Multiple EPG sources.

by BigJustice1985

I frequently see posts about individuals using multiple EPG sources with their IPTV service.

I'm assuming then, that they must be using EPG data that isn't solely provided from their supplier, obviously.

I have always just used whichever EPG was provided by my supplier, but I'm inferring that one need not rely solely on that data? Can we use an EPG / data provided by someone or someplace other than that from our own provider?

Is the data "all the same" so to speak? That is to say that -regardless of whomever you provider is- "CBS East will always be airing the same program Tuesday evenings at 9pm," for example?

Does there exist some "Universal guide, or data set for everything that is on every channel" that providers can access to create EPG's that sync with their listings?

And can we -as end users ourselves- access that raw data to use in a program like m3u4u.com for example? How or where might one go about doing that? (Sidenote: I haven't yet figured out how to use m3u4u.com personally. Lol).

How does one access all of that raw data to begin with?

I hope I asked that correctly?

Thank you kindly in advance.

SaltRaspberry8
  1. Yes, you can use any xmltv file for EPG, it doesn't have to be your providers.
  2. No, the universal guide doesn't exist, as providers use their own channel names and ID tags, which means that you often need to match them yourself in order to get them to work. You can do it manually in a text editor, but that takes a lot of time and with any change from the providers you have to make these changes manually as well. It's easier with an online editor like xeev or m3u4u (both have their own EPG as well), as you just copy the id tags and paste them in the appropriate field. You can also assign EPG manually in apps that let you do that (like tivimate), but you would have to do it manually for each channel that doesn't have matched id tags, so that will be a chore.
  3. What do you mean by accessing raw data? you can open an m3u file in a text editor and xmltv file in excel. Unless by raw data you mean the EPG data that gets converted into xmltv. For that lookup webgrab, but if you have problems figuring out m3u4u, than it's above your paygrade. That's why most of us, including myself, use editors for that.
Daniel15

That is to say that -regardless of whomever you provider is- "CBS East will always be airing the same program Tuesday evenings at 9pm," for example?

Depends on which feed they're using for "CBS East" - for example CBS New York may have slightly different local programming to CBS New Jersey. Once you work out which CBS feed it is, you just need to look at the local TV listings for that area.

Does there exist some "Universal guide, or data set for everything that is on every channel" that providers can access to create EPG's that sync with their listings?

Most EPG data comes either from Zap2it or Gracenote. A common intermediary provider of EPG data is Schedules Direct, who use Gracenote data and provide a nice API for a relatively cheap price. Officially you can only use their EPG data with open source apps though. https://www.schedulesdirect.org/ . There's an app called Guide2Go ( https://github.com/mar-mei/guide2go ) that can read Schedules Direct data and output XMLTV files. EPG123 can do that too.

For Zap2it, AFAIK they don't have an official API so people scrape the site (eg. Using zap2xml).

I think services like m3u4u obtain this data in some way and 'resell' /distribute it.

BigJustice1985

Thank you both so much. I'm realizing that a lot of this is way over my head and I'm going to have to continue reading up. Thank you though. Sincerely...