Automap Emby LiveTV Guide Data to custom .M3U

[dberg 6]

I have a custom .m3u I use as my LiveTV source which consists of channels in the DirecTV national lineup (USA-DITV-X).  The channels in this playlist are organized in an order that is different from DirecTV's lineup and I'm looking for a way to automap these channels in Emby when I apply a Guide Data Source to them.  Currently, if I apply the DirecTV Guide Data Source to my custom .m3u, it auto populates EPG data based on the channel order from DirecTV which gives me a ton of incorrect channels in the Guide.   

The only way I can get it to work is if I don't map my playlist under Guide Source Data and I manually configure the guide & channel in Emby channel manager for every entry in the playlist.  This is a very long and tedious process and I'm concerned if I need to change hosting providers or if something happens to my Emby instance and I'm unable to restore from backup I'll need to go through this entire manual channel config process again.

TVHeadend manages this with the tvg-id field.  I set the SchedulesDirect ID for every entry in my .m3u and it maps the correct guide data to each custom channel. 

#EXTINF:-1 tvh-chnum="100" tvg-id="I58646.json.schedulesdirect.org" group-title="News",CNN
http://tvprovider/user/pass/channel1

#EXTINF:-1 tvh-chnum="101" tvg-id="I64241.json.schedulesdirect.org" group-title="News",MSNBC
http://tvprovider/user/pass/channel2

#EXTINF:-1 tvh-chnum="102" tvg-id="I58780.json.schedulesdirect.org" group-title="News",CNBC
http://tvprovider/user/pass/channel3

Is there a way to utilize the tvg-id or tvg-name fields in a .m3u playlist to get Emby's SchedulesDirect guide data to automatically map correct EPG data to custom channels?

[Luke 37084]

HI, yes Emby also supports tvg-id. if you are using xml guide data then just make those those values match up with the channel id's in the xml data.

[dberg 6]

Thank you for the quick response!  Do you have an example of how the tvg-id field should look in order to map to Emby's guide data?

All I see under channel manager is

Mapped to 202 CNN - USA-DITV-X

 

[Luke 37084]

Right now I don't. Emby Guide Data comes from gracenote. I don't know if there's any predictable pattern to their channel id's.

[dberg 6]

I found a way to extract the data I needed using the API:

1. Manually map one channel in your custom .m3u under LiveTV > Channels using the Emby guide data source you wish to use
   (I'm using DirecTV (USA))
    
2. Using the Emby API, get the ListingsProviderId from /LiveTv/Manage/Channels
   (for USA-DITV-X this was 9390bbe3a61b49bea1987c897bc077c6)
    
3. Use the Emby API and the ListingsProviderId to pull the full list of channels and their Gracenote IDs from /LiveTv/ChannelMappingOptions
    
4. Populate the tvg-id fields in your custom .m3u with the Gracenote IDs
   (for CNN in the USA-DITV-X linuep the Gracenote ID was 10142)
    

   #EXTINF:-1 tvh-chnum="100" tvg-id="10142" group-title="News",CNN
   http://tvprovider/user/pass/channel1

    

Edited April 5 by dberg