ABC grabber - change of URL

[HairySpoon]

A few days ago, my configured grabbers all stopped working. Investigation revealed that the abc_website grabber was using this URL...

my $guide_url = "http://epg.abctv.net.au/processed/%s_%s.json";

Which is now inactive. So changed to the current URL as follows...

my $guide_url = "https://cdn.iview.abc.net.au/epg/processed/%s_%s.json";

Which grabbed data for another seven days except for 7Mate. Reading the source code I noticed at around line 140 where abc_channel_to_shep is defined...

"7MATE" => "7mate",

Changed to

"7MATE" => "7mate HD",

... got it working for me. However, this may not be suitable for everyone as according to channel_list, both 7mate and 7mate HD exist in different regions, sometimes both at once. What is the trick that allows both SD and HD channels to share the same data? For instance Seven and 7HD, 10 and 10HD, and so on.

[glennmckechnie]

On Sat, 14 Sept 2024 at 15:14, Hairy Spoon @.***> wrote:

A few days ago, my configured grabbers all stopped working. Investigation revealed that the abc_website grabber was using this URL...

my $guideurl = "http://epg.abctv.net.au/processed/%s%s.json";

Which is now inactive. So changed to the current URL as follows...

my $guideurl = "https://cdn.iview.abc.net.au/epg/processed/%s%s.json";

Thanks for the heads up on this. I hadn't twigged that there was a failure as it was still showing that it had captured 6 days of data, but the upcoming recording list had dropped right off. Closer investigation showed that the 6 days included only a few stations, there were holes everywhere else.

This may have also been due to the yourtv.com.au failure that Peter_B mentioned. Eitherway, I'm back to 7 days here in Country Victoria.

Which grabbed data for another seven days except for 7Mate. Reading the

source code I noticed at around line 140 where abc_channel_to_shep is defined...

"7MATE" => "7mate",

Changed to

"7MATE" => "7mate HD",

Interesting. My custom_list entries had gone missing? Sigh. The next run should test if their reinclusion worked even though shepherd --reconfigure found them..

... got it working for me. However, this may not be suitable for everyone as according to channel_list, both 7mate and 7mate HD exist in different regions, sometimes both at once. What is the trick that allows both SD and HD channels to share the same data? For instance Seven and 7HD, 10 and 10HD, and so on.

I might be misreading you here but for sharing the SD / HD data, I just point multiple channels to the same shepherd source, after confirming with the TVs inbuilt channel guide of course.

Cheers Glenn

Various WeeWx addons at https://github.com/glennmckechnie

Message ID: @.***>

[HairySpoon]

Thanks for the heads up on this. I hadn't twigged that there was a failure as it was still showing that it had captured 6 days of data, but the upcoming recording list had dropped right off. Closer investigation showed that the 6 days included only a few stations, there were holes everywhere else.

My initial response was similar. I had data but it stopped four days in the future. I had assumed that all grabbers were broken. It happens that after abc_website broke, the only remaining grabber was rex (yourtv.com.au provided by nine network) which had dropped to just four days. As you observed it came back to a full week.

Shepherd is now down to just two grabbers (abc and nine) and one maintainer (Xander). Risky. So, during the weekend I went looking for another easy fix in the other grabbers. None found. However I noticed that channel 7 (tvguidetonight.com.au) is similar to ABC in that it provides a full days json file. It may be possible to create a new grabber based on ABC. I'm tempted but my PERL is rubbish - if it were python I'd have it done by now.

[HairySpoon]

I might be misreading you here but for sharing the SD / HD data, I just point multiple channels to the same shepherd source,

You are. My concern is in the source code that enables this to happen so easily. I made a change which fixed the abc grabber on my platform by hard coding

"7MATE" => "7mate HD",

I fear that my patch is not good enough because it will break for anyone who has configured 7mate for SD. I was hoping that Xander would offer some guidance so that I could offer a working patch.

[thiakil]

Apologies, Github doesn't notify me that there's a NEW issue on the repo...

ABC has been updated in the repo.

7Mate is a little complicated. Some regions have it called 7mate some are 7mate HD and if I'm reading right, some have both? Regions that have both should be able to configure Mythtv/etc to use the same id for both channels. No source provides high enough quality data to tell if the actual broadcast source is HD or not so it shouldn't really matter.