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Changelog & upgrades

Release history and anything you need to do when moving between versions. New installs can ignore the upgrade notes — they only matter when you already have an older EasyPlayTV database.

v1.3.0 — 2026-09-05

3-package split: video addon is playback-only; the Service addon (service.easyplaytv) and the standalone (easyplaytv-service) share the easyplaytv_service runtime for PVR generation + library sync.
Client/server PVR: the Service addon is always the PVR server; client boxes run only the video addon and fetch PVR files over HTTP.
Sequential batch sync: providers sync one-after-another, then the PVR (channels + EPG) refreshes, then the cycle repeats — capped by the sync interval. No per-provider staggered timers.
Two-cadence stale sweep: movies and whole TV shows are removed every sync; episodes inside still-present shows on a slower cadence. Both are failsafe-skipped when a provider's upstream fetch comes back empty.
TMDb disambiguation: library-sync lookups match results against provider metadata (year, description, cast/credit names) instead of trusting the bare-title first result. Fixes wrong matches like War resolving to War Machine or Bird to Bird Box. Remediation for existing bad rows: delete them and let the scheduler rebuild (library sync is insert-only).
Radio EPG for the 44 BBC radio stations, from BBC Sounds schedules (5 Global stations stay EPG-less).
Removed all manual-force-sync entry points (HTTP POST /sync/vod/*, force_sync_<provider> markers, --sync CLI).

v1.2.0 — 2026-08-30

Stubbed 4 unreliable free-IPTV channels for graceful failure: Great! Action, Pop Max, Talking Pictures TV, Together TV — greyed out in the PVR guide with a "not implemented" notification.
Native Pluto TV resolver — 13 channels.
Additional channels: Great! TV live, UKTV VOD provider, 9 clear Samsung TV Plus channels, ITV Quiz via ITVX (ITVBe slug), WildEarth / 5 Trucking Hell / France 24.
Removed +1 timeshift channels and the plusone resolver.
Freely LCN normalisation to Freely numbering; region setting for channel lineups.
ITVX fix for intermittent 403s on CDN segments (lost audio). PVR setup fix for Kodi 20+ (patch instance-settings-1.xml). Addon XML validation added to the release workflow.

v1.1.2 — 2026-08-22

Formal Freely channel lineup with region setting (London / Central Scotland); LCNs normalised to Freely numbering.
Fixed invalid addon.xml; added XML validation to the release workflow.
CI falls back to automatic token when the release token is unset.

v1.1.1 — 2026-08-20

STV EPG fix (Freeview-EPG mapping).

v1.1.0 — 2026-08-20

PVR integration: live TV in Kodi's native TV section (channels + EPG).
C4 auto re-login when the session expires.
Single-threaded service operation.

v1.0.0 — 2026-08-17

Initial release: live TV + VOD playback with sign-in for ITVX, C4, My5.

Upgrade notes

Wrong TMDb matches from older releases (v1.3.0 and earlier)

TMDb disambiguation in library_sync uses a title-similarity scorer (token Jaccard, year tie-break, exact-title first). Releases before the scorer just took TMDb's first search result, so some titles were inserted against the wrong TMDb id — e.g. ITVX's War (2007) could resolve to Avengers: Infinity War, or a documentary could shadow its titular film.

New titles sync correctly with no action. Because library sync is insert-only (rows are never re-matched), correcting an already-wrong row means deleting it and letting the scheduler rebuild it. Delete tvshow / movie rows whose uniqueid (type='tmdb') holds the wrong id; the next scheduled pass re-inserts them with the scorer. Stop the Kodi service before deleting so a concurrent sync can't race the rebuild.

Stale-sweep: what actually happens

The two-cadence sweep (_sweep_movies_fast per sync, _sweep_absent_shows per sync, sweep_stale on the slow cadence) deletes through child tables (streamdetails, art, uniqueid, genre_link, countrylink, seasons, tvshowlinkpath, files, episode, movie, tvshow) rather than relying on Kodi FKs. One caveat: on modern Kodi schemas (MyVideos131) the media link table is country_link, while the delete helper still targets countrylink — where the table is missing, that DELETE raises 1146. The per-sync sweeps wrap the chain in a try/except, so the sync completes and the failure is logged rather than aborting; the affected show/episode rows are simply not removed that pass. Fast-path movie sweeps are unaffected (they touch genre_link, not countrylink).

Re-registration after a fresh unzip

If you install the addon by unzipping over a previous copy rather than via the ZIP installer, Kodi may prune the addon at startup. Re-run the manual registration steps in Installation — DB insert into Addons33.db (addons + installed), strings.xml from strings.po, and strip the xbmc.addon.settings extension point from addon.xml.

Service addon vendors the runtime

service.easyplaytv/lib/easyplaytv_service/ is a byte-copy of the standalone's easyplaytv-service/src/easyplaytv_service/. When upgrading the standalone, the Service addon must be upgraded too so both run the same runtime version.