[dteirney]

The unique ID for an EPG entry used to be optional. This was handy for MythTV since there isn't a unique ID for EPG entries (or likely any other backend that surfaces an XMLTV type interface).

Can EPG_TAG.iUniqueBroadcastId either be made optional or converted to a string?

I can make a synthetic unique ID as a string by concatenating the channel ID and a text representation of the start time. Turning that into an integer is much, much harder.

What data are other add-ons using to populate this field?

[opdenkamp]

tvheadend does give each tag an id, and it's used to attach epg tags to timer tags e.g.
same as with the recording index, this is used to update tags in xbmc.

[dteirney]

What are the options for the MythTV Addon? I can't formulate a unique integer ID for each EPG entry. Right now the MythTV Addon can't work.

MythTV links things based on "Title", "Channel ID", and "Scheduled Start Time". MythTV doesn't have any other concepts of linking things together. The scheduler in MythTV does all of the heavy lifting (so to speak) to schedule recordings.

[opdenkamp]

I think you just can keep a counter in the add-on and just give every tag a number. create a ticket on trac or an issue on github if you like these values to be optional instead. I'll have to look into this properly before changing it to optional.

edit:
also, have a look at the pvr api changes thread from time to time if you can, as these changes have been in the pvr tree for a while now and they were announced and discussed there.