PiratesIRC/Dispatcharr-Channel-Maparr-Plugin 1.26.2241126

v1.26.2241126

on GitHub

GitHub release: https://github.com/PiratesIRC/Dispatcharr-Channel-Maparr-Plugin/releases/tag/1.26.2241126

Broadcast channels that state a market instead of a callsign now match, and streams that have no
channel can be turned into channels. This release also carries v1.26.2221915, which was developed
and deployed on August 10 but never released, so the station table rebuild described under that
heading below reaches the public for the first time here.

New

• Match a station by market city and channel number. A provider name such as
  US: FOX 13 HD [SEATTLE] or US: FOX NET [ABILENE TX] states a market and a channel number but
  no callsign, and matched nothing. Channel-Maparr/market_index.py reads the market out of the
  name and resolves it against the station table in two stages: first among the stations licensed
  to that community, then, when that community has no station carrying the network, among the
  stations of that state on that channel number. A station is returned only when exactly one fits.

  This is off by default. Turn on Match by Market When No Callsign to use it. Measured against
  1,190 real provider names in the nine network stream groups on one installation: 997 already
  matched by callsign, 193 did not, and this resolves 62 of those 193, with none wrong on
  inspection. Eight come from the second stage, where the station serves the market from a
  neighbouring town, so Seattle resolves to KCPQ in Tacoma, San Francisco to KTVU in Oakland, Las
  Vegas to KVVU in Henderson, Charlotte to WJZY in Belmont and Raleigh to WTVD in Durham.

  Two refusals are deliberate. An ambiguous market is left alone rather than guessed at, so
  FOX 43 HD [HARRISBURG], where three states have a Harrisburg, resolves to nothing. A name
  carrying PLUS or XTRA is left alone too, because those name a sister station rather than the
  market's main one: FOX 9 PLUS in Minneapolis is WFTC, not KMSP.

• Create Channels From Streams, a new action. It finds streams in chosen stream groups that are
  not attached to any channel, resolves each to a broadcast station, and creates one channel per
  STATION in a chosen existing channel group. This is a different job from Import M3U Streams,
  which creates one channel per STREAM and tells duplicates apart with a suffix; a provider that
  carries each station once per M3U account gives four channels for one station that way, where the
  usual layout is one channel holding the four streams.

  It attaches no streams, leaving each new channel as a target for a stream matcher to fill in. It
  refuses before doing anything when the source groups or the target group are unset, when the
  target group does not exist, when more than one channel group carries that name, or when the
  target is in Channel Groups to Ignore. A name a channel already uses is skipped, so running it
  twice does not duplicate anything. Dry Run exports a CSV preview and creates nothing.

Fixed

• The network was read wrongly when a provider prefix is a word rather than a country code. The
  pattern that strips a leading prefix before the colon accepted two or three letters only, so a
  name beginning CITY: PBS KETC ST. LOUIS read as stating no network, and the station took the
  affiliation on its FCC record rather than the network the name states. Four provider groups use a
  word as the prefix. Measured on one installation: 1,257 stream names carry one of them directly
  ahead of a network name.

• A station record the FCC gets wrong can now be corrected. networks_supplemental.json loads
  after the main station table and cannot override it, so it can add a station but never correct
  one. scripts/networks_corrections.json is read while the table is rebuilt and overwrites named
  fields on an existing record, stamping that record with a note saying what changed and why. Each
  correction names the value it believes it is replacing and is skipped and reported when that no
  longer matches, so a correction the FCC has since made unnecessary cannot silently overwrite
  newer data. The first entry gives WBMA-LD, the ABC station for Birmingham, Alabama, the
  affiliation and channel number the FCC dump leaves empty, so US: ABC 33/40 HD [BIRMINGHAM]
  resolves where it previously resolved to nothing.

Tooling

• scripts/build_networks_json.py, the station table rebuild script, could not be parsed by Python
  3.11. Ten of its print calls reused the outer double quote inside an f-string, which only became
  legal in Python 3.12. Nothing imported the script before, so nothing had ever parsed it on 3.11.

• tests/test_package_inventory.py pins every file the plugin ships, because this plugin is a
  standard Plugin Hub listing whose source is copied file by file, so a module added here and not
  copied there is absent from every Hub install. Two files added recently are imported at module
  level, so their absence stopped the plugin loading at all.