[mythtv-users] UK Radio Times XMLTV [was: Reliability of USB capture cards]

Jason Chambers lists at purplish-monkey.com
Fri Jul 30 05:46:02 UTC 2010


On 28/07/2010 19:28, Nick Morrott wrote:
> On 26 July 2010 01:27, Jason Chambers<lists at purplish-monkey.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> Generally its very good.  There are a few minor problems which
>> I'll get to later but none of them are annoying enough for me to
>> start sending threatening letters to the BBC.
>
> Please don't! They provide the service gratis but do not create the
> listings content themeselves - they pass them on from their listings
>  provider after adding their own programme reviews where necessary.

Fair enough. They would have probably sent Jonathan Ross round to sort 
me out anyways, so I'll keep quiet.

Out of interest do you know /why/ the Radio Times publishes this data?

My googling just brings up various posts on mailing lists, forums and
blogs about the XMLTV grabber itself.  However I cannot find anything 
from the Radio Times and/or BBC that mentions the fact that the raw data 
is available in the first place.

Is this something that they are required to do for some reason? Or some
trial/beta service that they may scrap/charge for in the future?

>> 2. The descriptions and episode titles and not always consistent
>> when shows are repeated.
>
> This can be - and is currently - improved if you provide details of
> those shows where you see inconsistencies.

I wasn't aware that the grabber did any changing of the data content 
beyond possibly dealing with overlapping times or dodgy character 
encoding problems.  XMLTV was one of those programs I just installed and 
let it get on with it without ever learning more about it.

I've been reading through the program and the supplemental files on the
website and I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of cleansing that 
is actually going on.

> The current release of tv_grab_uk_rt allows for blanket category
> updating on a per-title basis. At the time of writing, 493 different
>  programme titles are updated.

I run Debian's stable release, which has an older version of xmltv that 
didn't understand the category re-assigning codes. Which explains why I 
wasn't benefiting from those fixups.

> The debug output of the grabber currently reports whenever the same
> programme title is assigned to different categories within the
> 14-day listings window.

I notice that the --debug option gives a huge amount of output - it
mixes pure debugging information (such as the mapping of channel ids and
parsing supplement files) with the output of potential listing
inconsistencies.

Is there a reason for this, or would you be willing to accept a patch
that adds an --inconsistencies option to separate out the two.

> If you do notice inconsistencies in the data you see (and you're
> running the current stable release of XMLTV), please post details to
>  the ongoing uk_rt updates thread on the xmltv-users list. I update
> the fixups frequently...

I've installed the latest stable version now and subscribed to the 
mailing lists so I'll happily provide feedback on any future 
inconsistencies now that I know something can be done to correct them.

Thanks for your hard work.

Jason


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