right one, then you can go in and manually enable/disable channels.

[gplasky]

Originally Posted by view836

7 years later and Canadian guide data still not supported - that's not what I would call a user friendly offering!

Why not simply allow users to enter the zap2it channel number that will be used for guide purposes only as part of each channel entry, and allow it to be edited at will. Then make it work (pull in the appropriate guide data from the cable TV listing for the same channel). Bonus points for telling the user if the number they just entered has no guide data available to SageTV from zap2it, and suggesting some alternatives based on channel name and market location.
As a new user struggling with this it's really irritating to see just how long this has gone on with apparently no serious attempt at making it better for your Canadian customers.

Are you actually using the product and have you read the manual? When you first set up a tuner it asks if you want US, Canada or XMLTV Guide data with this source. I know there are a couple of XMLTV data import tools. XMLT Import Tool and WebGrab Plus. Is there something else you are looking for?

Gerry

[view836]

Originally Posted by gplasky

Are you actually using the product and have you read the manual? When you first set up a tuner it asks if you want US, Canada or XMLTV Guide data with this source. I know there are a couple of XMLTV data import tools. XMLT Import Tool and WebGrab Plus. Is there something else you are looking for?

Gerry

Yes I've been using the product for a week, the manual was the first place I looked - it definitely doesn't help. There are no Canadian cities listed in the guide data at all through SageTV, not even the biggest cities (Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver) are there. I've also been through the UI looking for ways to accomplish this, there are channel 'remap' functions but I haven't been able to get this to work by doing manual channel adds and mapping to known cable stations either. For example, OTA I get

17-1 CITYHD 17-17-1

which is also in zap2it.com as station ID 68285, 10125, and 34200. But, if I manually create new stations tuning to 17-17-1 with those station IDs, it's not grabbing the program data from zap2it. I don't know why, surely it shouldn't be this hard!

I didn't try xmltv for two reasons, first because the UI seemed to indicate that I should be choosing EPG for Canada, and second because in my initial experimentation the XMLTV choice appeared to be Europe-only. However I will look at that again, maybe it's the only way currently to work around this shortcoming and get program data in Canada for OTA programming. (edit actually it was tvtv that was europe only, it seems the XMLTV is part of the main EPG choice)

[Edit 11:21am: OK, it seems the XMLTV is a dead end for this. There are two xmltv grabbers for NA and one of them uses the for-pay schedulesdirect.org and the other doesn't have any Canada support. Schedulesdirect charges $20 a year and the license only permits use of the schedule data with approved applications, and the sagetv importer isn't one of those applications.

So, back to square 1.]

[Comitizer]

Did you enter your postal code when you setup the line up? I think you're making this a lot harder than it needs to be.

[view836]

Originally Posted by Comitizer

Did you enter your postal code when you setup the line up? I think you're making this a lot harder than it needs to be.

There's no option to enter a postal code that I'm aware of. You have to select from a list of USA cities for OTA, there are no Canadian cities in the list at all. This is with SageTV V7.0.23.246 btw.

Unfortunately when you play around with this stuff forcing a rescan of the channel lineup SageTV also erases all your manual recordings that you've scheduled for specific channels on specific times. :-( [Edit: actually it just removes the channel info from every recording and renders them all as 'conflicts' and doesn't provide any way to reassociate those carefully entered recordings with a channel. BTW if it was possible to add a name or title to timed recordings by formula e.g. MyFavoriteShow.%YY-%MM-%DD:%HH.%MM then that would almost be a 'good enough' alternative to guide data - people who don't get guide data could at least do a manual web search for the few programs they want to watch, and manually enter the program information based on time and channel to be recorded and stored under a human-recognizable name of their choice. But I digress. The point is that SageTV just isn't providing a reasonable and convenient way to obtain Canadian listing info, and as a new customer I'm irritated when I see threads like this that show this has gone on for a tremendously long period of time. It should be SO SIMPLE to allow a user to just say that OTA channel <whateverchannel> should use guide data for channel ID <whateverid> and SageTV should at that point simply not ask questions but rather download the program data for channel <whateverid> and apply it. I don't see why there should be any need for remappings, or manual addition of channels etc. -- which don't work anyway. My understanding is that those zap2it channel IDs are unique thus you don't need to know or check for consistency with anything else like channel name, zip/postal code etc.]

[view836]

EDIT: IT TURNS OUT THIS DOES NOT WORK 100%. Everything looks right but if you go back into the Channel Setup, it's clobbered the names of lots of the channels entered and just leaves them with their logical and physical numbers and no names e.g. 20-1 - - [20-20-1] instead of 20-1 - CKXTDT - [20-20-1]. The data shows up OK in the guide though. It also has messed up or hidden the new channels added, changing the channel IDs to different ones not the ones just entered for the new channels. I'm so frustrated I could scream.


Thanks to comitzer for getting me on the track to a workaround for this.

The solution hinges on telling SageTV that you are connected to cable or satellite. If you don't do this, you can't get any guide data in Canada.

Here are the (unduly painful IMO) steps required to configure SageTV for OTA in Ottawa, Ontario:

1 Go to Setup>Setup Video Sources
2 Select your OTA tuner from the list of tuners
3 Select EPG Lineup: <whatever it reads> from the right hand column
4 Select "Use US, Canada, or XMLTV Guide Data with this source"
5 Select "Cable or Satellite" (*IMPORTANT do not select Local Broadcast (OTA) even though this is actually what you are using)
6 Enter your Ottawa postal code
7 Select "Rogers Cable Inc Digital" (*IMPORTANT other choices such as Antenna WILL NOT WORK as SageTV/zap2it appear to filter guide content based on these parameters in this step and the next, and no matter what station IDs you enter later you will never get guide data if the station is not present in the network you choose here)
8 Select "Extended Basic Service" (see note above)
9 Scan for channels and select "Done Reviewing Scan" when complete
10 Note the channels found during the scan by selecting them in the lineup to the left and noting their details - name, logical and physical channel info. Go to zap2it.com and confirm what the equivalent of these channels is in your local network that you've chosen.
10 Select "Edit Channel Lineup" from within the list of channels on the left
11 "Add channel to lineup" for each channel you want guide data for:
11a - specify the station name as obtained from zap2it.com
11b - check that the station ID is automatically filled in; if not then you got the name wrong or the station isn't present in the network you chose (see steps 7 and 8); go back to steps 7, 8, 10 as appropriate. If you continue instead of going back you'll never get guide data for that channel.
11c - if you have a conflict with an existing station that's good, it's either in the linup or is a remnant of previous efforts of yours to manually add channels (SageTV seems to remember these). If the physical channel number of the conflicting station is correct for OTA you can just use it, otherwise you can remap your real channel found in the scan to the conflicting channel. You do not need to add a new channel for this station, go back to step 11 for your next station.
11d - enter your logical + physical channel numbers so you can tune to this channel (physical) and position it in your guide (logical)

12 Go through your channel list. You will see some duplicate channels that have the same physical channel but which may differ in name, logical or physical channel. Disable the old one found in your channel scan, and enable the new one you just configured.

13 Now you're done. Back out to the main menu and you will have guide data for your OTA stations.

For other people in Ottawa, here's my list of channels that I get from my single attic antenna:

logical ch_scan_name physical zap2it_ch_name zap2it_ch_ID
4-1 CBOT-DT 25-4-1 CBOTDT 58494
9-1 CBOFT-D 22-9-1 CBOFTDT 55235
17-1 CITYHD 17-17-1 CITYDT 34200
20-1 CKXTDT3 20-20-1 CKXTDT 64992
27-1 OMNI1HD 27-27-1 CFMTDT 44788
66-1 OMNI2HD 66-66-1 CJMTDT 44790



SAGETV: Do you honestly think this is a reasonable thing to have to figure out as part of new user out of box experience? Again, I maintain that I should have been able to just do a channel scan, and tell SageTV the zap2it channel IDs that correspond to those discovered OTA stations, and the software should do the rest. Even if your API to zap2it's data sources involves specification of zip/postal codes and networks, you could maintain a lookaside table that helped to automated the many-to-one pull of data necessary to populate the guide.

[view836]

I see one of the mods has moved/merged this as it was being discussed in the Canada forum and the EPG forum; thanks.

OK, so latest update I seem to now have a stable EPG channel lineup using remapping rather than direct creation of new channels. There appears to be information left over from all my previous fiddling with channel lineups that lives in the Sage.properties file. I shutdown SageTV and the server and manually edited the file to eliminate all the many existing ChannelScan entries, linup_overrides, and lineup_physical_overrides in the hopes that I would be starting from more of a blank slate.

Then I redid the channel setup as follows:

The solution hinges on telling SageTV that you are connected to cable or satellite. If you don't do this, you can't get any guide data in Canada.

Here are the (unduly painful IMO) steps required to configure SageTV for OTA in Ottawa, Ontario:

1 Go to Setup>Setup Video Sources
2 Select your OTA tuner from the list of tuners
3 Select EPG Lineup: <whatever it reads> from the right hand column
4 Select "Use US, Canada, or XMLTV Guide Data with this source"
5 Select "Cable or Satellite" (*IMPORTANT do not select Local Broadcast (OTA) even though this is actually what you are using)
6 Enter your Ottawa postal code
7 Select "Rogers Cable Inc Digital" (*IMPORTANT other choices such as Antenna WILL NOT WORK as SageTV/zap2it appear to filter guide content based on these parameters in this step and the next, and no matter what station IDs you enter later you will never get guide data if the station is not present in the network you choose here)
8 Select "Extended Basic Service" (see note above)
9 Scan for channels and select "Done Reviewing Scan" when complete
10 Select 'Channel Sorting Method' from the channel list and arrange the channel lineup by name rather than number so you will be able to more readily see whether your OTA station has a cable/satellite equivalent with program data. You may need to go to zap2it.com if the names are nothing alike (such as OMNI1HD mapping to CFMTDT in Ottawa).
11 For each channel found in your scan that you want guide data for, select "Remap this channel":
11a - scroll within the channel list in the right hand column to find the corresponding channel. Usually it will be close in name but not always - you may need to take notes from data you can see at zap2it.com.
11b - select the channel you want to remap to

12 Now you're done. Back out to the main menu and you will have guide data for your OTA stations.

For other people in Ottawa, here's my list of channels that I get from my single attic antenna:

logical ch_scan_name physical zap2it_ch_name zap2it_ch_ID
4-1 CBOT-DT 25-4-1 CBOTDT 58494
9-1 CBOFT-D 22-9-1 CBOFTDT 55235
17-1 CITYHD 17-17-1 CITYDT 34200
20-1 CKXTDT3 20-20-1 CKXTDT 64992 ** Note the method above finds the incorrect channel, CKXTDT 48756 is found but the correct one for this OTA channel according to zap2it is 64992. Right now I just hope they are equivalent. I'm nervous about doing the channel add because the channel adds seemed to corrupt something within SageTV.
27-1 OMNI1HD 27-27-1 CFMTDT 44788
66-1 OMNI2HD 66-66-1 CJMTDT 44790

[sharky905]

I completely agree with you - adding OTA for Canada is difficult (even with the manual).
I, thankfully, read and reread everything online before installing and did know that you need to select Cable or Satellite instead of OTA to get OTA in Canada.
What I also find strange is that to get the Zaptoit listings, you basically have to re-create all the channels again as all the OTA channels some in without Zaptoit listings. My back-end setup looks horrible and confusing - selecting and deselecting channels (each channels has 2 entries, the one that was added with the tuner, and the second that I have added manually with the zaptoit listing).
In the end the guide looks great and everything works. Just keep at it - agree for us OTA Canadians it isn't an easy setup, and not something I would recommend for the faint-of-heart.
BTW: I am based out of Toronto.

[view836]

I couldn't find this stuff (the requirement to tell SageTV that you are on cable when you aren't) anywhere in the manual, both reading it and doing searches e.g. reading everything that reference EPG. Some parts are just flat out wrong, like this:

"Station ID – If you know the station ID, enter it here, or leave this field blank if you do not know the ID. If you know the Zap2it ID for the station, use that value so that SageTV can automatically download EPG listings for the channel, if SageTV has access to the channel’s listings. Note: SageTV may not be able to download listings for channels that are over-the-air only, but listings should be available for any channel that Zap2it includes as part of any cable or satellite lineup."

The reason that it's wrong is that actually no listings are available at all except those that are already preconfigured as part of the cable/satellite provider's lineup that you select. If truly you could add a channel and specify a zap2it station ID as this paragraph suggests, that would have helped. That the channels get corrupted and the names deleted (some sort of bug) doesn't help either. I couldn't find any reference anywhere that said you have to tell the s/w you are on cable in order to obtain any EPG listings.

At any rate, this is all way more complicated than it ought to be. Even if we accept at face value that there is not a business case for SageTV to supply OTA data for Canada because of their added costs to get the data from zap2it, it could be made much simpler by simply allowing people to directly enter a zap2it station ID for the OTA channels obtained with the channel scan. From that point on, the s/w should just handle it and assuming that the station ID we'd entered is present within any of the cable/satellite data from zap2it that SageTV does subscribe to, it should just work. I can imagine that maybe in some cases this might require merging two sets of data (hypothetically presuming that the API to zap2it might return a set of data based on zip/postal code and network choice, thus requiring a lookaside table to be maintained by SageTV that associates channel IDs with zip/network; so to fill out a particular OTA lineup might require fetching from multiple zip/network queries to gather the EPG data for the necessary combination of channel IDs).

[wayner]

Apparently one of the issues is that Zap2it, which is where Sage gets its guide data, does not have proper ATSC OTA data for Canadian channels.

For example when I go to the Zap2it website and put in my postal code (in Scarborough) and choose Antenna then I get a channel lineup from Zap2it that contains Canadian analog stations, Canadian digital stations but just a couple of the many US digital stations available in the Buffalo area.

I suggested a while ago that Sage work with its Canadian users to maintain a database of OTA stations available in major Canadian cities. The data you would need is pretty much just what was in view836's post above.

Once you have this info for Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Vancouver and Calgary you will probably have almost all Canadian Sage OTA users. This doesn't change very often as it is relatively rare to have new channels show up, especially once we complete the NTSC to ATSC transition in Canada. That way the people that follow along behind us will not have to go through all of these hoops. But unfortunately Sage doesn't seem inclined to do this.

[hackzaw]

Couldn't agree more that the implementation of guide data for Canadian's is a HORRIBLE experience (I'm just OTA, so I can't comment on Cable implementation).

This should have been ten times easier. And, unfortunately, IMO the guide is the cornerstone of the viewing experience.

There should definitely be a STICKY for Canadian's on the SageTV Canada section that walks OTA users through the process for getting the guide up successfully. How come every new Canadian OTA user struggles with the same thing?

I actually bought SageTV with an HD300 without utilizing a trial period (and bought because of raving reviews about Sage found everywhere on various web sites). Had I trialled the product prior to purchasing, I'm pretty confident I would NOT have purchased it given the difficulties in setting up the guide.

(Thought process is as such - "if it's this hard to get proper channels in the guide AND even find a good tutorial on how to do it, then what does this say for the rest of the product?)

Here's the equation:

NEW USER EXPERIENCE = BAD = NO SALE

Pretty straight forward. That said, once I figured out the guide with the assistance of generous people on this site, it does work very well.

[wayner]

The problem is that it is generally different with every user. I recently set up a new server and I had no problems getting the OTA guide data - I had Sage do a scan and all was well. But I have cable as well as OTA so perhaps it is pulling some of the guide data from the cable lineup since there are only a couple of stations that are not available on cable. But one of those, Thinkbright, seems to have good guide data with no intervention from me.

[hackzaw]

Agree that there will certainly be differences between users, but there must be a configuration that would be most "common". In fact, I would classify myself as that "most common" setup. SageTV Server on a PC (running Windows 7), one HD300 hooked up to my network, pulling in OTA signals. I couldn't imagine a simpler setup, and I'd guess the most basic type of setup. A sticky taylored to this setup would satisfy 80-90% of the users (wild ass guess). The largest variance would likely be the users operating system.

Still, I can understand the frustration going through an install where, for instance, you have to select "Cable" rather than the "Local Over the Air" option. Or having to select the closest US city to pull in the majority of channels and remap ones that Sage and Zap2It don't give a correct listing number for.

One thing that was the "missing link" for figuring out how to remap channels for me, was that despite doing a scan for all OTA channels, and seeing channels that don't have proper guide numbers, you had to actually create a NEW channel and remap it. Why we couldn't simply select the scanned channel that had incorrect guide data, and configure it's Zap2It channel number manually is beyond me. That in of itself would have made things so much simpler.

[wayner]

I agree that it makes no sense that you can't change the guide number for channels - that would make life much easier. The only reason that I can think of is that the Channel number is the primary key in the channels database.

[Opus4]

Originally Posted by hackzaw

One thing that was the "missing link" for figuring out how to remap channels for me, was that despite doing a scan for all OTA channels, and seeing channels that don't have proper guide numbers, you had to actually create a NEW channel and remap it. Why we couldn't simply select the scanned channel that had incorrect guide data, and configure it's Zap2It channel number manually is beyond me. That in of itself would have made things so much simpler.

What number are you unable to remap? You can remap the logical channel number (the one shown in the guide) and the physical channel number (the one used for tuning).

Or, are you referring to the Station ID instead?

- Andy

[wayner]

I am pretty sure he means the station ID.

@Opus4 - why can't you cange the station ID? When you are doing a scan Sage will often give OTA channels station IDs with numbers like 1,2, etc. Why can't you change these numbers to the correct Zap2it IDs which are 5 digit numbers?

[vividweb]

being able to change a StationID would be helpful. You can set the stationID when you add a new channel.

[hackzaw]

Yes - it's Station ID I was referring to (sorry - typing from work so I was trying to go from memory).

So, for OTA, after doing a scan of the tuner, you end up with a list of channels. In the setup previously, I've selected Buffalo as my city even though the largest Canadian city close to me is Hamilton. So some channels (can't remember exactly, but I think it's all the Canadian scanned channels) do not get assigned proper Station ID's from Zap2It. It would have made a lot of sense to me to be able to simply select the channel and be able to manually enter the Station ID (which can be found on Zap2It's website).

Instead, you actually have to create a New channel. Then remap the scanned channel to that new channel. And for the new channel, you can manually enter the Station ID.

And worse yet..... none of this is documented anywhere (as far as I could find). So how is a brand new user supposed to know how to do this? And how frustrating is it to a new users when trying to get this set right? I can comment directly as only a few months ago, I was that brand new user. And I can vouch saying it was frustrating finding out how to do it. And furthermore, what the fix was just didn't seem logical to me.