Schedules Direct now open for membership.

  • Hey all, just wanted to make sure everyone saw that Schedules Direct is now out of beta testing and fully open for anyone who wants to sign up.
  • With the release of 0.20.2 the other day, switching your Myth config over from using Zap2It labs for data is fairly easy. Please see this mailing list posting from Bruce for a short set of instructions - but it mainly just boils down to running mythtv-setup, changing the existing listings grabber to Schedules Direct, and putting in your new username + password (assuming you kept the same lineup config as on the old Labs website). Took me well under 10 minutes.
  • I know, it's a bit hard to start paying for guide data. It was free for so long! I'm not sure how many of you were around during the bad old days of having to screen scrape to get listings data, but it was decidedly not fun. Constantly upgrading XMLTV to deal with website changes, etc. So, really, I don't think paying a little bit for a stable source of good, complete data is unreasonable. This was the best alternative we developers could come up with, given the lack of options available to us, but I realize that not everyone will agree.
  • If you're on the fence about signing up due to feeling that the price is currently too high and you'd rather just wait, I'd like to ask you to please reconsider. SD is a non-profit org run by open source/free software developers for the benefit of the users - not out to make money on this stuff - and the monthly/yearly price of membership will be lowered to meet costs. But, how much the price goes down initially will really depend on how many users sign up during these first months.
  • And finally, I'd like to thank everyone who has already become a member of SD - your support of this project is great. =) And if you haven't, please consider becoming a member of Schedules Direct. Thanks.
Posted by Isaac on August 27th 2007