| | 150 | === Can I get guide data from multiple different regions? === |
| | 151 | |
| | 152 | Yes, but not easily. When you install/configure Shepherd, it will ask you for a region. It needs this because TV stations often use different schedules in different locations: what a channel is broadcasting at 9pm in Melbourne is no guarantee it's broadcasting the same thing in Broken Hill. |
| | 153 | |
| | 154 | Most of the time, users only require guide data for channels within their own region. But if you have a satellite dish or can otherwise receive channels from multiple regions, you might want Shepherd to collect data on these. |
| | 155 | |
| | 156 | The only 100% sure way to manage this is to run multiple independent versions of Shepherd, and feed their output files one at a time to your PVR (which can hopefully combine them). This is a little tricky, because Shepherd forcibly runs from ~/.shepherd/: you cannot change this, and the only workaround is to install and run it as a different users, or alter the HOME variable. See [wiki:FAQ#CanIspecifydifferentconfigurationfilesforShepherdtouse the below FAQ for details]. |
| | 157 | |
| | 158 | This is necessary because Shepherd and its grabbers use channel names to identify channels, and it will not distinguish between "Prime" in one region and "Prime" in another. Invoking Shepherd a second time with a different region code will cause it to see that it has Prime data cached from the first run and return that, rather than fetching the potentially unique data from the second region. |
| | 159 | |
| | 160 | Even if you only want channels that have unique names, and do not exist in both regions, you need to setup multiple instances of Shepherd. If you don't, Shepherd will encounter a range of minor problems such as refusing to run for the second region because it thinks it has successfully completely too recently. |
| | 161 | |
| | 162 | There are a number of users who would benefit from Shepherd handling multiple regions better, but the single-region assumption is quite ingrained in Shepherd and difficult to fix. Sorry. |
| | 163 | |
| | 164 | Users grabbing data from regions in different timezones should also ensure that each Shepherd instance has [wiki:FAQ#WhichtimezoneshouldIsetMythTVtoAutoNone1000 the correct TZ variable set]. |
