epg data from sky

[leejsmith]

i have a very rough but working visual basic program that at the moment only displays program information from sky.com tv guide.

it can grab basic program times for a single channle on a single day in seconds or follow the link for each program for more detailed information in about 30. this is on my 150k cable modem.

i ran tv_grab_uk_rt last night for 30 channles over 5 days and it took almost 12 hours with just about the same amount of information.

i will add more information as i have it and but i plan to create epgdata in the same format as xmltv.

[msm]

Great work

Have you been to the site i listed below - you can download a weeks worht of listing in XML format (not XMLTV) and then work on these off line. It has all the major channels, so will at least cut down on the amount of scraping required.

Matt

[nielm]

Because uk_rt is so slow, I run it daily with --offset 7 --days 1 saving the output into dated files so that I only get 1 days' data at a time...

I then combine these dated files with tv_cat and tv_sort into a single epgdata.xml file...


The www.bleb.org data looks fairly easy to transcode from it's own XML format into XMLTV, but the uk XMLTV maintainer is currenly working on a new version getting data from www.broadcastingdata.com

It's a pity Bleb's owner decided to invent his own TV data XML format...

[leejsmith]

the only problem with bleb is i would still be missing some channles mainly mtv.

i have made some good progress on my sky grabber and i can write a csv file containing

start time , channle , program , description

20040130090000,Adventure One,Egypt Eternal,Documentary focusing on Egyptian tombs.

7 days of data for a single channle takes minutes.

next i need to format it for xmltv and also make some config files to choose what channles are grabbed ect.

edit ---
found a problem with sky missing some channles mainly the news channles , qvc and the box.

[msm]

XML was around long before XMLTV - they just hijacked the basic standerd (which lets face it is basically tag start and end lines like HTML)

[leejsmith]

it now has a channles config file containing the channles you want to grab.

this has xmltv channles id's and sky guide channle numbers in it.

also it can write the grabbed epg data in xmltv format (untested at this time).

i have to do some date verification when program times runover midnight as they currentley stay on the same date as before midnight but thats no biggy.

you can specify how many days to grab upto 7 days.

it's not much to look at but so far it's working.
dont think i will have time to do any more until next week but will keep you upto date when i do.

Lee