USING MC2XML TO MAKE YOUR OWN EPG - tuturial with open discussion

[Waylotul]

I know you are using a paid service, I have been using webgrab+Plus to grab data from TV.COM using a cookie, and from tv.sky.com. I am noticing that some channels are from UK and Some are US.I can get horror and syfy from both providers. Last night HBO signature had the wrong movie on. My data was wrong too. I think also I saw a couple streams mixed up last night. Anyway, Some channels are from UK others US. I was using dish as the provider but today I changed it to directtv to compare accuracy. I also see that the data in the XML is changing the icon on the guide in the lower right, usually, using Expatter's file, I get the Channel Icon, in this data pull it shows an icon URL in the file for each show that is on and it changes. I'm sure that increases the size but I don't know how to edit the XML file and the time stamp is whacked!

[expatter]

I know you are using a paid service, I have been using webgrab+Plus to grab data from TV.COM using a cookie, and from tv.sky.com. I am noticing that some channels are from UK and Some are US.I can get horror and syfy from both providers. Last night HBO signature had the wrong movie on. My data was wrong too. I think also I saw a couple streams mixed up last night. Anyway, Some channels are from UK others US. I was using dish as the provider but today I changed it to directtv to compare accuracy. I also see that the data in the XML is changing the icon on the guide in the lower right, usually, using Expatter's file, I get the Channel Icon, in this data pull it shows an icon URL in the file for each show that is on and it changes. I'm sure that increases the size but I don't know how to edit the XML file and the time stamp is whacked!

You are right about the US and UK streams. What I did initially was to open 2 tabs in a browser: 1 for SKY UK and another for zap2it where I displayed the epg for Directv for Miami. Then I compared what was showing in the websites to what was on the pvr channels. That's how I came up with the difference between which is US and which is UK. If you look at my us.ren and uk.ren files you can see which is which.

Whether using a paid service, Microsoft Legacy, or whatever, you will see that each of them link to a url for logos. I don't think that contributes too much to the file size. At least not enough to really worry about. If you how a low-powered system you could always just decrease the amount of days to download data for.

As for the time stamp being whacked - when you output your webgrab data, make sure it is in UTC, not your local time and you should be good to go.

Give it a try and see if that helps.

[Waylotul]

Ok I have to say, I re-invented the wheel going with webgrabber+Plus. It has a couple tools in it to like correct the time according the author. I don't see it working but it creates the files. Also it is SLOW!. I have setup several providers. I have separate config files for channels from tv.com, that works half ass. Grabbing data from sky seems reliable in comparison. I get a guide populated ok but I messed with mc2xml and pulled a Microsoft pull for directv satellite. LIke 200mb. I cant do anything with it. I would like an editor like say autoepg or something that would let me look at it. The one with webgrabber works for the sky pulls but not the direct tv us but drop either in kodi and they work. Had to edit a file that contains webgrabb's config data to pull channels each time and it takes 10 minutes. mc2xml did 200mb in no time.

[Crunch69]

Expatter which guide will your xml file work in? I tried Ivue , echo and TV guide full screen and all 3 gave errors like ops sorry about that it was not possible to load program data

[expatter]

Expatter which guide will your xml file work in? I tried Ivue , echo and TV guide full screen and all 3 gave errors like ops sorry about that it was not possible to load program data

It will work in the native KODI pvr guide. Just like Psyc0n's did. You'd have to go to a forum for those specific addons if you have questions about them.

[expatter]

Ok I have to say, I re-invented the wheel going with webgrabber+Plus. It has a couple tools in it to like correct the time according the author. I don't see it working but it creates the files. Also it is SLOW!. I have setup several providers. I have separate config files for channels from tv.com, that works half ass. Grabbing data from sky seems reliable in comparison. I get a guide populated ok but I messed with mc2xml and pulled a Microsoft pull for directv satellite. LIke 200mb. I cant do anything with it. I would like an editor like say autoepg or something that would let me look at it. The one with webgrabber works for the sky pulls but not the direct tv us but drop either in kodi and they work. Had to edit a file that contains webgrabb's config data to pull channels each time and it takes 10 minutes. mc2xml did 200mb in no time.

The 200 MB file sounds like you pulled the provider's entire lineup. So that would also mean that the channel names were not changed to match stalker names and so you would get nothing showing in the guide in KODI.

Since I don't use webgrab I can't give you any help or suggestions with it. Just make sure channel names match what's in stalker and if you have a huge file then your device has to have enough RAM to parse and load the file.

I can only give any help on what I typed in the tutorial. That was the whole purpose of my doing it. If you want to use webgrab I suggest you start another thread on it and maybe someone can help you out.

[Waylotul]

If you want to use webgrab I suggest you start another thread on it and maybe someone can help you out.

I totally understand, I figure I will mess with that on my own. Kinda ugly and cumbersome due to time issue only, just my opinion. I pulled working data and its an ugly Beta procedure at this point. I can table it for now.

I think the speed of mc2xml is hands down enough for me to try it. I wasted hours on the other setup. Takes forever to pull and test run from webgrabb and only do like one day of channels and see if it worked. it works.

Now onto what you have done! Great write-up. Ill do a pull of UK data and combine it later. for now I pulled 200 hours from Microsoft. Its about 120MB. Seems too large. I pulled using this :
mc2xml -D US.dat -C US.chl -R US.ren -d 200 -a -U -u -F -o xmltv.xml

I kept getting no available updates or something, so I added force. probably wrong idea, it pulled 120 MB file for the no sports US.ch I made using your tutorial. I just wanna pull one and get it working before combining them.

The fils is 120MB but when I open place it in the path and run Kodi, empty guide. Any thoughts? I mean about this?

[ilan]

Have you created a US.chi file? That is where you limit the channels by either specifying which ones to include or which ones to exclude. If you don't have that file, the pull will include every channel/program listing for whatever data source you specified.

If you don't see anything after the pull, there could be a time issue. The channels/programs are there, but shifted out of the immediate time range and thus not viewable.

If you do forces often enough, they'll block your IP address. The force is considered a no-no and is only to be used if something disastrous happens.

[expatter]

I totally understand, I figure I will mess with that on my own. Kinda ugly and cumbersome due to time issue only, just my opinion. I pulled working data and its an ugly Beta procedure at this point. I can table it for now.

I think the speed of mc2xml is hands down enough for me to try it. I wasted hours on the other setup. Takes forever to pull and test run from webgrabb and only do like one day of channels and see if it worked. it works.

Now onto what you have done! Great write-up. Ill do a pull of UK data and combine it later. for now I pulled 200 hours from Microsoft. Its about 120MB. Seems too large. I pulled using this :
mc2xml -D US.dat -C US.chl -R US.ren -d 200 -a -U -u -F -o xmltv.xml

I kept getting no available updates or something, so I added force. probably wrong idea, it pulled 120 MB file for the no sports US.ch I made using your tutorial. I just wanna pull one and get it working before combining them.

The fils is 120MB but when I open place it in the path and run Kodi, empty guide. Any thoughts? I mean about this?

You're totally right about the speed difference between mc2xml and webgrab. And what Ilan said hit the nail on the head, I think. With a pull that large it would have to mean you got their entire lineup. You MUST use a ???.chl and ???.ren file in order to limit the channel data that is downloaded. If you copy my us.chl and us.ren you can always just add the sports channels to them and save a little bit of work.

As far as no new data goes, that is what I was always getting with Dish after the first pull, so I switched to Directv. I think the Dish server has issues cuz even after 3 weeks when I tried to get data from them it still said 'no new data'. I don't have the time, patience or inclination to deal with that sort of nonsense. And I don't want this 'hobby' to become work. And that's exactly what it became today when both of my installs reverted back to the entire NFPS lineup today and I had to take about an hour to put it all back like I had it. Totally blows!

There are still a few channels that refuse to be populated with epg data and I don't know why. But I'm just about ready to totally automate the pulls and write some batch files to accomplish this. For those that wish to do the same, it is explained on the mc2xml website about how to write the files. But they are just text files with the .bat extension. The explanation is in the area about Media Portal or one of the sub categories on awardspace.info.

Remember you can force the file amount to be small by just pulling a day or even less. A day would be -d 24. It's totally easy to combine 2 xml files in mc2sml. just add the -I ???.xml -o guide.xml to your command line.

Aside from notepad++, xml editor is a good way to work with the xml files if you want to view and/or edit them for any reason. There are several other free utililities that will work. Just google 'edit xml files' and you'll see.

[Waylotul]

I wanted to know if much of this is addressed in this thread

http://iptvtalk.net/showthread.php?2...lopment/page22

I managed to locate a copy of that EPG Grabber, Its is a lot of serious code. Been a long time, however, I managed to get the webgrabber created and my old one backed. I slapped mc2xml in the bin file and launched the batch file and back, it prompted for what type of pull I wanted and chose E for English, bam it running. still waiting...... I guess we will see what the output looks like. OK editing this for the update. shiver me timbers, Pys0ns go bat grabber apparently utilizes some very interesting techniques. It uses both webgrab+ AND mc2xml to pull and consolidate the data, some serious time swapping occurs and boom outputs an NFPFS file. PM me for a copy of this or look for it found it on GitHub. its working. I need to figure out how to change mod the channels, I just edited the *.ch file in mc2xml and will test.