High Definition Television (HDTV)

This page is how to get the best out of Shepherd and MythTV for HDTV.

See also My high definition (HD) channels are missing programs?

XMLTV

The XMLTV perl library (0.5.50 and before) needs patching to allow HDTV flags to be read in. Copy the follow to a file called /root/xmltv.patch.

--- /usr/share/perl5/XMLTV.pm.old	2006-01-16 06:28:22.000000000 +1000
+++ /usr/share/perl5/XMLTV.pm	2007-12-07 21:48:30.413023176 +1000
@@ -1311,6 +1311,11 @@
 	    $value =~ /^\d+:\d+$/ or warn "bad aspect ratio: $value";
 	    $r{aspect} = $value;
 	}
+	elsif ($name eq 'quality') {
+	    warn "'quality' seen twice" if defined $r{quality};
+	    $value =~ /^\d+x\d+$/ or $value =~ /^(HDTV|SDTV)$/i or warn "bad quality size or HDTV/SDTV flag: $value";
+	    $r{quality} = $value;
+    }
     }
     return \%r;
 };

Then execute:

cd /
patch -p0 < /root/xmltv.patch

MythTV

Then for MythTV (0.20 and before) downloading http://members.iinet.net.au/~paulone/xmltv/setMythTVflags to a file called /usr/local/bin/setMythTVflags.

After mythfilldatabase runs, /usr/local/bin/setMythTVflags needs to be executed with the xmltv output file and then a reschedule called. The easiest way is a cron job such as the following. Copy the follow contents to /etc/cron.d/setMythTVflags, changing the start time and directories.

# /etc/cron.d/setMythTVflags: crontab entry for the setMythTVflags

SHELL=/bin/sh
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin

# start at 8:35
35 8    * * *   root     /usr/local/bin/setMythTVflags --quiet /home/shepherd/.shepherd/output.xmltv && mythbackend -v none --resched

ProgramID

The following was suggested but I haven't needed this:

* If you have multiple tuners, MythTV may attempt to record the same program on both if it doesn't have a programid set (as, for examples, movies often do not). A simple bit of SQL for synthesising one for unknown programs from the starttime+endtime+title will make short work of such cases.

    echo 'update program set programid=concat(starttime,endtime,title) where programid="";' | mysql mythconverg

The problem maybe related to the slight differences between programs on channel 7HD and channel Seven in their start, stop, title, sub-titles or descriptions. Because of the differences MythTV thinks they are different showings.