Difference between revisions of "XMLTV"

Revision as of 22:53, 4 August 2006

Setting up XmlTV for use with MythTV is documented in the MythTV HOWTO 5.3.

The purpose of this page is to cover specific issues that aren't necessarily covered in the official documentation.

Info on XMLTV http://membled.com/work/apps/xmltv/

Data Direct

With zap2it no longer providing listing information to XMLTV for North America (tv_grab_na), the only option is for the new Data Direct solution. Supported fully in version 0.15 of MythTV, the 0.14 version of MythTV, for a short time, requires a fix to continue downloading listing information successfully. More information is available in the Data Direct.

Outside North America

If you live outside the USA and Canada, there are some other sources of guide information

Australia

1. http://www.icetv.com.au (AU$3 per week subscription)
2. http://immir.com/tv_grab_au (Free) (may be inactive now)
3. http://www.tvguide.org.au (Free, requires registration)
4. Australian XMLTV grabbers (ice + tvguide)

Belgium

1. http://users.skynet.be/jxmltv (very fast, written in Java)
2. http://pytvgrab.sourceforge.net/
3. http://membled.com/work/apps/xmltv/

Denmark

1. http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/xmltvdk Six grabbers: The original (tv.tv2.dk), an additional written in perl (tdckabeltv.dk) and four written in Python (tv-guiden.dk, ahot.dk, jubii.dk, ontv.dk). Does also contain a merger written in Python to combine xmltv information from multiple sources, to obtain the highest possible quality (merge end time of last show from tdckabeltv.dk with episode numbers from tv2.dk and long descriptions from tv-guiden.dk etc.).

The link above is also a mailing list, so that you can be notified when there are updates or problems with the current grabbers.

Germany/Austria

The XMLTV Data usefull in Austria/ Germany you get with tv_grab_de_tvtoday. It has the episodes of series all mixed up in he main title. The part Number ('Teil') of the series are not always nicely structured and spill over to the title and subtitle field. This makes it quite impossible to record every sequence of a series (if you do not want to make a time based recording on a single channel). I decided to write a small mySQL script to update the programm data after performing the daily load of the xmltv file. This mySQL statment is batched after the daily mythfilldatabase entry in my CRON Script. The Statment looks for sequences That have the Word 'Teil' in it. This is the German word for 'Part'.

UPDATE IGNORE program
    SET    chanid=chanid
          ,starttime=starttime
          ,subtitle= concat_ws(' ', substring_index(substring(title,locate('Teil', title)-6,4+20), ' ', -2), subtitle )
          ,title= left(title,locate(substring_index(substring(title,locate('Teil', title)-6,4+20), ' ', -2),title) -1)
    WHERE title like '%Teil%';

Ther is also another Grabber for Germany available "Prisma". More info at http://www.mythwiki.de/index.php/HOWTO_Prisma_EPG. Download via http://hamsta.net/myth_epg.html

Italy

The grabber in the official xmltv distribution works correctly.

Netherlands

1. http://visualization.tudelft.nl/~paul/grabber/
2. http://www.addictivesoftware.net/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=3&Itemid=28

Norway

To use the XMLTV Data for Norway, you will have to use:

tv_grab_no --configure 

Running this command will give you some options. Its this command where you choose which channel you want program data from.

After you have done that, you need to do the following:

cp ~/.xmltv/tv_grab_no.conf to ~/.mythtv/<somename>.xmltv.

Next what you wanna do is the get the tags for each channel.. so let's fetch the data and save it to a tmp file.

tv_grab_no --days=1 > /tmp/tv.xml

Open that file and write down each tag for each channel. Look for lines like:

<channel id="1.fredag.dagbladet.no">

As you will see in the file: 1.fredag.dagbladet.no is for Nrk1.

So now when you run mythtv-setup --> channel editor, in order to capture Nrk1, you need to set the XMLTV ID to 1.fredag.dagbladet.no.

Do this for all the channels. When you are finally finished with doing all that, just run

mythfilldatabase

When its finished, start up mythfrontend.

Edit: Someone should update this. It seems that this does not work any more (as of 19.07.2006). When I installed mythtv 17.07.2006 and used tv_grab_no, the xml-file did not have the channel info, but it made the tag availible in the channels-editor so it is just to look there. This is the tags I use now: nrk1: nrk1.nrk.no tv2: tv2.no tvnorge: tvnorge.no

South Africa

South_Africa_MUG#Xmltv_Data

Sweden

1. http://tv.swedb.se/

United Kingdom

1. Uk_xmltv

A brief guide to configuring tv_grab_uk_rt is available at the link above.