[mythtv-users] UK Radio Times XML feed down

Nick Morrott knowledgejunkie at gmail.com
Thu Sep 16 17:43:41 UTC 2010


On 16 September 2010 17:13,  <dlknight at sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
> Been troubleshooting mythfilldatabase and tv_grab_uk_rt for hours now and
> finally found its not me at all its the xml feed on the radio times
> website return zero data...
>
> http://www.birtles.org.uk/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=334
>
> Has anyone else noticed this?

If you (or anyone else reading this) are using XMLTV to get your
listings, please join/follow the xmltv-users list [1] where problems
like this are discussed - as you've found out the problem is with the
listings feed and not mythfilldatabase.

The feed has been very intermittent for the past several weeks since
the Radio Times changed listings providers. I can't offer a solution
except to use the latest stable release of XMLTV and to hang in there
and keep checking the feed. The XMLTV Project runs a validator for all
grabbers [2] and it's worth keeping an eye on the tv_grab_uk_rt
results to check recent reliability (currently it's been down for 5 of
the last 10 days when checked).

If you are running the current stable release of XMLTV (0.5.58) the
grabber will cache good listings it retrieves for those times when the
grabber is run and no listings are available. This will not give you
any new listings, but will enable listings generated from the cached
data to take advantage of any updates to the fixup/consistency data
the grabber uses. I'm not aware of a time when the full 14 days of
listings have run out after an outage before new listings have been
generated, but this is of no use if you don't have the initial
listings to being with.

At time of writing the feed seems to be working but this appears to be
after a non-standard update - the feed normally updates daily at
around 0445GMT, but the current listings files were updated this
afternoon shortly before 1530BST. I reported the current outage to the
Radio Times earlier, and do so after the feed has been down for more
than a day.

[1] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/xmltv-users
[2] http://debian.crustynet.org.uk/~xmltv-tester/sid/nightly/

Cheers,
Nick

-- 
Nick Morrott

MythTV Official wiki: http://mythtv.org/wiki/
MythTV users list archive: http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users

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