Fettling Myth - New Freeview channel

Prompted by a post on the myth users list, I thought I'd have a stab a manually adding two new channels to my Myth system. It turn out to be trickier than I expeected.

The post covered adding the new channels to the xmltv configuration, but not Myth. As it turns out, it is not strictly necessary to alter xmltv at all, but it is better to do so.

The mods to xmltv expend the set of channels that it is aware of, allowing it to output data using sensible id's, instead of generating default id's. The 'channel_ids' file of xmltv essentially contains a mapping from the channel identity used by the source on the web, to a more meaningful version. The data is still accessible without the mapping, but it is then necessary to use the default, which is Cxxxx.radiotime.com.

The integration between myth and xmltv involves separate definition file for each myth input source. These files contain a list of the channels that are of interest in each case. So it was also necessary to add the xmltv id's of the new channels to the relevant input source file.

Once the mods to xmltv and the input source definition were made, running mythfilldatabase created two new channels in myth.

At this stage, I realised I had probably go about this in the wrong way, since the new myth channel records were missing a number of key fields. To fix this I shut down mythbackend, and ran dvbscan to get the latest dvb on-air channel data, and used this to fill in the serviceid for the new channels.

I would expect that Myth could do this automatically, but it was late and I did not feel like taking the risk.