Shepherd – IPTV schedule discrepancies

(last updated on August 28th, 2024 at 03:48 pm)

So here’s the problem…

A month or so after I had set up IPTV for the Myth system, I started noticing some recording weirdness – particularly on SBS channels. As it seemed to be getting worse (and more reliably so as well), I started to look into it further.

Turns out that (at least here in AU), some channels are broadcast in Sydney time – and not always every channel in a multiplex.

And then I realised that NSW went to daylight savings time about a month after I had set up the IPTV stuff…

For clarity, I’m in Brisbane. So at least for me, the affected channels are ABC Kids, ABC Comedy (they are separate channels for the live streams – stoopid, because one shuts down as the other “wakes up” anyways), ABC Me, SBS Viceland, SBS World Movies and SBS Food – and while NSW is in DST all shows on those channels are streamed an hour earlier than the Brisbane guide data shows.

After spending waaay too many hours figuring out how to best address this, I decided I needed to write a Shepherd postprocessor.

Unfortunately, doing so is basically undocumented and has barely ever been discussed – at least on any web archive I could find…

It’s gonna take me a little while to put the rest of this post together (despite that I’ll be keeping it as brief as possible while still being potentially useful), so I’m gonna come back to it.

Get it here 🙂

2 comments

  1. I live in W.A. so all my SBS channels are out by 2/3 hours because the listings are in Sydney time.
    Instead of writing a postprocessor, which I have no skill or idea how to do, I simply created another user account and set it’s time zone to Sydney. I installed Shepherd and configured it for the Sydney time channels and ran it. I then used the –file –sourceid and –xmlfile switches to import the output.xml file and now all of my channels have the correct showing times.
    Not as elegant, but it works.

    1. Hey Arnold,

      Cool – I’d not even thought of something like that 🙂

      Although it’s only a handful of channels affected here…

      Cheers,
      Mattt

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