Exposing ATSC 3.0 EPG without DEV upgrade

Want to write your own code to work with a HDHomeRun or work with the HDHomeRun DVR? We are happy to help with concepts, APIs, best practices.
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WNYOTA
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Exposing ATSC 3.0 EPG without DEV upgrade

Post by WNYOTA »

I'm about ready to submit my iOS app for review, but I wanted to see if there was a way for the HDHomeRun to start exposing ATSC 3.0 EPG (XML, PNGs) without requiring the $100 DEV upgrade.

My app is called "The Offline App" and is able to display live TV from the HDHomeRun, live audio from nrsc-5 broadcasts, ADS-B data from planes, and a lot more, without the internet. Since fundamentally the purpose of this app is to not connect to the internet at all, it was crucial that I made the app source guide data directly from broadcast signals. This was relatively easy for the ATSC 1.0 channels as the app can quickly request the full transport stream per RF channel, parse, and display the data contained in the PSIP.

For ATSC 3.0, the guide is much better. Channel logo images and programming poster images are being sent over the broadcast signal, in addition to a much longer guide compared to ATSC 1.0 channels. The only way that I was able to get this working was to have the app request a pcap from a DEV tuner on the LAN once the app discovered the channel lineup, parse the saved pcap, extract the ALP UDP payloads, parse the LCT packets, reassemble each object, decompress if using gzip, save the images and XML, match it based on the XML, and pass it to the guide UI. This took many days of tinkering around but I was able to get it to work. This honestly is overkill for simply trying to display simple guide data. It would be nice if I could make the app work with standard 4K models so people without the DEV upgrade could receive guide data offline.

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-Dylan

Trip
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Re: Exposing ATSC 3.0 EPG without DEV upgrade

Post by Trip »

WNYOTA wrote: Thu Apr 02, 2026 7:48 pm The only way that I was able to get this working was to have the app request a pcap from a DEV tuner on the LAN once the app discovered the channel lineup, parse the saved pcap, extract the ALP UDP payloads, parse the LCT packets, reassemble each object, decompress if using gzip, save the images and XML, match it based on the XML, and pass it to the guide UI. This took many days of tinkering around but I was able to get it to work. This honestly is overkill for simply trying to display simple guide data. It would be nice if I could make the app work with standard 4K models so people without the DEV upgrade could receive guide data offline.
Not what you asked, but:

1) You could get this out of the debug output the way RENDER does. You can look at the input.c code for how it processes debug files.

2) Not all stations transmit the logo and programming images, and some that do are only transmitting links to locations on the internet.

- Trip

nickk
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Re: Exposing ATSC 3.0 EPG without DEV upgrade

Post by nickk »

Back when we developed the ATSC 3.0 protocol stack there was no EPG being broadcast.

Agreed we should revisit that... I will dig into it...

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