Standardized TVG-IDs

[jnk22]

Hi @doglover3920,

I am a maintainer of the Kodinerds IPTV list for free and legal IPTV streams, mainly for German TV and radio channels and also some foreign ones.

When starting that project back in 2017, I initially used the Rytec TVG-IDs to provide compatibility for what I saw as the "standard" naming for those IDs, as I was using those IDs myself.

However, the recent changes of "ARD.de" -> "DasErste.de" and "N24.de" -> "WELT.de" have lead to some trouble for some users using different EPG sources.
As I have merged your recent changes to the Kodinerds IPTV lists, this has lead to other users of easyEPG Grabber having problems with their EPG sources, as they have kept "ARD.de" and "N24.de" for now.
I assume that there are potentially other IPTV lists, EPG providers etc. also using "Rytec TVG-IDs" as their TVG-IDs.

As I personally support these particular changes (and the maintainers of easyEPG Grabber mentioned the possibility of adapting your recent changes), another issue turned up just today regarding the new German TV Channel "Bild/BILD/Bild TV":

• easyEPG Grabber had an existing TVG-ID for that one since 2019 already: "BILD.de"
• Your changes from 2 days ago introduced a new TVG-ID "BildTV.de"

This is probably only one example of future conflicts in TVG-ID namings if there won't be a real "standard".

We, as the maintainers of Kodinerds IPTV and easyEPG Grabber, are currently discussing a way of finding "standardized TVG-IDs" to provide the best user experience possible to all users regardless of their (IP)TV channels and/or EPG source:
Kodinerds - tvg-id Diskussion

As I have initially tried to have compatible TVG-IDs based on the Rytec TVG-IDs in the past, I would like to ask, if it is possible to work together in providing some standardized TVG-IDs that can be used by all users of all (IP)TV sources and/or EPG sources?

[doglover3920]

No problem in standardisation of the names.
I came up with the naming to solve the problem for f.i. Animal Planet. Calling it simply AnimalPlanet will not do. Because of 200 different channels all called Animal Planet. So it became AnimalPlanet.de

In general use the real channelname. remove any spaces and replace special characters which could cause trouble.
I a trying to follow these rules. Ok occasionally a TV addition crept in. Also so deviations from this, because of history.

For the example of Bild TV, I will rename the channel to BILD.de
Be aware that in enigma2 we make these id's non-case sensitive. So BILD.de is equal to Bild.de.
I kept the capital letters to increase the human readabilty.

I am open to suggestions.

[jnk22]

Thanks for your quick response, this is great to hear - and will definitely be welcomed by all the affected users! :)

To my knowledge, changing the BILD TVG-ID to BILD.de will solve all current conflicts for now. Thank you for that.

I personally really like the human readable format with an additional country flag that you are using for all the channels.

We have yet to come up with a proper suggestion of how to handle future naming conventions, but having you on board will definitely make this a worthwile effort.
Some ideas that have been coming up are a GitHub repository managed by all involved parties, with a JSON based file for the standardized TVG-IDs. Something like that would probably be a simple solution.

I'll keep you updated on our ideas of how to move this forward together :)