epgsearchcats.conf - Man Page

Some EPG providers deliver supplemental EPG information, like the kind of event, the video and audio format, cast, etc. in the content summary. Using tools like tvmovie2vdr or epg4vdr, EPG content like this can be imported into the VDR.

Such information allows, for instance, creating a search for finding all tips of the day broadcasted in 16:9 format quite easily. For this purpose, EPGSearch scans the summary of an event for lines starting with the names of categories, followed by : and a space, that have one or more values set in the search timer. The search is case-sensitive for both the category name and its values.

To use this kind of information in search timers, appropriate settings must have been made in the file epgsearchcats.conf in the EPGSearch configuration directory. Sample files for epgsearchcats.conf can be found in the directory conf of EPGSearch. Quite often, copying the one that fits best as epgsearchcats.conf to the EPGSearch configuration directory and making some minor adjustments might be sufficient. Then just restart the VDR and open a search timer's edit menu for making use of the EPG categories.

Since setting up a new epgsearchcats.conf is quite a lot of work, EPGSearch comes with the small tool createcats that does the biggest part of the job. It should have been installed to the directory of the VDR. See createcats(1) for information about how to use it.

Lines within this file have the following format:

    ID|category name[,format]|name in menu|values|search mode

A line's fields have the following meaning:

1 – Unique identifier (ID)

Integer with a positive value.

Caution: Changing the identifier later on will require updating the search timers!

2 – Category name

String with the EPG category's name as delivered by the EPG provider, like Genre.

If an optional format is supplied, the category value will be interpreted as integer and formatted as specified by the format string (see man printf for applicable format strings).

3 – Name in menus

String with the EPG category's name for display in EPGSearch menus.

4 – Values

String with an optional, comma-separated list of values for the EPG category.

5 – Search mode

Optional enumeration with the following values:

Textual comparison:

0 = the whole term must appear as substring

1 = all single terms (delimited by one of ,;|~) must exist as substrings; this is the default search mode

2 = at least one term (delimited by one of ,;|~) must exist as substring

3 = exact match

4 = regular expression

Numerical comparison:

10 = less

11 = less or equal

12 = greater

13 = greater or equal

14 = equal

15 = not equal

  1|Category|Kind|Information,Children,Music,Series,Show,Movie,Sports|2
  2|Genre|Genre|Adventure,Action,Business,Science,Cartoon|2
  3|Format|Video format|16:9,4:3|2
  4|Audio|Audio format|Dolby Surround,Dolby,Stereo|2
  5|Year|Release year||2
  6|Cast|Cast||2
  7|Director|Director||2
  8|Presenter|Presenter||2
  9|Rating|Rating|Excellent,Great,Average,Acceptable,Poor|2
  10|Age|Age|6,12,16,18|2
  11|Country|Country||2
  12|Themes|Themes||4
  13|Season,%02i|Season||14
  14|Season,%02i|Season from||13
  15|Episode,%02i|Episode||14

Identifiers 13 and 14 refer to the same EPG category, but provide distinct menu names for different search modes. As the evaluation sequence is not guaranteed, their formats should be identical to avoid unexpected results when referencing the category's variable.

Originally provided by Mike Constabel <epgsearch (at) constabel (dot) net>.

Revised and adapted to recent plugin features by the current maintainers.

The plugin is maintained as GitHub project:

<https://github.com/vdr-projects/vdr-plugin-epgsearch/>

Issues can be reported, and features be suggested, through the project's bug tracker:

<https://github.com/vdr-projects/vdr-plugin-epgsearch/issues/>

Copyright (C) 2004-2010 Christian Wieninger

Copyright © 2011-2025 TomJoad (VDR-Portal), et al.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301 USA Or, point your browser to <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html>

The original author can be reached via cwieninger@gmx.de.

Current maintainers can be reached via the project's GitHub site (see above).

The MD5 code has been derived from the MD5 Message-Digest Algorithm of RSA Data Security, Inc.

epgsearch(1), createcats(1), epgsearchcats.conf(5)

createcats(1), epgsearch(1), epgsearch(4), epgsearchdirs.conf(5), epgsearchmenu.conf(5), epgsearchuservars.conf(5).