Missing Genre Descriptions

[prl]

Ice 0x45: Football, Rugby, American Football, AFL, Rugby League (also other non-football team sports)
ETSI 0x45: team sports (excluding football)

What you're suggesting can be made to work, but at the cost of throwing out a lot of the specificity of the IceTV genre information.

The IceBox code can probably be made to work with full genre information if it's possible to add both the sort of remapping that's in both your Topfield EPG code and my Beyonwiz code, and a specific IceTV table that maps the EPG codes to the IceTV genre strings to be used in place of the ETSI table. That would allow the full display of all the IceTV genre range, rather than shoehorning it back into more general ETSI genre strings.

Fortunately, there aren't more than 255 IceTV genres :)

[DeltaMikeCharlie]

What you're suggesting can be made to work, but at the cost of throwing out a lot of the specificity of the IceTV genre information.

I think that 'throwing out' may not be entirely accurate, 'redirecting' may be more appropriate.

The proprietary genre text can be preserved by appending it to the extended description.  It may not be perfect, however, it is better than losing it entirely.

TVH (tvheadend) currently does not support the nuances of the proprietary genre descriptions that ICE uses.  Short of redesigning the whole Kodi/TVH EPG/genre sub-system, this would appear to be what we are stuck with for now.  To have any genres available for use by TVH/Kodi, they must be ETSI genres.

The ability to filter by genre within Kodi/TVH will be impacted, as only ETSI genres are recognised.  Presumably, filtering by proprietary genre descriptions will still be available to users on the ICE Web site or app.

ICE could also consider keeping their own local EPG database that is searchable using their proprietary genre descriptions.  They could also write their own Kodi DVR addon/skin that provides access to the database and is able to display the proprietary genre descriptions in their full glory.

I look forward to seeing what innovative solution the ICE developers come up with.

[DeltaMikeCharlie]

I realised this morning that we may be operating on two different set of parameters.  You may be operating on the belief that TVH can use the whole 256 range of potential ETSI codes.  If this is the case, I should have made the situation clearer earlier.

In the two EPG acquisition methods that I have investigated, OTA EIT and XMLTV, TVH never uses the full range of available codes, only a subset.

With XMLTV, TVH will only do a text match the limited number (161) of descriptions that it knows about and only stores those ETSI codes.  I have not yet found a way to bypass this limitation.

With OTA EIT, TVH discards values above 0xAF as it considers them to be modifiers and not genres in their own right.

If, for example, you wanted to remap ICE 'Australian Rules Football' to something like 0xD1, that is currently not possible without modifying the TVH program code.  The Kodi language files would also need to be updated to reflect that change too.

I have already devised a potential solution, but I will initiate the discussion on the TVH forum once I have documented my thoughts because: 1) a solution may already be in progress over there and 2) the solution will require changes to the TVH code.

[prl]

You may be operating on the belief that TVH can use the whole 256 range of potential ETSI codes.

Yes, I was operating under that belief.

With OTA EIT, TVH discards values above 0xAF as it considers them to be modifiers and not genres in their own right.

That's horrible, especially since it's only 0xb0-0xbf that that's true for. IceTV only uses 4 codes from that range, and they can be easily remapped to other otherwise unused codes. However, the IceTV genre table I have has 182 genres, so they simply can't all fit into the range 0x01-0xaf (175 slots).

[DeltaMikeCharlie]

I have started a discussion on the tvheadend forum.  I don't know if anything will come from it, but it's worth a shot.

https://tvheadend.org/boards/5/topics/50072

[DeltaMikeCharlie]

For the past few days I was in a regional area with limited/intermittent internet access so I took a copy of the tvheadend source code for some light reading (as you do).

My intention was to investigate how TVH created its 'recording' (what we call timers) records and in particular, how I could add the parental rating to that file.  This was something simple that I would be able to build on later.

In my investigations of the TVH internal EPG data structure, I found that there were already two fields for dealing with genre-related data.  One for the ETSI genre codes that we have been discussing recently, and one for keeping track of the 'category' values that are received via XMLTV.



There seem to be some configuration options in the latest (unreleased) version of TVH in the XMLTV scraper module for handling legacy clients whereby EPG fields that may not be understood are appended to the description.  These fields include credits, category(ies) and keyword(s).

I plan to test this and see how it performs, particularly if the addition data is sent to Kodi and if Kodi understands it.

[DeltaMikeCharlie]

It would seem that the bleeding edge version of TVH supports non-standard genre descriptions as well as credits for cast, etc.  Kodi seems to understand these new fields too.

With the genres, it is an either/or proposition.  You can either have the ETSI genres or the custom genres, but not both.  In the quick test that I did, I could not find a way to make Kodi search based on custom genres.

TVH clearly shows the information as separate fields.



This is also reflected in the TVH JSON output.



The Kodi EPG summary also shows them as separate fields.



And the full description window shows that they can also be appended to the description text.