[mythtv-users] how could I provide program guide for users in China

[Nick Rout]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Clark Lee <clarkchen900 at yahoo.com.cn> wrote:
>
>
> Hi, All,
>
> I am not sure whether I should ask this question in user list or dev list.
>
> I am living in Beijing, China, where XMLTV or any other program guide information is not directly available. Even the channel information need to be setup manually.
> I managed to get the EPG of my digital cable TV weekly, i.e. every Monday morning. The information include:
>
> program Title; subtitle; starttime; endtime;
>
> Now I use a perl script to fill these information into local mythconverg database directly. Not using the mythdatabasefill at all. This works for me. However, I would like to share the EPG to other mythTV users (title/subtitles in UTF-8 chinese, sorry if you can not read it). I am considering to set up a web host so that people can download EPG from there and get their program guide up to date.
>
> My question:
> 1) what's the best way to provide EPG; should I use XMLTV format (which I am not fimiliar); or just plain text files and perl script to insert them into database directly?
> 2) what's the definination of all the columns in program table? There are quite some that I guess should be useful but I don't know how to fill it.
>
> Thanks very much,

you should (IMHO) definitely go with xmltv. In fact if you did the
conversion first you could then use mythfilldatabase yourself to add
to your own database. Your method may break with a schema change :(

Theres a bit of info on the xmltv wiki eg
http://wiki.xmltv.org/index.php/XMLTVFormat

Looking at the source to this program (which extracts EIT data and
outputs xmltv data) might help you http://nice.net.nz/epgsnoop/