Wiring It All Up

There are a couple of ways to setup the sky box. The first is to have the mythbox in the chain of RF devices, and set your tv card to pick it up on the right channel. The second option is to take the AV ouptut of the sky box to an s-video input port. This can be done with a scart to s-video converter if the sky box doesn't have s-video output (some NTL boxes don't)

You will also need an IR sender to control the sky box using your Myth remote, something like this: http://www.redremote.co.uk/serial/index.html

Use this guide in conjunction with the following:

http://www.knoppmythwiki.org/index.php?page=UKMythConfig

Setting up tv_grab_uk_rt

during the install just add bbc1, this will make the process much quicker.

to setup the channels you can either go through selecting them one by one or automaticly create ~mythtv/.mythtv/name of source?.xmltv using the method below.

Sky

The previous static files method has been removed as this is a much better way of doing it. This method is also more likely to stay current with channel number changes and additions.

Grab these two scripts:

DownloadChannels UpdateChannels

Save the first as download_channels second as update_channels.

copy both of these files to the mythtv box and login as root. from the directory both files are in run

chmod a+x download_channels
./download_channels

This script does the following:-

• Downloads this html page http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/satellite/skyepg/ and extracts all the sky channel numbers and names (eg 106,Sky One)
• Gets the list of available channel names from tv_grab_uk_rt (ie the uk alternative setting for xmltv
• Attempts to line up the sky channel number, name and xmltvid and store these in a comma separated file
• outputs the corresponding .xmltv file
• outputs a list of channels it couldn't match up

Now have a look at matched_channels and manually add in in the same format anything the script couldn't match from unmatched_channels (I just did the regional BBC channels). Do the same with matched.xmltv and copy this into

/home/mythtv/.mythtv/<your_tv_source>.xmltv

Now run this script to parse the matched_channels file and update the sql database with all those channels.

./update_channels matched_channels

NTL

Use this file, removing any channels that are not wanted first.

AllChannelsUKGrab (attachment back!)

I think this contains all the channels, but if it is missing one please add the tv_grab_uk_rt id to the file and the channel name and number to the channel.sql files.

Then run

nohup mythfilldatabase --graboptions " --days 14" &

This will get the next two weeks of program listings, note the nohup means that you can log out without stopping the process.

The channel numbers selected are all wrong for ntl, to correct this run

mysql -u root mythconverg

The paste in to the xterm the following file

Actualy paste it into a text editor and remove the ?'s added by wiki, then paste to an xterm

NtlUpdateChannumUk

At the end it will list any channel names it didn't match. To help others add these to the file in the same format.

Changing channel

I do this using the device from

http://www.redremote.co.uk/serial

For sky boxes, there is also a non-IR based control solution available here:

http://www.heenan.me.uk/control-sky-from-pc/

Both have a linux command line program that can be used from myth with a simple shell script, once the freqids are set correctly.

Changing channel - Samsung NTL boxes

If NTL upgrade your Pace box to a silver Samsung one then you will need to change the firmware in your RedEye Serial device to use RC-5 IR codes using this Windows VB program.

http://www.redremote.co.uk/serial/Reddemfull.zip

References

sky channel numbers were found on

http://www.skyepg.ndo.co.uk/tvc_fulllist.html

--peteredworthy

<various amendments by Nick Parkinson - Oct 13th 2005>