gwyrdd benyw's Journal: Tivo log: getting headend.txt to work

John Warwick was an enormous help to me when I went begging for help trying to find why writeguide crashed (actually the crash was unrelated to the config files being wrong -- see previous entry -- but my config files werereally screwed up, so I needed to address that first anyway).

Contrary to the tivocanada.com guide saying in section 3.1.2 that changes to config.ini were "optional", a LOT of work needs to be done there.

First of all, all channel information should be in config.ini. .xmltv/tv_grab_na.conf will contain the channel lineup according to what xmltv found (when tv_grab_na was configured in 3.1.1). All missing channels need to be filled in with reasonably-accurate data; I used Shaw's online lineup listing, and googled for the right zipcodes and affiliate info. (The tmsids, as the instructions say, need to be fetched from zap2it.com's webpages.) Then, the serverids in config.ini need to match the values in stations.txt-parsexml -- jwarwick also suggested making them all sequential, instead of relying on the "default" values in the big config-channels.ini provided, for easier debugging later.

By this point, mkconfigfiles.pl should run without any troubles, and all the config files should look good.

PS. take careful note of any channels that share the same station identifer (e.g. for me, 26 has both CBNEW and VOICE; 68 is both BCLEG and BNEWS). They cannot have the same serverid - I added 1000 to one of the two stations' serverids in each case.