Adding an IPTV EPG

EPG Electronic programming guides are provided by third parties as a link to XML files called EPG Electronic programming guide source. MinistraPRO allows you to add XMLTV EPG Electronic programming guide sources to provide your subscribers with listings for upcoming IPTV Internet protocol television programming.

For more information about the XMLTV file format, refer to https://wiki.xmltv.org/index.php/XMLTVFormat.

MinistraPRO automatically checks for EPG Electronic programming guide updates daily and you can force an update as required. Only published EPG Electronic programming guide sources are parsed.

To add an XMLTV EPG Electronic programming guide

1. Navigate to IPTV channels > EPG.

2. Select + Add EPG.

3. Add the relevant data for the EPG Electronic programming guide.

   Learn more: EPG details

4. Select Save.

   Your EPG Electronic programming guide is now displayed in the list of EPG Electronic programming guides on IPTV channels > EPG.

5. If you set the initial state to Published, select Update EPG.

   MinistraPRO creates a task for each published EPG entry in the list to check if the EPG information in the MinistraPRO database is different from the EPG source.

EPG details

Setting	Description
URL	The URL of the EPG Electronic programming guide source file. For example, http://www.example.com/export/export.xml.
Prefix	The unique identifier for this EPG source file. If the same XMLTV ID is used in multiple EPG files, this prefix is used in the channel settings to specify which EPG source contains the correct XMLTV ID. Learn more: IPTV channels For example, you have three channels, Eurosport, HBO, and TLC. You do not have an EPG Electronic programming guide source that contains EPG Electronic programming guides all of the channels, but you find two sources that cover all three channels. EPG Electronic programming guide source 1 with the prefix 1_ contains: channel_id = "HBO" channel_id = "Eurosport" EPG Electronic programming guide source 2 with the prefix 2_ contains: channel_id = "TLC" channel_id = "Eurosport" The channel_id for Eurosport is the same in both sources. With the prefix, you can specify from which source to take the EPG for the Eurosport channel. You have decided to take the EPG from the second source for Eurosport. The XMLTV ID for these three channels would be written as follows: HBO TLC 2_Eurosport
Initial state	Select whether the EPG Electronic programming guide is used immediately. Information Only published EPG sources are checked for updates.
Languages by priority	If you are using a multi-language EPG Electronic programming guide, select which languages to make available to the MinistraPRO end-user applications. You can select up to five languages. The MinistraPRO backend parses the EPG Electronic programming guide for the first specificed language and, if that language is not present, it parses for the next language in the list. Information MinistraPRO end-user application users can view the EPG Electronic programming guide only in the languages you select here, regardless of the languages that are included in the EPG Electronic programming guide file. For example, if you provide the link to a multi-language EPG Electronic programming guide and you select only English, then users only see EPG Electronic programming guide information in English.

Update EPG source files

EPG Electronic programming guide sources are subject to modifications and these changes need to be included in MinistraPRO.

There are two options to update the EPG Electronic programming guides in MinistraPRO:

• Update. This manually runs a CRON job that creates a task for each EPG Electronic programming guide listed on IPTV channels > EPG to check if the EPG Electronic programming guide data in the MinistraPRO database is different from the EPG Electronic programming guide source.

  Information

  The CRON job that creates update tasks is scheduled to run daily at 9:15am by default..

  For each EPG Electronic programming guide check task that is created, a second CRON job is run which updates the EPG Electronic programming guide data in the MinistraPRO database with the data in the EPG Electronic programming guide source. By default, this second job runs every five minutes.

• Force update. Update all of the EPG Electronic programming guide data in the MinistraPRO database with the data from the EPG Electronic programming guide sources without checking if there have been changes.