Add support for EIT data post-processing with an external program

[rkunze]

This PR adds a new flavour of the EIT OTA Grabber that pushes the EIT events to a comet mailbox instead of updating the EPG directly.

Background: I am currently working on EPG support for Germany. Sadly, there is neither a decent EPG provider for end users in Germany (the only one I know of is epgdata.com which is both commercial and unreliable) nor a working XMLTV grabber, so over here we're stuck with what we can get from EIT.

Fortunately, available EIT data (at least on DVB-T) varies from somewhat useable to pretty good. Some providers carry all information for a decent EPG (including series linking), most others have at least enough information for looking up series/episodes on thetvdb.com and movies on themoviedb.org.

My current plan is to use the new interface added in this PR to push EIT events to an external program that massages the EIT data into EPG info, enhances it with external data, and then sends the finished EPG entries back to tvheadend over the existing "External interface" sockets.

I'm going with an external program because I want to keep provider or channel specific post-processing out of tvheadend itself and because I don't think it's a good idea to have (possibly slow) requests to external sources like thetvdb.org in the EIT grabber code path.

[adamsutton]

Richard,

I need time to look at this, but unfortunately we've now reached feature freeze for 3.2. Interesting idea though.

Adam

[rkunze]

OK, I'll go ahead and experiment on my own branch for now.

Should I keep this pull request open for later or submit a new one after 3.2 is out?

[adamsutton]

keep it open for now so I don't forget what you're up to ;) in case I have any useful input.

The hope is we're basically at 3.2 beta now, with the exception of my HTSP updates. And we hope to have a 2-4 week testing period before release.

Adam

[nurtext]

Just a thought on this because I'm from Germany too and EPG here is really crappy:

Try http://www.timefor.tv/ instead as they offer good epg data (basically it's from epgs.com for end users), but you have to pay for it and they are not very intelligent: They've chosen to translate the EPG categories into German, which results in non-colored EPG for clients (like XBMC for example) and is not dvb standard. I've created my own external grabber file and if anyone is interested I can post it here… If we can get the translated epg categories work this would be an option, too.

[john-tornblom]

I've done similar work the last couple of days that might be of interest:

see: https://github.com/john-tornblom/tvheadend/compare/epgscrape

[adamsutton]

Dropping this as I'm aware @john-tornblom has been working on similar stuff and this is now very old.