UK TV Listings, Sage TV V2

[newschapmj1]

How are people getting UK listings?

Are you fairly happy with the reliablity of getting UK listings.
(say terrestial & freeview).

Having struggled and failed with MythTV under Fedora 1 with a Hauppage PVR350 it was a joy to have a working PVR in about half a day (including XP install).

However, I failed to get UK TV listings to work within the 2 week window and am hesitating before buying the software.

Thanks in advance for any comments.

(for details: http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...&threadid=5386)

[nielm]

XMLTV and tv_grab_uk_rt (yes I am in belgium but I still get BBC). using the EPG plugin in this forum to avoid problems with needing channel numbers in the display name of the channel in the XML.

With --slow and --get-categories, the grabber gets very detailed information on the programs (including actors and first-run/rerun info), the only problem being it takes ages (lots of web pages to retrieve and parse)!

The accuracy of the data is good (it comes from the Radiotimes Web-site), and the grabber is well maintained (by me amonst other people!).

Other people are using http://tv.bleb.org to get XMLTV data... I cannot comment on this!

[newschapmj1]

Thanks for the swift response Nielm.

What version of xmltv do you recommend?

http://cory.metadot.com/public/xmltv.zip says works for V0.5.15 of XMLTV

The howto talks of V0.5.16
(http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...&threadid=1484)

The latest version is V0.5.34 on SourceForge.

Which Java Run time? eg V1.4.2_04?

Thanks in advance for any comments.

[nielm]

latest XMLTV always -- it is being constanly updated to follow the moving target of the RadioTimes web site's design, and to add new featues (tv_grab_uk_rt categories was only added in 0.5.34)
Versions less than 0.5.28 will not work at all as the RT website had a different address.

Java? whatever is needed by Sage -- it doesn't really make any difference to the plugin which uses very simple Java..

[newschapmj1]

After a windows XP reinstall and loading the latest trial version 2.0.19 I have made progress.

I got a valid xmltv file as a couple of weeks ago but this time I got promted
to use zipcode 00000 etc and was able to view a weeks TV listings.

After remembering to plug in the IR "microphone" to the PVR350 the remote worked!<g>

I'll now try it out as a TV user and see how it measures up for a week.

Thanks for all those helpful comments.

[Alig Proudblade]

Nielm,

It works for me very nicely however the CPU utilisation while running is very low as is the level of internet access... Accordingly downloading 5 channels with --slow and --get-categories takes about an hour.....

Why doesnt it use the PC resources slightly more?

Thanks in anticipation,

Chris.

[nielm]

The last line of the grabber output should list the number of web pages and amount of data downloaded... This should give you an idea of why it takes so long to dowload the data...
The grabber also delays between each page request -- so that the RT webserver does not get overloaded, and that the admins don't start blocking it.

http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...1569#post41569

[Alig Proudblade]

Hi Nielm,

Ive successfully done an import now using both the switches for detailed info and the results are great.

Within the LiveTV Guide screen at the bottom of the description, each item now says things such as "Sport" etc but all my boxes are still blue and I believe they can be made to show up in different colours according to the type of program....

Do you have any ideas please?

Thanking you in anticipation,

Chris.

[nielm]

You need to rename the categories to match the hard-coded category names inside SageTV...

There is (very recently -- I have not yet looked at it) an XMLTV importer that has this feature built-in, See this thread: http://forums.freytechnologies.com/f...3378#post43378

[Spies]

I know xmltv is set to 'nice mode' when it grabs from RT, but seeing as the source is avail under GPL. couldn't someone change it to aggressive and so downloads would take a lot less time?

[nielm]

Originally posted by Spies
I know xmltv is set to 'nice mode' when it grabs from RT, but seeing as the source is avail under GPL. couldn't someone change it to aggressive and so downloads would take a lot less time?

Possible, but which might make it more likely that the RT webadmin will notice that someone is spidering the site, and start blocking the grabber, with the added bonus of possible legal action...

[Alig Proudblade]

Cant we run a fast grab to somewhere and make the processed XML file available so they are only scanned once?

Chris.

[Spies]

Originally posted by Alig Proudblade
Cant we run a fast grab to somewhere and make the processed XML file available so they are only scanned once?

Chris.

That would be great.

[nielm]

Originally posted by Spies
That would be great.

Sorry to be the downer again, but it would aso be copyright theft and against the Terms & Conditions of the RadioTimes website.
Also under British law, anyone publishing listings (whether for free or subscription based) must pay a royalty fees to the broadcasters (see here).
And the fact that someone has to run a website to host the downloads makes them a very visible target!

XMLTV really sits on the borderline of legality -- and one of the ways to keep it on the right side of this border is to follow the 'This information is for personal use and cannot be redistributed' T+C's of the information sources. (note other information sources have even stricter T+C's: "It is strictly prohibited to run any automated tools that systematically retrieve web pages for offline or online viewing" (digiguide))

[Spies]

As for automatically retrieving web pages, does that make Internet Explorer's offline viewing thing illegal?

[nielm]

As for automatically retrieving web pages, does that make Internet Explorer's offline viewing thing illegal?

According to digiguide, yes!

By the way, what is the problem with tv_grab_uk_rt taking its time -- as long as it takes less than 24 hrs to retreive each day of listings, surely it doesn't matter how long it takes, it will just stay running in the background...

On my system it is a daily scheduled which starts at some ungodly hour of the morning and runs as long as it takes...

[Spies]

My HTPC doesn't have a permenent internet connection that's the thing, I'm tempted to get a couple of USB WiFi adapters though...

[Spies]

I've decided to order a couple of 802.11b usb dongles