[mythtv-users] Alternative to Zap2It?

[Joe Votour]

As much as I hate to say it, if Zap2It stopped
providing the free data, then (likely) one of two
things would happen:
1. People would pay the subscription fee. (For the
record, if the fee was reasonable, I'd consider it. 
For me, MythTV isn't really a way to get free as in
money data, it's a way for me to record what I want,
and watch it when I want - unlike Tivo, which is now
starting to expire shows and bombard users with ads).
2. We'd go back to using screen scrapers (back before
the first version of MythTV that natively supported
Zap2It).  This was somewhat painful, as I remember
guide downloads were taking up to 20 minutes per day,
and it was a real bandwidth hog to Zap2It (which is
why they gave us direct access in the first place).

As the original poster mentioned, the guide data is
only 24 hours in advance.  I find myself scheduling
things to record days, if not a full week in advance. 
So, that wouldn't help out in an extended absence. 
Also, I would suspect that it's not implemented in
every area.

Also, although Donavan didn't word his question very
nicely, he did make an excellent point to me in a
private e-mail - if you use this method, you'd have to
dedicate a tuner to it, not necessarily all of the
time, but at least on periodic intervals to fetch the
data.  This is time that tuner couldn't be spent
recording shows (or being used to watch TV).

-- Joe

--- David Wood <obsidian at panix.com> wrote:
> That's super easy to answer, on the same week when
> zap2it had an outage, 
> and when by visiting their site you can see that
> they might pull the feed 
> at any minute...
> 
> On Wed, 20 Apr 2005, Donavan Stanley wrote:
> 
> > On 4/20/05, Joe Votour <joevph at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >> Short answer - it's not going to work right now.
> >
> > Of course the big question would be "why on earth
> would you want this?".
> > _______________________________________________
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> > mythtv-users at mythtv.org
> >
>
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users
> >
> 
> > _______________________________________________
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>
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