Permit Duplicate Channels In Line Up?

[darrenkdean 29]

Setup:
We have our Live TV broken up into categories, which is quick & convenient, ie: Kids Channels, News Channels, Local, US National Channels, Documentary, etc.

Challenge:
Channels that are populated under Kids Channels, News Channels, etc. are not populating under US National Channels (ie: duplicates).  Within the m3u editor, Disney Channel Jr. is both channel 11 & channel 125, & should appear in both the Kids Channels category well as the US National Channels category.  It is however only showing up in the Kids Channel category.  Emby skips the channel number 125 altogether, when it gets to it, under the National US Channels section.

Request:
Is there a way to permit duplicate channels for this type of setup?

 

[Luke 37124]

HI, are you saying the channel appears multiple times in the m3u, or that it appears once, but with multiple groups?

[darrenkdean 29]

13 hours ago, Luke said:

HI, are you saying the channel appears multiple times in the m3u, or that it appears once, but with multiple groups?

Yes, sort of.  The way I have it configured, specific channels should show up in more than 1 category, & have different channel numbers.  That's the way I designed the m3u.

Example: Animal Planet & National Geographic are setup to show up in: Kids Channels, Documentary Channels, & US National Channels.  However, Emby is only surfacing the channel in the Kids Channels category & skips the channel & channel number inside of the other two categories.  When I check the m3u file, the channel is there with a different channel number within the respective category, it's just not being surfaced in Emby.

[BillOatman 502]

21 hours ago, darrenkdean said:

Yes, sort of.  The way I have it configured, specific channels should show up in more than 1 category, & have different channel numbers.  That's the way I designed the m3u.

Example: Animal Planet & National Geographic are setup to show up in: Kids Channels, Documentary Channels, & US National Channels.  However, Emby is only surfacing the channel in the Kids Channels category & skips the channel & channel number inside of the other two categories.  When I check the m3u file, the channel is there with a different channel number within the respective category, it's just not being surfaced in Emby.

If these m3u entries reference the same epg-id, then Emby considers them duplicate channels and ignores the duplicates.  A tool called IPTVBoss has a setting to get around this.  

[darrenkdean 29]

On 8/30/2022 at 9:55 AM, BillOatman said:

If these m3u entries reference the same epg-id, then Emby considers them duplicate channels and ignores the duplicates.  A tool called IPTVBoss has a setting to get around this.  

They do use the same epg-id, as they are duplicate channels intended to show up in multiple channel categories.  Channel categories make finding what you want to watch, amidst a large block of possible channels, very easy & convenient to navigate.  Especially for children, etc.  Appreciate the recommendation for IPTVBoss but we're very happy with the simplicity & capabilities of iptveditor.com.

 

@Luke can we possibly add this as a feature request?  Id really like to have an option in Live TV to allow duplicate epg-id channels in order to accomplish our goals of category based tv navigation.

 

[Luke 37124]

More control over this is planned for future updates. In the meantime it will already work if it is just one single entry in the m3u with multiple groups.

[darrenkdean 29]

9 hours ago, Luke said:

More control over this is planned for future updates. In the meantime it will already work if it is just one single entry in the m3u with multiple groups.

Thank you!  I will look into this & see if we can get it to work.  In the meantime, I'm chatting with iptveditor.com Admin in Discord to see if they have a solution they can implement on the m3u editor side of things.  They had the following question:  "Do you know if emby has a default user-agent or if it possible to setup a custom one?"

I'm not sure what that means.  Are you able to advise?

Best-

[BillOatman 502]

15 hours ago, darrenkdean said:

Thank you!  I will look into this & see if we can get it to work.  In the meantime, I'm chatting with iptveditor.com Admin in Discord to see if they have a solution they can implement on the m3u editor side of things.  They had the following question:  "Do you know if emby has a default user-agent or if it possible to setup a custom one?"

I'm not sure what that means.  Are you able to advise?

Best-

What IPTVBoss does is if the configuration is set to deal with Emby, and  if it sees more than one m3u entry referencing the same epg-id, it creates a copy of the epg item with a different epg-id, and sets the epg-id of the "duplicate" m3u entry to it.  The only downside is that it makes the epg unnecessarily large.

[Spaceboy 2499]

the emby tv beta allowed grouping of channels from different iptv providers and even iptv and OTA channels

[darrenkdean 29]

*deleting latest question* - HDHR 4K Flex ATSC 3.0 channels are present.

Edited September 8, 2022 by darrenkdean

[Carlo 4330]

You can accomplish what you ask in the top post with some manual work creating/altering an MP4 file. I do this even with my HDHomeRun (cable and OTA). So instead of setting up my hardware tuners "normally" I instead load an mp4 file that looks like any other normal mp4 with groups in it but the URL is pointing to my tuner hardware.

In that way I can add groups to my tuners that wouldn't be there otherwise. To get duplicate channels like you want for a few channels you can copy the entries then change it slightly so it doesn't appear to Emby Server during load that it's a duplicate. I don't have an example to show but have helped another customer do this.  To figure it out I just created an mp4 file with one channel present then copied it and altered it until Emby loaded both channels vs just one.  That's probably the easiest method to self test/discover what needs changing as they aren't that many fields to change so only a few tests needed.

Carlo