XMLTV

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Revision as of 14:08, 2 December 2008 by Rfordinal (talk | contribs) (Czech Republic)

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Setting up XmlTV for use with MythTV is documented in the MythTV HOWTO 5.2.

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

Info on XMLTV http://xmltv.org/wiki/


Outside North America

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

Import Notes for all XMLTV users

Warning.png Warning: You should not include channels in your xmltv config which are not required. This places an unnecessarily high load on both the source websites and your own system.

Australia

Refer to Australian TV Listings for further details.

  1. OzTivo Guide (Free, requires registration)
  2. http://www.icetv.com.au (AU$3 per week subscription)
  3. Australian XMLTV grabbers (ice + tvguide)
  4. Shepherd (Free : Ice,OzTivo hybrid multi source )
  5. http://immir.com/tv_grab_au (Free) (may be inactive/broken now)
  6. http://www.onlinetractorparts.com.au/rohbags/xmltvau/ (not confirmed if working)

Belgium

  1. https://launchpad.net/belguide
  2. http://users.skynet.be/jxmltv
  3. http://pytvgrab.sourceforge.net/
  4. http://membled.com/work/apps/xmltv/

You can also get your XML file directly from http://mythportal.be/XML-tv-gids

Brazil

There are a working grabber, tv_grab_br_net a perl scripts (or any other Linux native solutions) for Brazilian TV programming. This grabber get data from Net [1] cable TV. No open to air TV on this source, just paid tv programme. It is detected by mythtvsetup and you are prompted (on background windows) to make your choice about your city, line-up and channels. It provide both, simple and complete description for programs.

Other functional alternative is to use TVxb, which isn't open source or even Linux, but works well with wine (at least as far as version 1.0085).

TVxb is configurable for different countries via ini-files. Check the following page for Brazilian templates. As of today, there are some for NET (PR), and others for TVA as well.

http://www.tvxb.com/country/br-ini.html

For information on how to set it up with MythTV, check out TVxb.

Croatia

The grabber for Croatia tv_grab_hr is using the goNIX service as its backend.

More information is available on http://www.gonix.net/


Czech Republic

The only way to get TV listings in Czech Republic is TVxb, there is no grabber for xmltv.

Not public xmltv file for czech and slovak channels (UPC channels included) can be send after request to rfordinal.

Denmark

In Denmark there is a group maintaining several grabbers. This group has created the following:

Currently seven grabbers are maintained:

  • The original (tv.tv2.dk),
  • An additional written in perl (dr.dk)
  • Five written in Python (tdc.dk, tv-guiden.dk, ahot.dk, jubii.dk, ontv.dk).

The group also maintains the following:

  • 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 tdc.dk with episode numbers from tv2.dk and long descriptions from tv-guiden.dk etc.).
  • A "combined" grabber, which configures each of the other grabbers and runs them in parallel and then merge the output. That combined grabber does also support the swedish grabber (swedb).

The mailing list is used to inform users when there are updates or problems with the current grabbers.

Finland

Finnish XMLTV data can be acquired with tv_grab_fi. The script parses www.telkku.com web site in order to get EPG entries.

Latest version of the tv_grab_fi can be downloaded from:

http://xmltv.cvs.sourceforge.net/*checkout*/xmltv/xmltv/grab/fi/tv_grab_fi 

Due frequent site updates of the www.telkku.com user should always have the latest version of the grabber.
Add latest version of tv_grab_fi somewhere where mythtv can find it for example in debian system to /usr/bin/. Also remember to assure that you don't have any older versions installed.

To use tv_grab_fi you need to first run in ~/.mythtv

tv_grab_fi --configure --config-file dvb.xmltv 

This will ask which channels does the user want to use grabber for.
Once you have generated dvb.xmltv it should contain lines like this 'channel 0 YLE1'. Channels with '#' in front of them will not be added.

Now we need to tell XMLTV ID's to mythtv. In dvb.xmltv take the number after word "channel" and add ".telkku.com" after that and you'll have the ID. For example if the channel has line of 'channel 62 YLE24' the ID is 62.telkku.com.
Start Mythtv setup

mythtv-setup 

Go to: 'channel editor' -> "channel that you want to use grabber for" -> XMLTV ID: xx.telkku.com (Where 'xx' is the number in dvb.xmltv) -> Next -> Ready.

To update program guide do

mythfilldatabase

If that doesn't add EPG entries then do:

mythfilldatabase --refresh-all

Another way to get XMLTV ID's is to do

tv_grab_fi --config-file dvb.xmltv --days 0 --output channels.tmp

In channels.tmp find line that has '<channel id="...>' in it. In place of "..." you will have the XMLTV ID. For example if the line is: "<channel id="2.telkku.com">" then the XMLTV ID is 2.telkku.com.

France

This web site [2] provides free and very complete xmltv listings as a downloadable XML file. You will need to run mythfilldatabase with the --file argument to use the downloaded xml.

Germany/Austria

TV Today

German/Austrian XMLTV Data can be got via the tv_grab_de_tvtoday web scrapper script. 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%';

Prisma

More information here. Download via this or [this] link. The Prisma grabber is way slower than the TV Today grabber but allows to fetch 4 weeks in advance compared to 1 week for the TV Today grabber.

TV Movie (tvm2vdr)

This script piggy backs on tvm2vdr that grabs the EPG data in VDR format. It enables the user to very quickly download TV Movie and other german schedules and convert them into XMLTV based files. Discussion and help on running the script can be found [here]. Right now it enables the download of about 14 days of Data with long descriptions.

Other sources that can be configured to be used by this script are:

  • TVInfo
  • TVInfo Merkzettel
  • TVMovie
  • Hoerzu
  • Infosat
  • Premiere
  • TvToday

Italy

The grabber in the official xmltv distribution works correctly.

Netherlands

Netherlands (Holland) specific info can be found here: Netherlands

New Zealand

A c# application to scrape sites can be found here, runs fine using mono on linux

  1. http://www.reven.co.nz/

Norway

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

tv_grab_no --configure --config-file=tv_grab_no.xmltv

It will then ask you what channels you would like. Next copy the file to your .mythtv directory.

Next, you have to get the tags for each channel.. So let's fetch the data and save it to a tmp file.

tv_grab_no --config-file=tv_grab_no.xmltv --list-channels --output=channels.tmp

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

<channel id="nrk1.nrk.no">

As you will see in the file: nrk1.nrk.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 nrk1.nrk.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.

South Africa

See the South Africa MUG WIKI page for details.

Spain

The included parser works (www.elpais.es/parrillatv/index.html). Although it has been found some inconsistencies with the real programation.

One alternative, abeit not been as complete: http://www.miguiatv.com/todos-los-canales.html

Sweden

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

Switzerland

  1. XMLTV_CH: Info on available grabbers and icon listings.

United Kingdom

  1. Uk_xmltv

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

Ukraine, Russia, Belarus

tv_grab_ru applicalion, converts JTV-formatted arcive with about 200 channels to xmltv. More info in [3]