Trying to understand channels, services, EIT and XML guides

[pcolmer]

I live in the UK and I'm using a DVB-T2 tuner.

Argus has successfully scanned TV and radio channels (although I had to re-do the scan during hours that BBC3 and BBC4 were actually broadcasting otherwise they weren't found).

In Recorder, I did a 1-to-1 mapping of channels to services. Under Channels, I then turned off "Grab EPG" and "Include in EPG" for those channels I'm not interested in, like the various shopping channels and where I have SD/HD "duplicates" like BBC Three and BBC Three HD.

In Scheduler, it looked like I had to turn off the Visible flag as well to *really* stop those channels being visible in the EPG.

Problem 1: even though I've turned off Visible for BBC Three, programmes for it still show up in Suggestions.

In order to augment the EIT (over the air) EPG data, I'm using XMLTV combined with a grabber file to get the PA metadata from atlas.metabroadcast.com.

This is working, by and large, quite well except that the channel names that Argus used when it scanned for the channels don't always match up to the channel names that Atlas uses.

Problem 2: how do I "merge" those channel names together? Or is it a case that you have to pick XML over DVB-EPG and therefore I have to change the mapping of channel to guide channel?

The setting in Scheduler for the guide says "Preferred" that XMLTV overwrites DVB-EPG or DVB-EPG overwrites XMLTV. If a programme is running late and the DVB-EPG gets updated to reflect that, do I need to use the latter option in order for the scheduler to pick up that change or does Argus not support that flexibility?

Also, if I pick "DVB-EPG overwrites XMLTV", do I lose all of the rich metadata that I'm getting from PA like season and episode numbers, etc?

Thanks.