Web based EPG and scheduler

[hasse]

Hi all,

Been coding on a web scheduler application - aTVScheduler, that lets you schedule TV-shows for recording with MyTheatre among other DVB programs. I'm quite satisfied with the result and thought that maybe it could be of use for some of you aswell...

It's a Java standalone program, it uses XMLTV data for input and the internal windows scheduler to handle start/stop of the DVB software.

Please take a look at server.logoff.nu/atv for more info. All feedback appreciated

Regards
H

 

[Sadie]

I'll check this out as soon as I have the time, from following the links this looks like a its based on some earlier work called jTV, if so a big thankyou. I have been using this program with Mytheatre for the last 9 months with no problems. It makes setting up a recording schedule very easy.
It took a little bit of effort to set up, I only had one unresolved issue which was that I had to go into Mytheatre scheduler and manual tick on ever program the option to wake the computer up out of standby for a recording to start automatically, minor issue that I can live with and may not even be with jTV.
It takes about 10 minutes to set up a weeks schedule of recording (around 20 shows) after that the computer just wakes up records the shows and goes back into standby. I know this sounds like a basic Media center function but I've yet to find a Media center that works well with our true FTA satellites most had special functions added by hackers or couldn't funtion as reliably as MT on our satellites.

It may be a week or so but I will let you know how the new version works out.

 

[hasse]

Hi, thanks for the reply!

Yes it´s true that the application was called jTV earlier but i changed
the name to 'aTV Scheduler' when jTV was already used for a similar application.

But take the new version for a spin and lets see what you think, there's been quite some changes to it the past months.

/h

 

[Sadie]

Hi Hasse Sorry for the delay in replying I have been away a while and are only just getting caught up. I did get a chance to try the new aTVScheduler and like it a lot, :up the timeline option is particularly nice,:up is the an option anywhere to extend the grid to 6 hours?
I'm still having the same issue I mentioned above to wake the computer from standby, not that it's a big deal, I'm just curious if it's something I can fix in my configuration or a limitation of aTV

Right now I'm having another issue which is nothing to do with aTV, my source of xmltv files has gone down, I was using a zap2it grabber to download a custom true FTA listing like this.
None of the sources of xmltv data including schedule direct have the option to included enough line ups from different areas so this was the only way to easily do it, hopefully it well get fixed soon.
I'm working on a solution using mc2xml it works but I have to manually combine the files, if I can get a one button option to work it will be a better solution.

 

[hasse]

Hi again, glad you liked it!
Regarding the 'TimeLine' it's still a bit of a beta function, it's not 100 percent exact in it's representation of start/stop times, but still fairly good. But i will look deeper into that.
I made it a 3 hours span initially but you gave me the idea to perhaps make it an user option...when i get the time
But you did notice the arrows in the upper right corner and that allows scroll one hour at the time?

About the option to make the computer wake from standby for scheduled items I first thought it was a piece of cake to fix. But it was not
It's unfortunately not an option when scheduled items are created with schtasks.exe (strange though when this options exist when it's done from within the Scheduled Items in the Control Panel). I still haven't find a good way to circumvent this....any ideas are of course welcome!

/h

 

[Sadie]

I finally figured out how to get mc2xml working as a source of xmltv data for our satellites, if anyone else needs the data to set it up let me know and I will get the files to you.

Hausse, I noticed those arrows to move the time line along 1 hour :up if you get time to change the grid maybe you could consider making the arrows move the grid along for the time period of the grid and not just 1 hour at a time or making it an option.

Sorry figuring out the scheduled tasks is bit beyond me, quite a bit beyond........
I did notice something that might be relevant, when I schedule a recording it appears in the list of scheduled recordings but as soon as i go into Mytheatre and click on the option to wake from standby and apply, the scheduled recording listed in aTV is removed from the list (after a screen refresh).
After I have enabled the wake from standby option in MyTheatre for all the recordings scheduled, often about 20 for a week, no scheduled recording are shown in aTV at all.
Not a big issue, just something to be aware of when scheduling recordings in this way.

Thanks again for a very useful piece of software.

 

[madmadworld]

thanks for sharing

Hasse
did the demo look's great. going start building my htpc next week. sick of playing with my az box.
sure will give your software a spin when i can.
thanks for sharing

 

[hasse]

Hi again,
Well it sound a bit strange that your changes to the scheduled task make them disappear from aTV Scheduler. The only reason for this is that they're renamed (not prefixed with 'aTV_' anymore) or simply that they have been deleted.

I'm not sure how or what you do in MyTheatre to accomplish this but it seems rather complicated and time consuming. So I started to look a bit deeper into the problem.

I've made a small program that *perhaps* will solve the problem. It scans through the aTV tasks created and alters them to have the 'Wake from Standby' flag enabled. Atleast it looks like that when I check the tasks via Windows (only checked XP at this point...)

But I have not tested that it actually works...

The program is called EnableWakeFromStandby.exe and by default it looks for
tasks in c:\Windows\Tasks that are prefixed with 'aTV_' and alters them all.

If the above path is not the correct one it can be overridden by giving another
path as an argument when the program is started. The easiest way to run it is
simply copy it to the toolbox directory in aTV and run it from the Web gui I guess.

you can download it from server.logoff.nu/atv/ewfs.zip

Hopefully it will work and suite your needs.

madmadworld; Thanks, you're welcome!

EDIT
Made a test and probably the case is that the Task Scheduler does not recognize the changed jobs directly.
So to accomplish this wrap the EnableWakeFromStandby.exe in an .bat file that stops/starts the service.

This file could contain something like this;

@echo off

echo Invoking EnableWakeFromStandby.exe %1 ^<BR^>
net stop "Task Scheduler"
c:\atv\bin\EnableWakeFromStandby.exe %1
net start "Task Scheduler"

exit 0

/hasse

 

[Sadie]

I've been playing around with it a bit more and you are correct as soon as Mytheatre "wake by task"is enabled from Mytheatre (Mytheatre-right click-actions-open scheduler-Wake by Task)) the complete task is renamed from aTV to Mytheatre hence the reason for it disappearing in aTV.

Your new utility nearly fixes the issue, it looks like there are still 2 issues.

1) I think it also needs to enable the "run only if logged on" flag, in windows scheduled tasks as well as the "wake the computer to run this task" flag that it currently enables.

I noticed that when Mytheatre makes a change to a schedule task to "wake by task" these are the 2 extra flags it enables in windows scheduled tasks

I've been Googling the subject and apparently XP is very reluctant to run any scheduled task without a password enabled. There are various hacks and work arounds suggested but so far I have been unable to get any to work


I thought by manually selected "run only if logged on" it would solve the issue but this is where things start to get weird

2) After 1) above to get the PC to wake I also have to go into schedules tasks, select the schedules tab where the time for the start of the recording is shown and select any item in the window to cause the apply button to light up it is not necessary to change anything although changing something and then reversing the change is an easy way of getting the apply button to light up.
After clicking on the apply button the PC will now successfully wake from standby and record as scheduled



Just noticed your edit to the post, I will give it a try if I can figure it out, I'm working at the limit of my very limited knowledge here

 

[Dee_Ann]

Hi,

This looks interesting but will it work on XP SP2?

The last time I upgraded my pc to SP3 it messed it up badly.
I do not trust or like windows at all. And I've heard only BAD things about SP3.

Last time I put SP3 on my pc I had to wipe it out and start clean because it screwed up pretty much everything. The hard disks started crashing and losing data, I lost two 500gb Seagates because of SP3. I went back to SP2 and I've had no troubles since.

Thanks.

 

[Sadie]

I'm using XP professional SP3

I have used earlier versions of this program with SP2

 

[hasse]

Hi again,

Sadie; yes try with the bat file to start with. If it still won't work I can try to
see if i can enable the other flag aswell.

It's easy to do;
1. Create a new text file with NotePad and copy/paste the content from my previous post into it. (the text in italic)
2. Save the file in the format .txt but enter the filename within quotes, eg "WakeStandby.bat" That makes sure the file suffix will be .bat and not .txt.
3. Make sure that the path to the EnableWakeFromStandby.exe in the .bat file corresponds to the actual path of the executable.
4. Move the .bat file to the toolbox directory and run it from there...

Dee_Ann; Yes SP2 should be no problem as long as you run XP Professional.
If you're using XP Home this version lacks the schtasks.exe that aTV use to schedule items...

 

[madmadworld]

i know i don't have XP professional.

one of my atsc cards uses titan i wonder if you could some how add FTA to it. that would pretty cool. ???

thanks

 

[Sadie]

I believe the are various work arounds for XP Home to either add "schtasks.exe" or an equivalent utility, you might want to try Googling the subject.

 

[Sadie]

Its Working now!! The bat file did the job perfectly thanks very much :up

The doesn't seem to be any need to enable the "run only if logged on" flag, although I've only tested it on my laptop which has a password enabled to log on, my HTPC has a blank password, I should get a chance to try that tonight.

I had to include some quotation marks in the path to the executable due to the being some spaces in the description on my system

My final bat file looks like this

@echo off

echo Invoking EnableWakeFromStandby.exe %1 ^<BR^>
net stop "Task Scheduler"
"C:\Program Files\MyTheatre\aTV\toolbox\EnableWakeFromStandby.exe" %1
net start "Task Scheduler"

exit 0

Edit: Sorry I forgot my HTPC has a password enabled

 

[hasse]

I'm happy it works!

Also, many thanks for your input!

/h

 

[Dee_Ann]

Hi again,

Sadie; yes try with the bat file to start with. If it still won't work I can try to
see if i can enable the other flag aswell.

It's easy to do;
1. Create a new text file with NotePad and copy/paste the content from my previous post into it. (the text in italic)
2. Save the file in the format .txt but enter the filename within quotes, eg "WakeStandby.bat" That makes sure the file suffix will be .bat and not .txt.
3. Make sure that the path to the EnableWakeFromStandby.exe in the .bat file corresponds to the actual path of the executable.
4. Move the .bat file to the toolbox directory and run it from there...

Dee_Ann; Yes SP2 should be no problem as long as you run XP Professional.
If you're using XP Home this version lacks the schtasks.exe that aTV use to schedule items...

Oh goody! I checked and it says xp professional sp2.
I think I will look into your little program this evening.

Thank you!!

 

[Dee_Ann]

I totally give up. This is WAY over my head. All sorts of other programs have to be installed and all sorts of cryptic programs have to be edited.

Far too complicated for me.

I will just not have a tv guide .

My new HDTV can show LOTS of information about what's playing and what's coming up. But my COMPUTER can't? That's crazy.

See, I don't watch TV using the tuner in the new TV, my pc is the tuner for satellites and for antenna and it plays on the tv by a cable.
IF it had a guide I could schedule things to record in advance. As it is now, I have to stumble upon things by accident, hit record and be happy if I can catch at least some of the show on recording.

Can the hdtv download it's tv guides into the pc? It of course would only be antenna tv and not satellite but that would be better than nothing.

As for this, well, I guess it's cool that you super geeks can make it work but us little goblins way down at the bottom just can't comprehend all that programming gobblety-gook..

 

[Sadie]

I've been thinking of doing a how to for this, I will add it to my "to do list".

Setting up aTV is not too bad, but getting the xmltv data for the TV guide is a real pain.

You would think the industry would make this easy, after all you need a guide to watch your favourite programs, instead they seem afraid that you might record the program and watch it at your convenience. In which case they want a piece of the action.

The data is out there but its not that easy to use either the pay way or the free way.

 

[zamar23]

I finally figured out how to get mc2xml working as a source of xmltv data for our satellites, if anyone else needs the data to set it up let me know and I will get the files to you.

Please send it to me. Can you post them here for others in a zip archive, adding a Read me file with Instructions?