Introduction to EPG Management

Introduction to EPG Management

General


Icareus Playout EPG Server is used to broadcast the TV program information and to generate the necessary service information. It provides many different ways to ingest the EPG/EIT data. Each EPG source can be managed based on the settings specific for that data source.
Data source can be e.g.
  1. Manual input
  2. Java API input & control
  3. DVB-ASI or RF via supported Dectek cards
  4. Program data via HTTP
  5. Program data using FTP
  6. Program data based on Icareus’ XML format using FTP, HTTP or Playout Management Console
  7. Program data based on customer’s custom XML format using XSL for transformation
  8. And many more...
Every channel can have its own datasource, which gives unlimited configuration options to manage your EPG data.
Once EPG data is stored to Icareus Playout database it can be outputted e.g. via:
  1. XML to 3rd party systems via FTP
  2. EIT tables on Services on Actual or Others networks

How it works

In Icareus Playout there are two aspects that relate to EIT: Networks and DVB Services repository.
EIT is part of the DVB Services, which are then assigned to Networks (Actual or Others). If a DVB Service is assigned to several Networks it uses the same EIT source in all Networks.
Each DVB Service may use
A default EIT data source (configured in Server -> Settings)
A dedicated EIT data source (configured by right clicking the DVB Service in question and selecting)

Playout's EPG Settings

EIT Settings

To manage the general EIT settings of the Icareus Playout server choose Server -> Settings. It will open the following window:


Remove old log messages automatically: Choosing if the log messages will be saved or removed
How long to keep old log messages (days): choose number of days for saving the log messages
Use Parental Control: Defines whether the parental control flag is supported in EIT table

General EIT Settings

To manage the general settings of the EP100 server choose Server

Settings -> General. It will open the following window: 

Default character encoding:
EPG Encoding Options
DVB default (ISO-6937 + Euro symbol)
ISO-8859-1 (Latin-1)
ISO-8859-2 (Latin-2)
ISO-8859-3 (Latin-3 / South European)
ISO-8859-4 (Latin-4 / North European)
ISO-8859-5 (Cyrillic)
ISO-8859-6 (Arabic)
ISO-8859-7 (Greek)
ISO-8859-8 (Hebrew)
ISO-8859-9 (Latin-5 / Turkish)
ISO-8859-10 (Latin-6 / Nordic languages)
ISO-8859-11 (Thai)
ISO-8859-13 (Latin-7 / Baltic)
ISO-8859-14 (Latin-8 / Celtic)
ISO-8859-15 (Latin-9)
UTF-8
UTF-16BE
KSC5601-1987 (Korean)
GB-2312-1980 (Simplified Chinese)
Big5 (Traditional Chinese)

Default language: Choose the default language for encoding
Remove old log messages automatically: Choose if the log messages will be saved or removed
How long to keep old log messages (days): Choose the number of days the log messages will be saved for

Note on Character Encodings and Conversions
EPG input data is often in UTF-8 format, which is an encoding that uses multiple bytes for international and other special characters. When the server converts the long event encodings into the output EIT tables, it discards characters that could not be converted from UTF-8 to to the selected encoding. Playout EIT logs conversion errors, for example: service id 2020, event id 20: '„' (bytes e2 80 9e) failed to convert to ISO-8859-2.
As Icareus Playout enable operators to output several networks as individual transport streams some EIT related aspects may be configured on network level, such as:
  1. Generation of EIT pf
  2. Generation of EIT Schedule
  3. Repetition rate for EIT pf
  4. Repetition rate for EIT Schedule
These can be accessed by selecting the desired Network from the Networks tree and right clicking it as shown in below images.


Edit Network from the Networks tree:
Read more from Managing Networks.

EPG Event Structure

Icareus Playout EPG Event structure is described in the following table.
Name       Desciption
  Comments
General event data
  
  
  
start_time
 This field contains the start time of the event
  
 Mandatory
duration
 This field contains the duration of the event in hours, minutes, seconds
  
 Mandatory
content_type
 This field defines content identifier
 Content type codes
 Mandatory
image_icon
 The image icon carries inline icon data or a URL that identifies the location of an icon file.
  
 Optional
running_status
 This field indicates the status of the event
Field value is defined automatically. Possible values are:
  • 0 - undefined
  • 1 - not running
  • 2 - starts in a few seconds
  • 4 - running
 Mandatory
free_CA_mode
 This field, when set to '0' indicates that all the component streams of the event are not scrambled. 
When set to '1' it indicates that access to one or more streams is controlled by a CA system.		  
 Mandatory
Event titles description
  
 It is possible to define titles for one or more different languages.
  
language_code
 This field identifies the language of the following text fields
 Language codes
 Mandatory
name
 This field contains the name of the event
  
 Mandatory
short-description
 This field contains the short description of the event
  
 Mandatory
long-description
 This field contains the long description of the event
  
 Mandatory
Parental control
  
 It is possible to define parental control values for zero or more different countries.
 Optional
country_code
 This field identifies a country for parental control
 Country codes
  
rating
 This field is coded based on the recommended minimum age in years of the end user
 Values:
0x00 - undefined
0x01 to 0x0F - minimum age = rating + 3 years
0x10 to 0xFF - defined by the broadcaster		  
Notification message
  
 This field allows broadcasters to provide receivers with a textual message 
which the receiver may display to the user at appropriate times.		 Optional
country_code
 This field contains the ISO 639-2 three character language code of the language of the textual message.
 Country codes
  
text
This is a field containing a string of characters specifying the text to be displayed.


Content identifier
Content identifiers are part of TV-Anytime information in DVB transport streams (ETSI TS 102 323 v1.5.1)
Events in input source may contain a content reference identifier (CRID) which
is a unique identifier for the content. If the input source contains CRIDs these can
be output as content identifier descriptors in the output.
Optional
crid_type
This field identifies the type of the CRID.
Values:
0 - No type defined.
1 - CRID references the item of content that this event is an instance of.
2 - CRID references a series that this event belongs to.
3 - CRID references a recommendation. This CRID can be a group or a single
item of content.

crid_location
This field specifies the location of the CRID information.
Values:
0 - Carried explicitly within descriptor (this is the only supported value)
1 - Carried in a CIT table (not supported)

crid_bytes
This field carries the explicitly encoded CRID.
Values:
The CRID is specified in a similar manner as an URL.

Manual Editing of EPG using PMC

Playout EPG Server is managed through Playout Management Console (PMC). In order to manage the EPG/EIT data in some channels, choose the correct channel from DVB Services list.


It will open the EPG management window, where the user can manage EITs by manually creating those or by importing the XML files.
In order to add EIT data manually, click the 'Add EIT event' button from the toolbar or select the 'Add EIT event' item from the right-click menu.

In the opened dialog the administrator can input all the necessary event information regarding the program.

Importing EIT Data Manually via PMC

PMC offers possibility to upload EIT files (XML or CSV format). To manually upload the files, click the 'Import EIT event' button from the toolbar.


Choose the XML input file in Icareus' XML format to upload the file to the system. To use files in some other XML format it is required to also provide a XSL file for transformation to convert the XML file into Icareus’ format. Refresh the data and system by pressing the Refresh button.
EPG source file should contain event ids between 0 and 65535. Event id should be unique for a particular service, but not for the database table.

Exporting EPG Data

Icareus Playout supports exporting EIT data manually into Playout XML format.
To export EIT/EPG data, the user should:
  1. Select the desired DVB Service from the list
  2. Select the EIT tab
  3. Click the Export EIT data button, shown below in the first image 
  4. Save the export into a XML file as illustrated in the second image 



EPG Sources and Formats

Introduction

Icareus Playout supports many different ways to ingest EPG data to the Icareus Playout database. The database is then used to generate the EIT Present/Following and EIT Schedule and other related tables to outputs.
Icareus Playout offers two ways to define an EPG Source:
  1. A default configuration for an EPG Source
  2. Channel/Service Specific EPG Source
Each EPG source has its own characteristics and the configuration options may vary between the EPG Sources.

Supported EPG Ingest sources

Icareus Playout support current the following EPG Ingest sources:
  1. Local drop folder
  2. FTP and SFTP
  3. HTTP
  4. ASI Input
  5. IP-over-TS Input
  6. RF Input
EPG Ingest source support
Each EPG Source Format defines which of the above methods are supported.

Example Local Drop Folder

Below is a general introduction on how local drop folder works, each datasource is documented separately in detail in the following chapters.
Usually the files with EPG data are uploaded to the server using FTP.
The FTP access credentials are the same as those used for the Playout user in PMC. In the EIT configuration on the server, you can define the address of the Remote source folder, which should be used in FTP file upload. The server monitors content of this folder periodically and updates EPG data if new files appear.


In order to manually update the data from the folder in PMC click 'Instant update' in the tool bar for the selected service.

Example of HTTP Source

It is possible to retrieve EPG data from web server. In the EIT configuration on the server there are URL, User login and User password settings that define the web access to the EPG data. The server tries to send HTTP request for each service http://your.epg.source/?username=icareus&password=icareus&service_id=1 and stores the response in the XML file in the folder defined in the Remote source folder settings. After XML files for all services are downloaded, the server parses them and adds EPG data to the database.


EPG Sources and Formats

The following list defines the currently supported EPG Sources and Formats
  1. Barco XML
  2. EPG Sales
  3. Icareus XML
  4. Live ASI Input
  5. Live TS-over-IP Input
  6. Live TS-over-IP Input
  7. Thomson Jade
  8. Tribune Media
  9. TV-Anytime
  10. XMLTV

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