Documentation regarding guides seems to have a circular reference

[theshoeshiner]

The EPG readme says "Playlists with already linked guides can be found in the iptv-org/iptv repository". However I don't see anything in that repo that has guides linked. It just says to download them via the EPG tool, which seems to be a confusing circular reference (Unless I'm missing something). If there are in fact no "playlists with already linked guides", then that readme should probably be updated. If they do exist somewhere then maybe it should be better explained, because it's not readily apparent where they are.

[freearhey]

The word “linked” implies that as tvg-id in playlists and channel id in created guides are the same, allowing them to be used together without additional actions.

But maybe the wording isn't the best and this sentence should be updated.

[theshoeshiner]

Thanks, I do see that now. It really stems from my lack of knowledge about how the entire codebase worked. e.g. that custom M3U props are used to link EPG and stream urls, since the standards themselves are independent.

I think the last piece I was missing was that it wasn't very intuitive which channels go with which site. e.g. If I download an M3U, I see the channel ids, but I still have no way to retrieve the guide data for that specific channel via a channels.xml because the M3U doesn't directly tell you the site id, which is required to construct the channels.xml (obligatory "unless im missing something). And this probably also stems from my lack of realization that the entire linkage between the data is custom.

I was able to figure it out by simply searching the repo for my channel id, and got it all worked out on my end. It's pretty flawless / easy once I understood some of implementation details.

Now all that's left is packing this into a jellyfin plugin. easy peasy. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[theshoeshiner]

So per my other comment - is there a way to tell which site a channel belongs to? e.g. If I scan through the channels list and decide I want to view a subset of them, how can I create the necessary channels.xml to pull the guides for only those channels?

[freearhey]

A list of all available guides can be found through a search on https://iptv-org.github.io/ by channel ID. Then all you have to do is gather all the channels into one list as shown here: https://github.com/iptv-org/epg?tab=readme-ov-file#use-custom-channel-list

[brianjmurrell]

Could this be made easier in some way than (the tedious task of) going through all of the channels one has in one's m3u playlist and one by one and following links to figure out which guide provider to use for the channel? This gets pretty nasty if you get into the several-tens (or hundreds) of channels in your playlist.

Like maybe can the m3u playlist include a list of guide providers for each channel so that one just has to look in the playlist for the list of guide providers one needs to pull from?

Or maybe even just a single (i.e. comment) line listing all of the guide providers that provide guides for the channels in the playlist?

It would be nice also if the database could generate the custom.channels.xml file for one's chosen channels.

Here's a nice little tool (IMO) I wrote to grab an EPG from an M3U playlist for example:

#!/bin/bash

channels_file=$(mktemp)
trap 'rm -f "$channels_file"' EXIT

{ 
  cat <<EOF
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<channels>
EOF
  grep -h -f <(grep -Po '(?<=tvg-id=")[^"]+' "$1") sites/*/*.channels.xml
  cat <<EOF 
</channels>
EOF
} > "$channels_file"

cat "$channels_file"

npm run grab --- --channels="$channels_file"

[freearhey]

@brianjmurrell It's better to create a new thread for this idea here so that the rest of the community can see it.

[freearhey]

The link to iptv-org/iptv repository has been removed from the readme (iptv-org/epg@3e36c64).