BETA: New Custom Channels M3U extensions: tvc-guide-placeholders, tvc-guide-tags, tvc-guide-genres

Beta Community DVR Beta
#1

In the latest pre-release, we've added support for parsing new m3u tags from Custom Channels.

tvc-guide-tags & tvc-guide-genres

The first 2 allow you to provide tags and genres (comma separated) that will be applied to guide placeholders for Custom Channels that have no guide data. When created, these placeholders will adopt the tags and genres you have set for the channel.

  • tvc-guide-tags="HDTV, Live"
  • tvc-guide-genres="Sports event, Action, Sitcom"

This is useful if you want to seed this data into the placeholders for Custom Channels so that their airings can be pulled into your Channel Collections via Automatic Channels.

tvc-guide-placeholders

The third tag is tvc-guide-placeholders. This tag can either have a value of false, or an integer greater than 0, representing duration in seconds.

tvc-guide-placeholders="7200"

Using false or 0, will tell Channels DVR Server to not make placeholders at all. The channel will work just like it did before we added automatic placeholders. Using an integer, will create placeholders of that length.

Maybe you would like your airings in your Custom Channel channel to be 30 minutes or 2 hours. Using this tag, you can accomplish that.

Pro Tips

Not including this tag at all will just create placeholders at 1 hour increments, like it did before.

Any placeholder equal to or greater than 24 hours (86,400) will create placeholders that size, but without adding the "@2pm" title to them. So, if you want Custom Channels to show with just their channel name, cleanly, but also need a placeholder airing to exist to work with Automatic Channels, use this trick.

2 Likes
#2
#3

@maddox I just tried to remove the placeholders for my security camera feed and it doesn't seem to have any effect. ( tvc-guide-placeholders=0)

Here is a snip from my config

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:-1 channel-id="BackyardBlueIris" channel-number="0.8" tvg-logo="https://i.ibb.co/kHvRksm/cameraicon.png " tvg-name="Backyard BlueIris" tvc-guide-placeholders=0 tvc-guide-title="Backyard (BlueIris)" tvc-guide-description="Live View of Backyard" ,Backyard View
rtsp://Seth:[email protected]:80/Backyard

My guide:

image
image1399×84 13.1 KB

edit: I see this on the pre-release notes: FIXED: tvc-guide-placeholders m3u tag was not working
I checked and I am on 2022.11.01.1858 but still having the issue

1 Like
#4

Ha, yeah, sorry about that! You will need to refresh your guide data after you make the change. Choose to fetch guide updates.

#5

The value needs to be in quotes.

tvc-guide-placeholders="0"

#6

The tvc-guide-categories tag has also been added as an extension. This will seed your placeholder airings with category information for use in Automatic Channels

tvc-guide-categories="Movie"

The options are: Movie, Sports event, or Series. These correspond to the category section in Automatic Channels.

#7

That did it thanks

1 Like
#8
#9

My M3U playlist is setup where the category is tagged as group-title="USA News". Is there anyway for channels to look for group-title instead of tvc-guide-genres?

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#10

I'm new to all of these tags and placeholders, so if I have a m3u playlist added via url source but with no guide data, where do I edit these tags and placeholders so I can make them play nicely with my automatic channel collections?

#11

It’s explained in the docs.

#12

Sorry I'm asking for follow-up on this three months later, but I guess my question really was WHERE do I add guide data fall back tags to a custom channel added via URL with no guide data. The documentation isn't very clear as to where I'm to do this editing to add the fall back tags (unless I'm missing something).

#13

The tags go in the m3u. If its at a URL you need to download it, edit, and host it at a new url or add it as Text

1 Like
#14

Got it. Thanks.

#15

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