Pi 4 for serving M3U and XMLTV only

Ah. Yes, I believe the original limit was 500K entries, or something like that.

Well, until that time, you can use combinations of the time and duration parameters to generate multiple files—such as for 24 hour increments—and use tv_merge to put them all into a single file.

You may want to browse the XMLTV project's repository, as they have some extra tools for managing and manipulating XMLTV files.

I'm using the XMLTV feed from Channels and getting 14 days of guide data using:

http://<channelsip>:8089/devices/ANY/guide/xmltv?duration=1209600
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As @chrisc mentioned, they're on the stable release, which had an artificial limit hardcoded as to how many entries would be exported. You are most likely using a current pre-release which has had that limit removed.

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I'm going to upgrade it for the time being. I can't keep that mess running on a tv box, lol. It's going to a Pi soon anyway. If there's a problem I'll keep the new install on the stable release.

Truth be told I wanted to look at another EPG in hopes of finding something more robust. But this should do and the price is right!

Gracenote pretty much has the market cornered. I'm not aware of another service that sells guide data. Also, the data provided is pretty robust. If you look are the raw guide data Channels stores, you'll find information about ratings, recommendations, cast/crew, categories, keywords, etc.

If you want some more information of what Gracenote provides, take a look at the Schedules Direct documentation. The only thing that they mention that it looks like Channels does not support is the sports/score information for in-progress live broadcast events.

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I started to look at something called "Webgrab+", but the setup info provided is another exercise in reinventing the wheel, because I couldn't find anything in step-by-step format. It's all a needless deep-dive into the River Benal written by people that seem to love typing but not communicating, lol. In a nutshell it scrapes the TV Guide site schedule when setup correctly. I walked away from it when I realized I had to read multiple pages to set what amounts to three parameters and build a url.

I did the Channels update, bounced, rebuilt the guide, etc. STILL problems pulling the guide. So rather than waste any more time I disabled Bonjour and DVR on Channels, and bought a year of SchedDirect. Works beautifully, and now my Channels server is running lean and mean, TRULY doing nothing but serving m3u.

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Are you having Problem pulling the guide for EMBY ... ? I had my Server just serving the m3u and guide on a PR4100 and had all sorts of trouble populating the guide in EMBY.... very CPU intensive. The nas could not handle it.

I am wondering if the extraction of the Guide data parses every Tuner for guide data even if they are the same type and then combines the channels.

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No it was just Channels cutting it off at 5 days. The guide is now a full 14 days from sched direct.

My Emby server is running as a docker on older NAS hardware. It's a Xeon 1275L with 32gb. (Unraid) The thing that might be helping it along is where my Dockers reside. They sit on the cache array, which is a 1.3tb pile of 4 old sata SSDs.

Channels is running on an Android box that for some reason the play store allowed the DVR server to install to (Ematic AGT419). That's barely using anything at all. This is Channels with 3 streams going. At least one HD.
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OK I run the prerelease so that limitation was removed. I move the server to a Lenovo M73 mini PC i had gotten from WOOT works great .. I get plenty of guide data from ChannelsDVR now with no problem.

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That's what I put on, but the problem still exists. I'm guessing because it's the Shield app.

I found out part of the Problem is that EMBY times out when accessing VIA HTTP so I created a batchfile using WGET to get the guide data and output a Guide.XML works great. I will just run it everyday and output to a share .. and point EMBY to it.

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