EPG Encoding

[netmaster]

As I understand, character encoding for EPG must be UTF-8.
Reality is, that EPG's from DVB-S or DVB-T is on non UTF encodings (ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-5, etc.), often even several different encodings from the same source.
Is it possible to add "source encoding" option for every channel and use PHP's iconv function at import to convert EPG to UTF-8?

[Aleksey Zhurbitsky]

As I understand, character encoding for EPG must be UTF-8.

Not exactly.

Is it possible to add "source encoding" option for every channel and use PHP's iconv function at import to convert EPG to UTF-8?

You can do all encoding conversion before adding it to the xmltv file. All text in the xmltv file must be in one encoding and this encoding must be specified in the xml header.

For example:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1251"?>

[netmaster]

yes, but what "must be" and what really is are two different things. I for example have EPG source, where in header is written ISO-8859-1, and german and english channels is on this encoding, but russian channels are actually in ISO-8859-5. If I convert all it from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8 then russian part is ruined, if I convert from ISO-8859-5 to UTF-8, then german part is broken (some chars get replaced by cyrillic), etc. I did wrote program to convert every channel differently, but with many different sources and programs, this can be very unreliable and difficult to track where something happens. If on import time shifting and etc. can be done differently for every channels, why not re-encode it if necessary.

[Aleksey Zhurbitsky]

You mean that in one xmltv file you have different encodings?

[netmaster]

yes, exactly.
Because big providers usually supply users with own receivers (viasat for example) then they dont have any obligations to make EPG according to standards. Is enough to match with receiver firmware. Using tv_grab_dvb is very easy and free way (even for encrypted channels) to get EPG from the air, but encoding is always a mess especially for nonstandard characters like cyrillic ...

[Aleksey Zhurbitsky]

Unfortunately, we can not help you. Encoding conversion is automatic according to the xml header.

I see only one way out - split the program into different files according to the encodings with an appropriate xml header.