NextPVR and the future

[pünktchen 1251]

Curious how this would work. Maybe you could answer this.

 

Let's say I've got a series setup in Emby that records MASH episodes.  Lets also assume these are airing at 2am, 2:30am and 3am on Channel 100.

Now I have NextPVR setup to update the schedule at 2am.  It uses 5 EPG sources and finishes at 2:20.

I leave a 10 minute window and have Emby setup to pull this at 2:30am

Emby finishes at 2:45.

 

Are all 3 of those going to get recorded properly?  The IDs will be changing during those times, hence the question.

 

Thanks for the insight on this!

All 3 should record properly, because the series schedule created in Emby only tells the live tv backend what kind of series schedule the backend has to create:

what time, which days, which channels, what program name to search for.

The single schedules of the series are then created by the backend, not by Emby!

[SHSPVR 119]

No what I'm saying is I can set something to record on channel 100 at 2am, 110 at 2:30, 848 at 3am.

I don't know if this would affect things or not but I have probably 200+ series setup that record around the clock as well.

Plus typically at least one TV watching live TV 24/7 in the house.  

 

Kind of screwy but everyone in the house has revolving work schedules so there is no "night time" or down time in my environment.  I pretty much have at least two tuners in use 24/7 up to around 10 during prime time.

 

I can certainly try it again and maybe I was to focused on this issue and testing it when I knew it was likely to not work.

 

Ideally, I'd love to use Emby completely for all Guide and scheduling and use NextPVR as the engine.  That was I'd get the benefit of all the Emby integrations including Gracenote data.  I got close using NextPVR with Emby using it as an IPTV source feeding it an M3U file but this didn't seem reliable and would leave tuners open in NextPVR. That's documented in this thread: https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/63665-nextpvr-dumb-tuner/page-1

 

Being you talk about M3U what about Cast4ME being that base on NextPVR code?.

[sub3 64]

What I worry about and have had problems with is stuff not recording properly that were already scheduled.  Emby will have 1 ID for the movie/show in it's DB but NextPVR has already updated that ID to something else and the recording never kicks off. 

That doesn't matter, and isn't something you'd need to worry about. It'd still record. Once it's scheduled, it's fine, and doesn't matter if the IDs change. (it was only a problem at scheduling time when Emby asked to record show ID 1234, and that wasn't an ID NextPVR knows about, and so it's never scheduled in the first place)

 

(there is some logic that'll fix up any recordings that have had show details change, like IDs, start/stop times etc, so the scheduled recordings will be kept up to date, and not something you need to worry about)

Edited January 22, 2019 by sub3

[sub3 64]

I guess the architect/programmer in me just doesn't understand why you're essentially doing a complete remove/reload of data vs just updating/adding new records to the guide which wouldn't cause this problem.

 

I do it because it's substantially less work for the machine, and a lot quicker. Some people have a quarter of a million listings in their database. Most EPG sources don't have any unique identifier to identify the existing show, other than some combination of show name / time / channel. Any of those listings could have changed, including those identifying attributes like show name / time, or shows could have been removed, so it's lot of work to lookup the existing data and compare to find which ones need inserts/updates/deletes etc. It's a hell of a lot quicker to just delete everything and do a bulk insert of the current data.

Edited January 22, 2019 by sub3

[sub3 64]

 

The problem with different program id's only exists right at the time of creation of one time schedules. It has no affect to series schedules.

 

@@sub3

If you want to create a trigger for Emby's guide refresh you have to create a get request:

http://localhost:8096/emby/ScheduledTasks?IsHidden=false&api_key=PERSONAL API KEY CREATED IN EMBY

This returns a json response like this:

[
  {
    "Name": "Refresh Guide",
    "State": "Idle",
    "Id": "9492d30c70f7f1bec3757c9d0a4feb45",
    "Triggers": [],
    "Description": "Downloads channel information from live tv services.",
    "Category": "Live TV",
    "IsHidden": false,
    "Key": "RefreshGuide"
  }
]

You have to search for "Refresh Guide" and with its "Id" create a post request:

http://localhost:8096/emby/ScheduledTasks/Running/ID OF THE REFRESH GUIDE TASK?api_key=PERSONAL API KEY CREATED IN EMBY

Good info. Is there any equivalent of a more immediate execution of a task? or can I create a task with for the current time, and expect it to run immediately?

[pünktchen 1251]

Good info. Is there any equivalent of a more immediate execution of a task? or can I create a task with for the current time, and expect it to run immediately?

The post request excecutes the task immediately. If you mean only one request for all, no that's not possible right now. But maybe @@Luke can create an api endpoint to excecute a task by name instead of the id.

[Luke 37008]

Sure, we could do something like /LiveTV/Guide/Refresh

[Carlo 4330]

Thank you guys for those thorough explanations. It definitely helps a lot because it seems my testing was all "worst case" manually specifying recordings when the two systems could have been at odds with the refresh taking place. 

 

In the real world this isn't going to be a problem!

[emveepee 112]

How much interest is there in a plugin for NextPVR when v5 comes out?  I am happy to do the port, but I want to make sure there are going to be users for it.

 

Whether not the addon will be compatible with v4 remains to be seen, I expect as a minimum v4 users will need to be current or they will have to upgrade.  I don't want to riddle the current code with if statements.

 

Martin

Edited March 23, 2019 by emveepee

[Carlo 4330]

You could just switch the code.  The AFAIK is the choice of API that was used.  The API used by the current Emby plugin isn't going to be supported moving forward with Next PVR.

 

I'd be interested in the plugin.

[arrbee99 1551]

Definitely also interested.

 

Just as a user unfortunately, don't know nowt about coding...

[rikiwi 32]

Definitely also interested.

 

Just as a user unfortunately, don't know nowt about coding...

Me too.

 

Sent from my SM-G950F using Tapatalk

[emveepee 112]

You could just switch the code.  The AFAIK is the choice of API that was used.  The API used by the current Emby plugin isn't going to be supported moving forward with Next PVR.

 

I'd be interested in the plugin.

 

Are you saying that Emby is dropping support for NextPVR as in integrated plugin and users will have to suffer with the problems of using the m3u interface to NextPVR?  If so I certainly don't want to waste my time.

 

I probably am misreading since you probably mean the NextPVR API is changing which is obviously the change that I am planning to make.

 

Martin

Edited March 23, 2019 by emveepee

[arrbee99 1551]

Personally, am hoping post #2 applies, which sounds like Emby will use NextPVR if someone will kindly contribute a plugin. Maybe there could there be two plugins, at least for a while, depending on which version of NPVR you have.

[emveepee 112]

Personally, am hoping post #2 applies, which sounds like Emby will use NextPVR if someone will kindly contribute a plugin. Maybe there could there be two plugins, at least for a while, depending on which version of NPVR you have.

 

Changing to sub's API will not be a huge undertaking although it may involve some changes from what exists in v5 today, it it too early to say.  I am also really hoping that sub backports the required changes to v4 but I have asked for some small changes for Kodi and he wasn't willing to do that so 2 plugins may be possible.

 

As an example sub's v4 EPG call is limited and there are some useful v5 fields the Emby plugin even doesn't currently use (Season#, Episode#, Movie Year, Significance (Season/Series Premier/Finale)) which I would like to see in v4 but the importance depends if Emby supports these fields, it has been a long time since I looked at this plugin.

 

Right now the original air date and star ratings will also be lost in v5

 

Martin

Edited March 23, 2019 by emveepee

[arrbee99 1551]

Oh well, I guess sub doesn't really want to add stuff from v5 to v4 if v4 will be expiring anyway. If there are two plugins I guess it would only be temporary (though it could be a long temporary) and improving v4 might make it less likely people will move to v5.

[emveepee 112]

Oh well, I guess sub doesn't really want to add stuff from v5 to v4 if v4 will be expiring anyway. If there are two plugins I guess it would only be temporary (though it could be a long temporary) and improving v4 might make it less likely people will move to v5.

Right he only has so much time. The huge new change taking time is going to multi-platform .NET core which will be significant for some new users but will also bring new support challenges.  Existing users happy with a Windows backend won't see any benefit and for a time like any change there will be some regressions.   It is more than temporary though, some things like analog cards likely will not get ported which is a problem for me, and dropping all user add-ons and the old style browser will mean some long time users won't migrate.

 

Version bumps are always slow for implementation, hopefully we can keep the confusion for Emby users to a minimum.

 

Martin

[dcol 165]

I vote for updating NPVR. I use it exclusively on my Emby production server.

[SHSPVR 119]

Personally for me I much rather used M3U Tuners way and keep NPVR IPTV Recorder and use Emby EPG in stead of relying NPVR Plugin.

[dcol 165]

Personally for me I much rather used M3U Tuners way and keep NPVR IPTV Recorder and use Emby EPG in stead of relying NPVR Plugin.

I would agree when they put the recording changes from the beta in the stable release. Recording is too unreliable now with Emby. Works good in the beta.

[emveepee 112]

Personally for me I much rather used M3U Tuners way and keep NPVR IPTV Recorder and use Emby EPG in stead of relying NPVR Plugin.

 

That is a good example of how NOT to set this integration up since it makes no sense from any logical viewpoint.

 

Martin

[SHSPVR 119]

That is a good example of how NOT to set this integration up since it makes no sense from any logical viewpoint.

 

Martin

 

Then some will need build a Direct Integration Tuner with out relying on 3rdparty apps even WinTV SDK is not very reliable under Emby so in tell that happen we have still relying on 3rdparty apps and only the HDHomeRun has true integration for now.

I don't want to use NPVR EPG there to min con going this route which had been talk about min time before

Don't get me wrong as NPVR is amazing software on it own but there min thing I have ask for years ago but nothing ever been add

[emveepee 112]

I have no idea what you are saying is the problem I am guesssing it is the EPG issue  If someone can configure NextPVR and can configure Emby I think the only difficulty is harmonizing the EPG update time too me that looks trivial unless Emby makes it difficult

 

The smart solution comes if Luke provides the  /LiveTV/Guide/Refresh URL he discussed earlier.  With it we can can get rid of that issue with a curl/wget call in the NextPVR postupdateepg.bat file, but it has been almost two months and still no word on when or if that might be coming.

 

Martin

Edited March 24, 2019 by emveepee

[SHSPVR 119]

I have no idea what you are saying is the problem I am guesssing it is the EPG issue  If someone can configure NextPVR and can configure Emby I think the only difficulty is harmonizing the EPG update time too me that looks trivial unless Emby makes it difficult

 

The smart solution comes if Luke provides the  /LiveTV/Guide/Refresh URL he discussed earlier.  With it we can can get rid of that issue with a curl/wget call in the NextPVR postupdateepg.bat file, but it has been almost two months and still no word on when or if that might be coming.

 

Martin

 

It more then just that there are other part of it as it also need full series/fav/timers control which is something you can't even do even under NPVR it self as your stuck with what ever setting you set with no way to modify them unlike in other DVR app heck even STB DVR.

[emveepee 112]

Sub mentioned he was looking at being able to modify recurring rules earlier in this thread, although I can easily mask that in the Emby client by simply doing a delete and a re-add assuming Emby accepts that. It definitely has become more of an issue now with IPTV with users adding and removing stations so frequently.

 

Most of my tuners and configured stations are years old and the New on this channel works perfectly for me.  I do edit the destination as I move things around.

 

Martin

Edited March 24, 2019 by emveepee