Configuring TV-Server

Firstly

Now that installation is complete, there will be 3 new icons on your desktop: MediaPortal, Configure MediaPortal and Configure TV-Server. We'll be using Configure TV-Server on this page.

Important!

When you load TV Server configuration for the first time you will be prompted for your username and password for the SQL database. If you did not set one of these up during installation (i.e. you kept clicking Next like I did!) then the username will be "sa" and the password will be "MediaPortal" (case sensitive.)

TV Channels

Here we will set up our TV channels, TV-Server is preloaded with the main frequencies for New Zealand.

To scan channels, expand TV Servers on the left, Expand your PC name and select your digital tuner. Next select your city from the Country list and leave CAM as default. If you are unsure which one to select just select New Zealand All Regions. This will scan a whole lot of frequencies (and will take awhile!) but its a fail safe method. Click "Scan or channels" to begin scanning.

Once scanning is complete you will have a screen similar to the following:

As I have a dual tuner card I also had to scan on the second DVB-T tuner. At this stage you could also scan your analouge channels as well (I will update this shortly once I install my analouge tuner again)

If you select TV Channels on the left you will see a screen like below, hopefully listing all the Freeview HD channels

At this stage we have all the channels configured and TV-Server running in the background. You can play around with other options inside TV Server configuration, I wont go into these but we will have a look at Recording options and the EPG or TV Guide.

Recording Options

 We also need to specify where to keep the large recording files, as I'm using a different hard drive for my recordings I had to change the paths here.

Select the path to where you'd like the Recording and Time shift files to be stored.

EPG Guide

TV Server can be used to view EIT information but this is limited to Current and Next show information only, which doesn't really help us. Freeview uses MHEG-5 format for its EPG also but unfortunately TV-Server and MediaPortal do not currently support MHEG-5. The options we are left with is use EIT or import the EPG information using XMLTV.

To get around this current limitation I use a program called xmlTVNZ by Reven Interactive. This program will grab the EPG information from various websites in New Zealand and will create a XMLTV file that TV-Server can then import.

I am using xmlTVNZ 3.0.0.11 (Donation required), I have been told that 2.5.0.3 no longer works correctly.

Firstly you need to extract xmlTVNZ to a folder, I'm using "C:\Program Files\TVNZ\". Next you need to create a shortcut to xmltvnz.exe (right click, create shortcut) which we'll use to set up the parameters we wish to use.

If you go to the properties of the shortcut (right click, properties) and in the Target box enter the following:

xmlTVNZ.exe tvguide.xml -days 8 tvnzfv_tv1 tvnzfv_tv2 tvnzfv_tv3 tvnzfv_c4 tvnzfv_tvnz6 tvnzfv_tvnz7 tvnzfv_tvnzsportextra tvnzfv_parliamenttv tvnzfv_maori

This will tell xmlTVNZ to create the file tvguide.xml, with 8 days of information for channels TV1, TV2, TV3, C4, TVNZ6, TVNZ7, TVNZ Sports Extra, Parliament TV and Maori TV.

Running the shortcut should show the below output and will close once complete, you should now have a file tvguide.xml in the same folder as xmlTVNZ.exe

Now that this is done, we need to go back into TV-Server configuration. Once configuration has loaded you need to enable the XMLTV plugin under the plugins option on the left.

Once you have selected XMLTV you will be able to expand the Plugins option on the left and will be able to access the settings for XMLTV (below). Here we need to set a few options, mainly the directory where xmlTVNZ is located. I also had to untick "Import files from new tvguide.lst" for mine to work and also recommend having "Delete old programs before import" selected. If you click import it will chug away for a little while (about 10secs for me) and then will confirm import is complete by updating "Last import run at" to be the current time.

Now that TV-Server is importing from our xmlTVNZ file we need to map the channels correctly, we do this by using the Mappings tab (below)

Firstly we need to hit Load/Refresh to load the channels onto the screen. Basically here we match the Tuning Channel to the Guide Channel (from xmlTVNZ) as shown above. Once you're satisfied with your mappings click the save button.

To be on the safe side, I would go back to the settings tab and click import once again - just to make sure TV-Server puts the info in the right places.

Great! Thats the server done. Now we will configure the Client side of things.