Channel logo updates?

[karlshea]

Just curious how often the channel logos get updated, or how that process works. SyFy has a new logo and the service was still returning the old one, but I know they originally come from a third-party provider.

[rkulagow]

We refresh the logos periodically. I'll find out if our upstream has a new logo set.

[karlshea]

Thanks! No rush obviously, just was wondering how that worked.

[rkulagow]

Are you seeing any updates now? What's the stationID that you're pulling?

[karlshea]

Sorry, should have turned on thread notifications.

The two station IDs are I11097.json.schedulesdirect.org and I58623.json.schedulesdirect.org.

I ran mythfilldatabase --do-channel-updates (which is set to use tv_grab_zz_sdjson_sqlite) and afterwards the database showed the same two logo filenames as before (s11097_h3_aa.png and s58623_h3_aa.png).

I thought it wasn't working since afterwards those two files in ~/.mythtv/channels were the same (old) logo, but when I hit https://s3.amazonaws.com/schedulesdirec ... _h3_aa.png directly it's the new logo. So it seems that it didn't try and re-fetch (which sort of makes sense, I guess, you wouldn't want to re-download all of the logos every time).

But I deleted all of the channel logos and re-ran mythfilldatabase and the new ones came down. I suppose that's the solution every now and then if I want them refreshed.

Thanks for answering my questions about this!

[gtb]

I ran mythfilldatabase --do-channel-updates

As I recall, mythfilldatabase --do-channel-updates will only update the channel data when it appears to have changed. If the channel name/xmltvid is the same (and the named icon file is found locally) no update occurs. Likely that is why deleting the icon file caused it to pull the icon(s) again.

Occasionally deleting the channel icons may be the easiest way to deal with such things. Alternatively, I suspect the MythTV project would consider accepting a feature patch to force pulling of the channel icons.

There is also a third party program MythUtil-Channel-XMLTV-getLineup (docs on the MythTV wiki), which when used with a grabber that provides --get-lineup support (the tv_grab_zz_sdjson_sqlite is known to do so) can attempt to do a deeper compare of the icon locally and remotely (it compares the hash values), and updates if necessary(*). I have tended to run it once every month to pull in new(er) icons, and also update the channel data. Note that as a 3rd party tool it is not supported by the MythTV project itself.





(*) there are reports that suggest that either the MythTV backend or the app, may occasionally return bad icon data from the backend, and (because the hash is now different) force an update that was not strictly necessary, but AFAIK there is no reproducer to pin the bug down. and in any case, updating the icon has a low enough impact that it probably does not matter a lot.

[karlshea]

Very good to know, I ran it against my existing lineup and it looks like there was a lot that was out of date. Thanks!