I'm watching Finnish DVB-T streams with VDR. Often, the EPG information for a program contains part of the description of the previous or following program. EPG bugfix level is set to 2. Should it be configured differently for Finnish transponders? Has anyone tried to contact the transponder people?
Marko
On Thu, 2005-11-03 at 19:09 +0200, Marko Mäkelä wrote:
I'm watching Finnish DVB-T streams with VDR. Often, the EPG information for a program contains part of the description of the previous or following program.
Ditto. And especially in 'Nelonen's EPG, I often see duplicates entries.
Marko Mäkelä wrote:
I'm watching Finnish DVB-T streams with VDR. Often, the EPG information for a program contains part of the description of the previous or following program. EPG bugfix level is set to 2. Should it be configured differently for Finnish transponders? Has anyone tried to contact the transponder people?
Hi Marko,
I called Digita last spring regarding the EPG-data, and I had an interesting chat with the person charge of these things.
I asked why Digita does not supervise that the data our broadcasters are sending is correct. I mainly pointed out that the data is put into wrong EPG-fields, and that because of that the program-description is chopped off.
I was realy surprised when he answered that the broadcasters are using an old system where they add program-data mainly for the newspapers and for own purposes, and that they have no intentions on modernifying it. This system brings also problems with classifying the programs correctly because they use ancient classes for the programs (e.g. sports, news cartoons)
But the most wired thing was the explanation about bandwidth. The guy told me that Digita saves bandwidth by just letting the broadcasters use selectd epg-data fields (program name, short description etc) instead of letting them use all.
I would suggest that more people should just pick up the phone and call Digita and ask why they do not supervise the correctness of the EPG-data. Also the dvb-subtitling should be fixed by Mtv3 and Nelonen... YLE did that already, but what I read from this article http://digitoday.fi/showPage.php?page_id=11&news_id=49753 it seems that MTV3 wont do anything to bring dvb-subtitles to the public either... :-(
René
Rene Hertell wrote:
Marko Mäkelä wrote:
I'm watching Finnish DVB-T streams with VDR. Often, the EPG information for a program contains part of the description of the previous or following program. EPG bugfix level is set to 2. Should it be configured differently for Finnish transponders? Has anyone tried to contact the transponder people?
Hi Marko,
I called Digita last spring regarding the EPG-data, and I had an interesting chat with the person charge of these things.
I asked why Digita does not supervise that the data our broadcasters are sending is correct. I mainly pointed out that the data is put into wrong EPG-fields, and that because of that the program-description is chopped off.
.. and that is because in the NorDig version of DVB-standard the extended description field is defined as optional. That's why :(
On Thu, Nov 03, 2005 at 08:33:08PM +0200, Lauri Tischler wrote:
Rene Hertell wrote:
Marko Mäkelä wrote:
I'm watching Finnish DVB-T streams with VDR. Often, the EPG information for a program contains part of the description of the previous or following program. EPG bugfix level is set to 2. Should it be configured differently for Finnish transponders? Has anyone tried to contact the transponder people?
Hi Marko,
I called Digita last spring regarding the EPG-data, and I had an interesting chat with the person charge of these things.
I asked why Digita does not supervise that the data our broadcasters are sending is correct. I mainly pointed out that the data is put into wrong EPG-fields, and that because of that the program-description is chopped off.
.. and that is because in the NorDig version of DVB-standard the extended description field is defined as optional. That's why :(
Hmm, sometimes you can alert journalists to investigate things by writing in the readers' column of a major newspaper, such as Helsingin Sanomat, which has run some articles on DVB recently. I'd try that myself if I knew the standards better. I'd like to contribute to such an article, if someone can provide the required technical details. I've written a few articles that have been published.
Marko
Marko Mäkelä wrote:
I'm watching Finnish DVB-T streams with VDR. Often, the EPG information for a program contains part of the description of the previous or following program. EPG bugfix level is set to 2. Should it be configured differently for Finnish transponders? Has anyone tried to contact the transponder people?
I set it to 0 and those problems were gone.
Lauri Tischler wrote:
I asked why Digita does not supervise that the data our broadcasters are sending is correct. I mainly pointed out that the data is put into wrong EPG-fields, and that because of that the program-description is chopped off.
.. and that is because in the NorDig version of DVB-standard the extended description field is defined as optional. That's why :(
... and because bandwith costs money... Yep.. Plain text "takes too much space" compared to eg. an extra audiochannel...
;-(
Marko Mäkelä wrote:
Hmm, sometimes you can alert journalists to investigate things by writing in the readers' column of a major newspaper, such as Helsingin Sanomat, which has run some articles on DVB recently. I'd try that myself if I knew the standards better. I'd like to contribute to such an article, if someone can provide the required technical details. I've written a few articles that have been published.
Call Digita and ask for the person who is in charge of the dvb-standard... He'll explain to you why things are not done as they should. Maybe they have some new arguments?
Someone else could enlight us about which EPG-fields are available, and which of them would be a minimum for getting a decent EPG-content..
Well.... I'll call Digita right right now (+358-(0)20 411 711)
René
Rene Hertell wrote:
Well.... I'll call Digita right right now (+358-(0)20 411 711)
I just talked with a guy names Alpo Siitonen, and he promised to investigate the EPG-issues, and inform the broadcasters regarding this thing.
This was not the same person I spoke with last spring. This time i spoke with someone on the tech-support department (probably because digitas switchboard did not understand what I was talking about (dvb-standards, epg-data... ;-) )
René
Anssi Hannula wrote:
Marko Mäkelä wrote:
I'm watching Finnish DVB-T streams with VDR. Often, the EPG information for a program contains part of the description of the previous or following program. EPG bugfix level is set to 2. Should it be configured differently for Finnish transponders? Has anyone tried to contact the transponder people?
I set it to 0 and those problems were gone.
This would mean that VDR's efforts to "fix" the EPG data would actually "damage" it?!
Maybe you could investigate a little more into this to find out what actually does the damage?
Which transponder/channel is this data on?
Klaus
On Fri, Nov 04, 2005 at 03:32:50PM +0100, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
Anssi Hannula wrote:
Marko Mäkelä wrote:
I'm watching Finnish DVB-T streams with VDR. Often, the EPG information for a program contains part of the description of the previous or following program. EPG bugfix level is set to 2. Should it be configured differently for Finnish transponders? Has anyone tried to contact the transponder people?
I set it to 0 and those problems were gone.
This would mean that VDR's efforts to "fix" the EPG data would actually "damage" it?!
I tried setting the bugfix level from 2 to 0 and requesting an EPG update, but it didn't fix anything. When I browsed the EPG, I saw the same program entry twice. When I looked at the details in the nearby entries, I saw the long description of one program for both that program and the following one.
Maybe you could investigate a little more into this to find out what actually does the damage?
Which transponder/channel is this data on?
I don't know how the EPG works, but I think the master DVB-T transponder here is the one that carries the state-owned YLE channels. There are two other transponders; I practically never use the third one. I have encountered bugs in the EPG entries of all channels I've browsed.
What exactly would you like to see to troubleshoot this problem? Is the epg.data file an exact dump of the EPG data, or does it leave out something already? Is it possible to get a raw dump of the EPG data?
Marko
Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
Anssi Hannula wrote:
Marko Mäkelä wrote:
I'm watching Finnish DVB-T streams with VDR. Often, the EPG information for a program contains part of the description of the previous or following program. EPG bugfix level is set to 2. Should it be configured differently for Finnish transponders? Has anyone tried to contact the transponder people?
I set it to 0 and those problems were gone.
This would mean that VDR's efforts to "fix" the EPG data would actually "damage" it?!
Maybe you could investigate a little more into this to find out what actually does the damage?
Okay, I will update to the latest VDR and test if this is still applies and look into the problem.
Which transponder/channel is this data on?
IIRC in Finland DVB-T channels MTV3, Nelonen, subtv had this kind of problems. They are transmitted in satellite 1W too, but haven't tested that. I'd believe they use the same EPG data there.
On Fri, 2005-11-04 at 21:57 +0200, Anssi Hannula wrote:
Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
Anssi Hannula wrote:
Marko Mäkelä wrote:
I'm watching Finnish DVB-T streams with VDR. Often, the EPG information for a program contains part of the description of the previous or following program. EPG bugfix level is set to 2. Should it be configured differently for Finnish transponders? Has anyone tried to contact the transponder people?
I set it to 0 and those problems were gone.
This would mean that VDR's efforts to "fix" the EPG data would actually "damage" it?!
Maybe you could investigate a little more into this to find out what actually does the damage?
Okay, I will update to the latest VDR and test if this is still applies and look into the problem.
I tried setting the bugfix level to 0 (was 2 or 3, don't remember now), and everything seems ok now after running for a while. No duplicates nor misplaced descriptions noticed yet, but the problems tend to crop up over time, so we'll see a bit later.
Which transponder/channel is this data on?
IIRC in Finland DVB-T channels MTV3, Nelonen, subtv had this kind of problems. They are transmitted in satellite 1W too, but haven't tested that. I'd believe they use the same EPG data there.
Same things happen in HTV's DVB-C, and I've seen the problems also in YLE's channels (at least TV1) in addition to the above.
On Fri, 4 Nov 2005, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
This would mean that VDR's efforts to "fix" the EPG data would actually "damage" it?!
Maybe you could investigate a little more into this to find out what actually does the damage?
Here's one example from Nelonen and it's the most annoying one atleast for me ("Elokuva" is "Movie" in english).
Bug fix level 0: E 561 1131230400 7500 50 T Elokuva: Saattokeikka (K15) S (The Last Detail/USA 1973). e
Bug fix level 1: E 561 1131230400 7500 50 T Elokuva: Saattokeikka (K15) S . e
BR, -- rofa
Rolf Ahrenberg wrote:
On Fri, 4 Nov 2005, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
This would mean that VDR's efforts to "fix" the EPG data would actually "damage" it?!
Maybe you could investigate a little more into this to find out what actually does the damage?
Here's one example from Nelonen and it's the most annoying one atleast for me ("Elokuva" is "Movie" in english).
Bug fix level 0: E 561 1131230400 7500 50 T Elokuva: Saattokeikka (K15) S (The Last Detail/USA 1973). e
Bug fix level 1: E 561 1131230400 7500 50 T Elokuva: Saattokeikka (K15) S . e
This is apparently caused by VDR's EPG "bugfix":
// Some channels put too much information into the ShortText and leave the // Description empty: // // Title // (NAT, Year Min')[ ["ShortText". ]Description] //
which in such a case removes the (...) part. Please try commenting out this part of the code to see whether it works then.
I do wonder, though, why they write the information between brackets. There's absolutely no reason for that...
Klaus
Marko Mäkelä wrote:
On Fri, Nov 04, 2005 at 03:32:50PM +0100, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
Anssi Hannula wrote:
Marko Mäkelä wrote:
I'm watching Finnish DVB-T streams with VDR. Often, the EPG information for a program contains part of the description of the previous or following program. EPG bugfix level is set to 2. Should it be configured differently for Finnish transponders? Has anyone tried to contact the transponder people?
I set it to 0 and those problems were gone.
This would mean that VDR's efforts to "fix" the EPG data would actually "damage" it?!
I tried setting the bugfix level from 2 to 0 and requesting an EPG update, but it didn't fix anything. When I browsed the EPG, I saw the same program
You should remove the epg.data file before (re)starting VDR in such a case, so that it freshly fetches all EPG records.
entry twice. When I looked at the details in the nearby entries, I saw the long description of one program for both that program and the following one.
Maybe you could investigate a little more into this to find out what actually does the damage?
Which transponder/channel is this data on?
I don't know how the EPG works, but I think the master DVB-T transponder here is the one that carries the state-owned YLE channels. There are two other transponders; I practically never use the third one. I have encountered bugs in the EPG entries of all channels I've browsed.
What exactly would you like to see to troubleshoot this problem? Is the epg.data file an exact dump of the EPG data, or does it leave out something
The epg.data file contains what VDR stores, after any "bugfixes".
already? Is it possible to get a raw dump of the EPG data?
You could add some code for that in the eit.c file.
If you run VDR with EPG bugfix level 0 (and an empty epg.data) then you should see the EPG data in the menus pretty much as it comes in. If you see a difference between bugfix level 0 and any higher level, then it's most likely VDR that modifies the data in a way you don't like (see my reply to Rolf's posting in this thread). In that case we need to refine VDR's EPG bugfix code.
Klaus
On Sat, 5 Nov 2005, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
This is apparently caused by VDR's EPG "bugfix":
Yep, I know that and the only reason I've been using bugfix level 1 is "No Title" fix. Could we move that to level 0 ?
I do wonder, though, why they write the information between brackets. There's absolutely no reason for that...
It's an old custom to introduce the original name, country, year and duration of the movie inside brackets following the actual description of the event, but ometimes that actual description is missing on channel Nelonen.
E 496 1131221100 5922 50 T Viimeinen lohikäärme S (Dragonheart, USA 1996, 99'). O: Rob Cohen. N: Dennis Quaid, David Thewlis, Pete Postlethwaite, Sean Connery (ääni). Fantasiaseikkailu ritarista ...
E 537 1131274500 5997 50 T Mies jonka minulle annoit S (The Country Girl, USA 1954, 100'). O: George Seaton. N: Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, William Holden. Grace Kelly Oscar-roolissaan alkoholisoituneen ...
BR, -- rofa
On Sat, Nov 05, 2005 at 01:43:04PM +0100, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
If you run VDR with EPG bugfix level 0 (and an empty epg.data) then you should see the EPG data in the menus pretty much as it comes in.
Thanks, I did that. I saw some entries with a title containing only "(null)". Does this come from glibc's printf %s or from vdr? If it comes from glibc, it would be good practice to ensure that no null pointers are passed to %s, as it might crash some other C library, such as uClibc or dietlibc.
Marko
I demand that Rolf Ahrenberg may or may not have written...
On Sat, 5 Nov 2005, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
This is apparently caused by VDR's EPG "bugfix":
Yep, I know that and the only reason I've been using bugfix level 1 is "No Title" fix. Could we move that to level 0 ?
I'd prefer to see named fixes with individual switches.
Per-channel settings may help where one source is fine at level 0 but another source requires a fix which breaks the first source: I already knew that the BBC are doing something odd for accented letters: for "café", the EPG data contains "cafÂe", but (picked up when grepping epg.data) at least one channel is using UTF-8 ("£" is a dead giveaway).
Two example EPG entries follow. The first is from BBC Radio 3; the second is from some dull boring shopping channel.
E 42224 1131519600 10800 51 T Morning on 3 S Sandy Burnett continues to feature Haydn's The Creation, plus works by Estienne MouliniÂe, FaurÂe, DamarÂe, Wagner and Saint-SaÈens. X 2 03 eng
E 45653 1131278400 3600 50 T Gifts under £30 S Stuck for present ideas? Check out our inspirational selection of gifts for family and friends, all priced at less than £30. X 1 03 eng X 2 03 eng
Anybody using Freeview can see this. I'd grab some raw data, but the football's on now...
[snip]
Darren Salt wrote:
I demand that Rolf Ahrenberg may or may not have written...
On Sat, 5 Nov 2005, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
This is apparently caused by VDR's EPG "bugfix":
Yep, I know that and the only reason I've been using bugfix level 1 is "No Title" fix. Could we move that to level 0 ?
I'd prefer to see named fixes with individual switches.
I'd prefer if we wouldn't need any EPG bugfixes in the first place.
Things could be so simple: every broadcast has a title, a short description and a long description. I really don't understand why it is so hard for the providers to supply that data in a consistent way.
Klaus
Rolf Ahrenberg wrote:
On Sat, 5 Nov 2005, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
This is apparently caused by VDR's EPG "bugfix":
Yep, I know that and the only reason I've been using bugfix level 1 is "No Title" fix. Could we move that to level 0 ?
I'd prefer to have level 0 leave the data (mostly) untouched (except for the newline and control characters). When looking at a provider's EPG data with bugfix level 0 I want to see everything they do wrong. And not providing a title is wrong.
If you like we could introduce a new bugfix level and shift the existing ones up by one, so that the new level '1' would just change a NULL title to "No title".
I do wonder, though, why they write the information between brackets. There's absolutely no reason for that...
It's an old custom to introduce the original name, country, year and duration of the movie inside brackets following the actual description of the event, but ometimes that actual description is missing on channel Nelonen.
E 496 1131221100 5922 50 T Viimeinen lohikäärme S (Dragonheart, USA 1996, 99'). O: Rob Cohen. N: Dennis Quaid, David Thewlis, Pete Postlethwaite, Sean Connery (ääni). Fantasiaseikkailu ritarista ...
E 537 1131274500 5997 50 T Mies jonka minulle annoit S (The Country Girl, USA 1954, 100'). O: George Seaton. N: Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, William Holden. Grace Kelly Oscar-roolissaan alkoholisoituneen ...
Yes, but why do they put this into the _short_ text? This is data that should go into the _description_.
AFAICS this EPG bugfix is the only one that actually removes data from the records, which apparently isn't that good. I'll remove this fix entirely, since fix #6 will move a lengthy short text into an empty description, anyway.
Klaus
On Sun, 6 Nov 2005, Klaus Schmidinger wrote:
I'd prefer to have level 0 leave the data (mostly) untouched (except for the newline and control characters). When looking at a provider's EPG data with bugfix level 0 I want to see everything they do wrong. And not providing a title is wrong.
This was also my intention when the "No Title" fix was introduced behind the bugfix level 1, but as the level 1 messes things up, I'd like to change things a bit.
If you like we could introduce a new bugfix level and shift the existing ones up by one, so that the new level '1' would just change a NULL title to "No title".
Sounds good.
Yes, but why do they put this into the _short_ text? This is data that should go into the _description_.
Yep. A year and half ago I asked about this and the answer was something like description field cannot be used, because some of the available DVB-T receivers don't support it. If one fails, everyone gets punished!
BR, -- rofa
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Anssi Hannula -
Darren Salt -
Klaus Schmidinger -
Lauri Tischler -
Marko Mäkelä -
Rene Hertell -
Rolf Ahrenberg -
Ville Skyttä