XMLTV & Categories

[Coxeroni]

Here is the thread I went on in more detail about the categories:

XMLTV (foreign) categories not used

Server Version#: 1.18.2.2031 (Shield TV 2017) Since I am not very happy with the EPG provided by Plex for Germany to say the least, I started building my own xmltv guide using webgrabplus. I had some success with it and I am overall very pleased with this solution. There are some issue still remaining: Plex does not respect the categories I set for news and sports. I added the German words “Sport” and “Nachrichten” to the respective category, which are generated in the xmltv file, but still …

At least a dev was visiting there, so if you chime in maybe this will be heard at one point.

[Rain_1]

I didn’t explain myself properly on my last message: I was importing WebGrab++ to TVHeadEnd and providing that to Plex (along with channel tuning). It works, but TVHeadEnd literally strips away a bunch of metadata from the XMLTV. It puts some back on version 4.3, but I’m still only using 4.2 for now and I don’t have the time to find a 4.3 pre-release to see if it helps me.

With that in mind, i’m importing the XML directly into Plex and, while it keeps most of the metadata I want (Plex is weird about when it shows “sub-title” metadata - not on the main EPG view, thats for sure), I have the same issue you’re having - not only Plex ignores the “sports” and “news”, everything is categorized under movies.

I guess we could look at it in this way: Movies by default. Then it sees TV Series as things with a Season/Episode number in the xmltv_ns format. Then it defines what is Sports and what is News by the category (which is why those are the only two things you can add to the DVR Guide. However, since its ignoring those alternate categories, everything that doesn’t have an episode (or an original airing date) is identified as a movie.

Technically I can do “sports” and “news” directly on the XML creator, but sadly my EPG guide doesn’t provide “original air date” for TV Shows (that are not serialized content with Seasons and Episode numbers). I wonder if I can work something around it.

Thanks for your message and other thread, it’s very well articulated and easy to understand. I’ll chip in on the other thread for visibility.

[Coxeroni]

Ah so you had another layer of issue with tvh indeed stripping the information. I didn’t get that.

Well there is not a lot of love for xmltv as it seems, dunno how the Aussies are doing, since they have to rely on xmltv altogether. There are probably enough problems with the guide provider already that there no resources left to fix these issues with xmltv (just my personal impression).

But thanks for chiming in on the other thread and sharing your experience!

Just to add I have more or less given up on Plex DVR due to the numerous issues with the guide and I am tired of constantly reporting issues. Detailed reports like in the other thread take time and effort and since it is not going as I hoped it would, I moved on to another product.

[Rain_1]

I made some amazing discoveries these past two days. I’ve described them here:

XMLTV (foreign) categories not used

Ok, so I made some progress. In a strange way: By editing my .XML file, here are the observations I made. These could be incorrect or incomplete, as I literally don’t have any more data to run through PLEX. I might make some up in a different time, but a more comprehensive way of understanding how PLEX parses data would be good to have. EVERYTHING that doesn’t have a “episode-num” tag will be identified as a Movie, no matter the categories. EVERYTHING that does have a “episode-num” tag, be it…

I don’t know which would be the best place to do it, so I also posted it here, as this is an older message with more people “subscribed” to. Hope it helps?