Mapping TV Channels to Radio

Radio Channel Mappings

As of Version 3.5.0 (Leia) / Version 4.5.0 (Matrix), the addon has the capability to map TV channels into the Radio section of Kodi. This may be useful for TV channels that are audio-only or for TV channels like MusicChoice that are primarily audio streams with nothing more than still images as the video stream.

Enabling Radio Channel Mappings

• From the Kodi Add-ons browser, select My add-ons
• Select PVR clients
• Select HDHomeRun DVR PVR Client
• Select Configure
• Select the Radio Channels settings group
• Toggle the Enable radio channel mappings setting to ON
• Configure the Radio channel mapping file setting

Creating the Radio Channel Mappings file

The addon has no means to automatically determine what channel(s) should be mapped to Radio, and therefore a user-defined configuration file must be created. This is a simple text file that lists either individual channel numbers or a range of channel numbers on each line. Over-the-air (OTA) channels in the format of CHANNEL.SUBCHANNEL (4.1, 26.4) and Cable channels in the format of CHANNEL (511, 1862) are processed separately to avoid any strange overlap problems when specifying a channel range.

The Radio Channel Mappings file must be saved in a location accessible to Kodi so that it can be browsed to via the addon settings. For multiple Kodi installations saving this file on a network share accessible to all Kodi instances allows the file to be shared.

Example Radio Channel Mappings file

In this example, the following channels will be mapped to Radio: 4.4 (OTA), 5.3 (OTA), 6.1-6.6 (OTA), 1800 (Cable), 1801 (Cable), and 1802-1899 (Cable). Note that each individual channel number or channel range must be specified on a single line of text:

4.4
5.3
6.1-6.6
1800
1801
1802-1899

Suppressing the video stream for mapped channels

⚠️ This feature should be considered experimental in nature and may not yield the expected results

The addon provides an option, Suppress video streams during playback that will also suppress the video stream(s) for any channels mapped as Radio. Enabling this option turns on an MPEG-TS packet filter that will apply to both Live and Recorded content associated with the mapped channel. This packet filter does not modify any Recorded content, it is applied during playback only.

The packet filter monitors the incoming MPEG-TS transport stream and manipulates the Program Map Table (PMT) to invalidate the video Elementary Stream (ES) data, and then replaces all packets associated with a detected video stream with NULL packets.