Recover LiveTV Channel Metadata? Prevent from disappearing again?

[manolodf 11]

So I had spent hours in the Live TV Channel Metadata in Metadata Manager entering Sort Names so that channels would sort the way I wanted them to for all 800 channels, then my IPTV provider had a hiccup on their M3U that went from 800 channels down to 160, and when it came back, all t hose other channels lost that Metadata completely and they are back to being sorted wildly with no organization.

 

Is there a way to recover that previous metadata?  The channel numbers from the Provider are the same, I would think it would be easy for Emby to match it up and see it was the channel that had metadata already, and a way to prevent it from happening again, since the IPTV providers are sometimes unreliable, just to be able to retain that info even if channels disappear for an hour like in this case. 

 

I have the backup/restore plugin from the catalog and have tried to restore System Configuration, Library Definition, Live TV Settings all with no luck to get that LiveTV Metadata back.

Edited March 22, 2018 by manolodf

[Senna 368]

To prevent this happening in the future, an option is to use a local m3u instead of a live m3u link in Emby.

 

When you have a reliable iptv provider, changes in stream URL for a channel are rare, but changes can happen in channel name, tvg-name, tvg-id in m3u. So for you, when you have a local m3u in Emby, your are not affected by those changes from your iptv provider in the live m3u.

 

Conditions to be met by doing that is, that you must have your own external EPG provider in Emby and not the one of your iptv provider, because commercial EPG providers never change channel-id in xml, but iptv providers can change tvg-id in m3u (channel-id xml must match tvg-id in m3u for EPG), messing things up in Emby.

 

For your local m3u use the tag channel-id="x" in m3u for numbering of your channels, where x is your preferred channel number for a channel.

I know, it's a bit of work, which you can do with a m3u editor and notepad++,

[manolodf 11]

Is there a way to backup the data and restore it?  Or to even just retain it even though channels are no more, because one thing that is consistent is the channel numbers of the ones that disappeared and re-appeared are the exact same.  Wouldnt be a big deal to have a few channels change or go, but this was 650 channels so I have to start from scratch. 

[Luke 37248]

What we need to do is hide those editing features until we're able to revamp channel management, which is something that we need to do.

 

The community wanted data from the source to always take priority, so that's why your changes keep getting lost. Now that it behaves that way, those editing functions shouldn't be there.

[manolodf 11]

The editing features were a workable temporary workaround until we are able to have channel groups or some sort of better channel management, if only that data could be stored and saved or allow admin to handle conflict resolution and restore previous work on it.    Like I also mentioned earlier to have an internal channel number that maps to the provider one, that way we can assign an internal channel number that maps to the provider's number and sorts that way, but does not disappear if the channel goes missing for an hour or a day or so. 

[Luke 37248]

Thanks for the feedback.