Shepherd on Mythtv

Shepherd is an EPG grabber that can output an xmltv file which is compatible with mythtv. There are a few tricks but the shepherd installation notes have it covered .

For me it took a long time to run the first time (many hours) because it has to self throttle on some sites to look like it’s not scraping the program guide I guess.

When it’s all done, mythfilldatabase is setup to call shepherd. I made it so that mythfilldatabase is called from a cron job (which shepherd sets up for you) rather than from within the myth settings. Make sure mythfilldatabase has the --update flag for multiple tuner cards otherwise it can stuff up the channel mapping.

I find that the myth status page says that the last run of mythfilldatabase failed but it has data for 8 days. This is because we pass the ‘—daily’ flag to shepherd which causes it to exit if it has been run in the last day. The cron job runs once an hour I think so the upshot is that you can lose connectivity or turn the computer off for more than a day and shepherd will update within an hour of getting the connection back.

One thing to watch with shepherd is that you do need to leave your computer running for a few hours to let it complete. I once had it setup to update at 2am but I also had a daily reboot scheduled for four in the morning (due to other issues on that box) which at one stage meant shepherd could never finish which meant myth ran out of EPG.