Announcement for XMLTV users: XMLTVParser!

[pawn]

edit: please read, and if you have already, re-read the note at the end of this post (UPDATED 01.15.2004).


Well, accepting that I have to live with XMLTV guide data for now, I decided to do what I can to clean up the data a little.

I wrote a program that will, based on your instructions, go through the data and properly set rerun flags, clear rerun flags and help prevent duplicate shows being recorded simultaneously.

(I actually said I would do this almost a year ago, but never bothered until now).

The program is here:

http://home.cogeco.ca/~kjones95/XMLTVParserSetup.exe

It has been moderately tested on data gathered using the XMLTV North American grabber, but I have allowed for a little customization in the "ini" file. So hopefully, it can be used for data from other regions.

This is beta software, and has not undergone rigorous testing, so make sure you do some spot checks before using the data. PLEASE LET ME KNOW HOW IT WORKS FOR YOU. (pm me here)

The software will run either in GUI format, or as a command line only utility, allowing it to slide right in to your grabber batch file. It also has some conditional logic like "all" days, "all" times, "Not" channel 3, etc..

There's a help file included, which should get you going.

Let me now if you use this, I may improve it if there's any interest. In fact, I'd like to add functionality to normalize ZAP2it's (or anyone elses) data to what the SageTV plugin expects if Zap2it ever changes the format.

Have fun.


edit: If you downloaded this before Thursday January 15, 2004, 11:20pm EST, I built a much more dependable installer package, in case you had trouble with the earlier crappy M$ one.

[pawn]

BTW:

I set everything up to automatically fix the rerun status for all of my favourites tonight. It worked great, except, skimming through the guide I noticed all kinds of instances of favourites without the white box and I figured I screwed up the data somehow, then slowly I realized "Hey, that's what it looks like when every single show isn't listed as a First-run" ;^)

[msm]

Fanatastic - thanks alot. I will give this a go when i get home tonight on mu UK data nad provide you some feedback

Matt

[joedornan]

excellent! thanks for doing this... I will definitely give it a try...

[CanadaNow]

This is very cool! Thanks for writing this.

I just wanted to let you know that the installer gave me some trouble. After file 7/7, it said that it needed to update some system files and reboot. After ddoing this and rebooting, there were no files installed anywhere that I could see, so I ran the installer again. Same thing, same error, reboot.

I finally just extracted the CAB file and ran the exe from there, and it works great! I followed your instructions and integrated it into my XMLTV batch script.

Thanks again!

[pawn]

This is very cool! Thanks for writing this.


Thanks. It's a neat little utility that, if I can say it, makes XMLTV data much more viable.

It takes next to no time to configure it to properly set the rerun flag for all of your favourites. I have a file of 7 favourites that took me about 20 minutes to set up. I ran it and boom, done. I'm positive Sage is running smoother now too, since there are next to no recording conflicts.

I actually can't believe how fast it works. It runs my two 4MB XML files in about 2 seconds. I spent a lot of time on buffering routines, thinking it would take for ever to parse the data. I guess I was being pessimistic.


I just wanted to let you know that the installer gave me some trouble. After file 7/7, it said that it needed to update some system files and reboot. After ddoing this and rebooting, there were no files installed anywhere that I could see, so I ran the installer again. Same thing, same error, reboot.


I had to be out of my mind using the crappy install packager that came with Visual Basic 6. I just repackaged it with a better setup builder.

http://home.cogeco.ca/~kjones95/xMLTVParserSetup.exe

Thanks for the heads-up.


I finally just extracted the CAB file and ran the exe from there, and it works great! I followed your instructions and integrated it into my XMLTV batch script.

Thanks again!

Let me know how it works and suggest improvements.

I want to add a feature that basically searches for any specific thing, and changes it to anything else. This will be critical if the data ever changes in a way that the Sage plugin can't handle it anymore.