TV guide (EPG) from DVB

Cable and satellite operators send the TV guide inside the mux itself, in the EIT tables. Castreon reads it from the DVB cards, keeps it per service and shows it in the panel and to IPTV players — with no external XMLTV source and no setup.

Available from Castreon 1.0.8, on all plans.

What you need to do

Nothing. The guide is read automatically from every running DVB adapter. On a cable network, each mux usually carries the guide for every service on the network, so within a few minutes of starting, channels whose muxes are not tuned at that moment have a guide too.

A channel takes its guide from the service of its DVB source: the network and mux of the adapter, plus the service number (SID). Channels that are not DVB (URL, UDP, SRT, RIST…) have no DVB guide.

In the panel

• Under the player on the channel page: Now (how far the programme has progressed and how many minutes are left) and Next.
• The Schedule tab: the days (yesterday, today, tomorrow…), the programmes of the selected day with the current one highlighted, the genre and the age rating. Click a programme to see its description.

Times are shown in your computer's time zone.

For IPTV players (XMLTV)

The guide for all active channels is available in XMLTV format, read by TiviMate, OTT Navigator, Kodi and most middleware:

http://<public-domain>/epg.xml
http://<public-domain>/epg.xml.gz

• ?past=<days> — how many days back (default 1, at most 8);
• ?days=<days> — how many days ahead (default 7, at most 14).

Access follows the same rules as the streams: if you set a token for players, add token=…; the IP allow-list applies here as well.

You don't need to copy the address by hand: Export M3U puts it in the header of the list (url-tvg), and every channel gets a tvg-id — the EPG ID from the channel editor if set, otherwise the short name in the channel's address. See M3U export and public domain.

Good to know

• The guide is kept for 8 days back (for the archive and catch-up) and 15 days ahead, and saved to disk — it is not lost on restart.
• How many days ahead you see depends on the operator: some send a week, others only the current and the next programme.
• Texts with accented characters (Romanian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Serbian…) are decoded with the DVB character tables.
• If a channel has no guide, check that its source is DVB and that the adapter is running. After the first tune, the guide can take a few minutes to appear.