Zap2It Labs Discontinuing Free TV Guide Service

QuijiboIsAWord writes "Zap2It Labs, which provides free TV listing data for personal use, has long been the main source of program guide information for users in the US and beyond. They've announced via their webpage that, due to abuse of the service, data will no longer be available after September 1st. There is no other direct source, and no option to pay for the service even if the users wanted to. Without a data feed of this type, users will be reduced to scraping websites at best. Is this going to be a killing blow for MythTV?"

Comments

Myth will survive

[fatnicky]

Myth will find another source. If it would just come pre-configured with a distro, it would be a lot more popular and not have to worry about potential risks like losing it's guide feeds.

FWIW, Myth beats the shorts off of TIVO any day.

Re:Myth will survive

[Skater]

How would it being preconfigured with a distro prevent the risk of losing its guide feeds? Just like old versions of Winamp come configured to access the original cddb instead of freedb.

Re:Myth will survive

[statusbar]

Truth is that hardly anything on TV is worth watching anyways... My Myth TV box sits idle nowadays anyways.

--jeffk++

Re:Myth will survive

[garcia]

FWIW, Myth beats the shorts off of TIVO any day.

How? I had my DirecTivo installed in 2005 and haven't touched it since. When it was installed I didn't have to do anything, someone came out and hooked it up and turned it on. Ever since it's been working like it should w/o me having to fuck with it in the least.

Until MythTV boxes come ready to plug and play for less than $100 (mine was free b/c DirecTV's new firmware (at the time) put up a screensaver that my standalone TiVo recorded instead of the show) it won't "beat the pants off of TiVo".

Re:Myth will survive

[gurps_npc]

MYTH TV offers everything TIVO does plus:

Not having to pay a monthly fee to automatically record shows you watched previously

Not having to deal with commercials inserted when you fast forward 30 seconds.

Now, if they could only find a way to strip thos FREAKIN' RUDE graphics that certain vile channels overlay on top of the movie/show. I can deal with a tiny little station identification, but those rude obnoxious ads obscure vital parts of the show about one out of every 3 times. I swear my Blood pressure goes through the roof.

Re:Myth will survive

[Anonymous Coward]

I can give you TiVo's occasional recording of repeats, although a little working with the Season Passes will avoid most of that, but WTF are you talking about with inserted commercials and fast-forwarding?

Re:Myth will survive

[Anonymous Coward]

FWIW, Myth beats the shorts off of TIVO any day.

How?

Easy Myth runs on Linux! What was that?

OK, Never Mind.

Emily Litella

Re:Myth will survive

[dosius]

EWWWW! I so hate animated station bugs. Especially that shit they have on Jetsux now (Toon Disney) where they shrink the screen so they can take up a quarter of it with some advertisement... Come on, you HAVE commercial time, use *it* for your ads! Sheesh.

And to think I pay $69 a month for this bullshit.

-uso.

Re:Myth will survive

[CastrTroy]

I still prefer SageTV. It's about 1000 times easier to set up, and has most of the same functionality. The $70 for the software is nothing for the ease of use it gives me.

Re:Myth will survive

[IthnkImParanoid]

You forgot being able to watch a recording on your laptop while on the toilet. I'm puzzled as to why MythTV doesn't advertise this feature a bit more, since it's one of my favorites.

That being said, you can't honestly suggest that MythTV is always a better choice than Tivo, unless you've conveniently forgotten about the teeming masses of people who couldn't install a capture card if their life depended on it. Ease is the killer feature for Tivo and bundled PVRs.

Re:Myth will survive

[elrous0]

I thought SageTV and BeyondTV used this same data. Won't they be cut off too?

Re:Myth will survive

[teknotus]

I think the solution is to pressure TV stations to provide listings in something like an RSS feed. Then all you need is a database of RSS feed URL's. Any idea's on how to sell TV stations on how this will benefit them?

Re:Myth will survive

[Kadin2048]

Not having to pay a monthly fee to automatically record shows you watched previously

Well, it did offer this, but it seems like it may not in the future, because it was depending on the charity of one organization to provide the data feed that makes it work.

I have a MythTV box and love it (and so does the S.O.), but I've always thought that the guide data was a massive failure point.

Re:Myth will survive

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot being able to watch a recording on your laptop while on the toilet. I'm puzzled as to why MythTV doesn't advertise this feature a bit more, since it's one of my favorites.

You can do this with Tivo out of the box.

Re:Myth will survive

[HTH NE1]

Myth will find another source.

I'd consider "scraping" it from one of my Series1 TiVos, but then TiVo allows access to web-based guide data to any user of their site, even without owning a TiVo.

I know because their FAQ told me so. I was looking to set up a timed recording on a channel not in my line-up (subchannel 11-1 over unencrypted cable on a Series3 without a CableCard installed) and found it only allowed remote scheduling of recordings for scheduled shows on listed channels, and it said:

Do I need to subscribe to the TiVo service to use TiVo Central Online?

Nope! Even without a TiVo subscription, you will be able to browse our television listings, see when shows are on, read about our daily picks, discover new programming and see what's popular.

However, in order to schedule recordings, you will need to have both a TiVo Series2 DVR as well as an active TiVo subscription.

Yeah, they should insert "or TiVo Series3 DMR" in there.

Re:Myth will survive

[Homr Zodyssey]

I've never used a MythTV rig. But, its my understanding that they don't offer the "Thumbs Up/Down" and "Suggestions" features that TiVo offers.

I've used a TiVo for 2 years now. I really like that it makes guesses about what shows I will like and goes and gets them when its idle and has free space. These recordings are considered low-priority and are the first to be deleted if it needs room for shows that I have requested. In this way, I'm often introduced to shows that I have never heard of and I end up liking them.

Re:Myth will survive

[Waffle Iron]

My biggest quesion is: does the Tivo (or any PVR provided by the satellite co.) support timestretch? I haven't seen it mentioned on the DirecTV or Dish network websites. I've been recently thinking about ditching cable for satellite, and their PVRs would be much simpler than dealing with IR blasters and multiple satellite boxes. However, the wife and I have gradually became acclimated to speeding up shows, and we both agreed that timestretch an absolute must-have feature. We probably wouldn't use any PVR that doesn't have it.

The other question is, is there any way to save out shows more conveniently than playing it out at 1X through the video outs? MythTV's ability to edit out ads and transcode directly into my desktop system is a huge convenience.

Re:Myth will survive

[Vortran]

Do you own your TiVo, or do you pay a fee for it?

What if you want to record from another source onto the HD or to a DVD?

What if you discontinue your DSS and get something else like cable or Dish? Will the TiVo still work?

What we need is a simple tapeless video recorder that lets you watch a show that has already started while it finishes recording. That's all I want, and I want it in a 19" appliance and without any subscription to anything. I haven't found it yet.

Re:Myth will survive

[Anonymous Coward]

I still prefer SageTV. It's about 1000 times easier to set up, and has most of the same functionality. The $70 for the software is nothing for the ease of use it gives me.

But that only runs on Windows, so for decent people with morals and integrity, funding a criminal organization due to mere laziness isn't really an option, now is it?

Re:Myth will survive

[garcia]

Do you own your TiVo, or do you pay a fee for it?

I own the Tivo box but being that I have DirecTV I have to pay for the receiver either way.

What if you want to record from another source onto the HD or to a DVD?

I don't and neither do *most* other people that don't want to fuck around w/their PVR.

What if you discontinue your DSS and get something else like cable or Dish? Will the TiVo still work?

I won't and probably not.

What we need is a simple tapeless video recorder that lets you watch a show that has already started while it finishes recording. That's all I want, and I want it in a 19" appliance and without any subscription to anything. I haven't found it yet.

Buy a TiVo, don't get a subscription and manually set the device to record your show.

Re:Myth will survive

[raw-sewage]

You forgot being able to watch a recording on your laptop while on the toilet. I'm puzzled as to why MythTV doesn't advertise this feature a bit more, since it's one of my favorites.

Yes, and more generally, MythTV's client-server architecture opens up a lot of possibilities. If you have a busy household (e.g. big family), build yourself a monster MythTV backend, and stash in in your basement. Then install MythTV thin clients everywhere in your house, and everyone can watch what they want when they want.

I also use the MythVideo plugin. I've copied all the DVDs I own to a big file server (so I have all my movies "on-demand" via MythTV). My girlfriend said it would be cool to install another MythTV system in a spare bedroom. Then when we had guests, they could watch a movie before going to bed (or when they get up in the morning, whatever).

Yeah, it's definitely not trivial to setup. But I always thought someone could make a business out of setting MythTV up for people. Charge a big upfront fee, and it's free after that. (Of course, you expose yourself to risk like this Zap2It debacle!)

Re:Myth will survive

[gEvil (beta)]

Agreed. I have a DirecTiVo dual-tuner setup, which is absolutely perfect for the Suggestions feature. It's rare that there are ever two shows on at the same time that I want to watch, and even when there are, I can record them both. Which means the other 99+% of the time, the TiVo is free to go out and record whatever the hell it thinks I might be interested in. And it usually does a good job of that. I constantly sit down and watch random things from the Suggestions list.

Re:Myth will survive

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the solution is to pressure TV stations to provide listings in something like an RSS feed. Then all you need is a database of RSS feed URL's. Any idea's on how to sell TV stations on how this will benefit them?

If you come up with one, I'd be happy to throw it at my boss to see if he'll go for it.

Re:Myth will survive

[SydShamino]

Unlike printed guides, which have to limit show descriptions to one or two lines at best, digital guides can be as detailed as you wish. By providing your own RSS feed of your schedule, you could increase the information given, which should increase the number of people willing to watch your channel. Even though I have a DVR I still watch (interesting) commercials, so don't completely write off my viewership.

And here's how you can directly make money:
By providing your own guide information, you can insert sponsorship lines and charge for them.

"Tonight on Lost, sponsored by Coca-Cola, Jack and Kate have more awkward sexual tension, while Hurley tries to cheer everyone up, Sawyer acts rudely, and Sayid kills someone with his feet."

Even us DVR users will very often look at the guide information. Voila, you've just sold an ad!

Re:Myth will survive

[swedub]

There is a version of SageTV for Linux ...

http://store.sagetv.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Scre en=PROD&Store_Code=SOS&Product_Code=STVLS&Category _Code=SS

However, I'm still using SageTV on a Windows box. If my recent switch to Ubuntu for my main computer continues to work as well as it has so far I will upgrade my PVR box to the Linux version. SageTV has been one of the best pieces of software I have ever paid for.

I still have no clue if they are affected by this. Guess I'll check out the SageTV forums next.

Re:Myth will survive

[HTH NE1]

I so hate animated station bugs.

I'm liking that my local HD stations (and the networks) still don't have much in the way of capability in inserting these into the HD feed. They can't even put severe weather information overlays on the HD feed without pillarboxing it as upconverted SD, and some won't do that, so you only see breaking weather information during commercial breaks or if they have to break in from the studio.

Meanwhile, when my local Fox affiliate shows The Simpsons pillarboxed at 720p, the station's bug is in the right pillarbox, not over the image. No generic FOX bug either. A pity the network steps on the credits and the musical accompaniment though; I wanted to hear the whole restyled theme at the end of "24 Minutes".

Re:Myth will survive

[BobPaul]

MythTV doesn't fast forward, it does commercial skip. Automatically. It hits a commercial break and just jumps past.

Tivo used to allow a really nice FF feature to skip commercials. Now they overlay advertisements on top of the advertisements you are fast forwarding through. Not to mention the advertising in the rest of the UI. If you own one, you should know what I'm talking about. If not, Google found me someone's blog with pictures

Re:Myth will survive

[roye]

I never see ads when I use Tivo's 30 sec skip. That you have to redo the hack after a reboot (admittedly almost never) is bullshit. But I can take the 5 seconds to press Select, Play, Select, 3, 0, Select. Instant 30 second skip anytime you want. This is also good to use during a boring minute or so of a show.

Re:Myth will survive

[russ1337]

I think you are on to something. I've been keeping tabs on the NZ Mythtv forums & mailing list (am about to move there) and EPG seems an ongoing issue for them.. I've often thought what you've suggested would be their answer.

People further down in the thread suggested that TV channel EPG is right up Google's alley, and I agree... just how do you persuade them???? Hopefully there are a few Mythtv users in the Googleplex that have the sway to pull this off. Google have the funds to purchase the EPG data, AND the customer base to insert ads in the stream (however ads would not be click-able).

Google... please buy ZAP2IT LABS!!! please!!!

Re:Myth will survive

[CastrTroy]

It doesn't affect SageTV's built in EPG data at all because SageTV pays for the US & Candian [sic] data it receives & redistributes to customers.

From the info on the forums.

Re:Myth will survive

[mysidia]

Every time a feed is lost and a new one is found, every time the guide feed changes, every user has to manually upgrade the software, and it's sure to happen many times in the future..

That is inefficient.

What would be ideal would be if myth boxes could connect to each other to form a peer-to-peer network and share some of their guide data with each other.

Let the authenticity of an entry update (in case of conflicting stories) be determined by the reported source of the update, a vote, and the "age" and reputation of the mythtv installations reporting the listing.

In that manner, when one feed dies, any mythtv user who can would be able to scrape or find listings data and provide it for the benefit of all mythtv users.

Also, no one mythtv node would necessarily need the full listings, they would only need to submit updates randomly based on newly acquired data, and to submit queries based on listings they're interested in.

I.E. channels the user is currently trying to lookup listings for, or channels in the channel lineup for the next few days, and searches for program names the user is interested in or wants recorded every time.

Re:Myth will survive

[bdjacobson]

You forgot being able to watch a recording on your laptop while on the toilet. I'm puzzled as to why MythTV doesn't advertise this feature a bit more, since it's one of my favorites. The only recordings I can imagine someone watching on their laptop certainly aren't something recorded on normal television....

Re:Myth will survive

[bdjacobson]

You forgot being able to watch a recording on your laptop while on the toilet. I'm puzzled as to why MythTV doesn't advertise this feature a bit more, since it's one of my favorites. The only recordings I can imagine someone watching on their laptop certainly aren't something recorded on normal television.... **on their laptop on the toilet

Re:Myth will survive

[janrinok]

Why don't you stop paying? Have you tried reading a book, or going for a walk?

Re:Myth will survive

[Anonymous Coward]

You seem to be overlooking the simple fact that tv listings are very localized and channel lineups change with your cable/satellite service. Trying to P2P that would be a clusterfuck.

Re:Myth will survive

[James McP]

You can do that with TiVo as well. The series 2 has a PC server program that will let you copy your files off your TiVo onto a PC. Yeah, they have DRM (to keep the MPAA off their backs) but it's hella weak and there are programs out there that strip it off easily*. Windows Media Player asks for a password and then you can play the video.

Multiple TiVos can actually copy videos back and forth. I've only got an 802.11b wifi adapter on my TiVo and it provides slightly better than real-time data transfer rates. I've been archiving off "Good Eats" to my PC since my wife doesn't appreciate having ~40 episodes stored.

The server program also lets you play MP3s and pictures on your TiVo.

*I've managed to strip the DRM off and copy the videos to DVD but there are frame synch issues that irritate me. The audio is just barely off and the video stream flickers; I think it's discarding some frames. I'm not sure if it is a result of the DRM removal or a setting on the DVD recorder.

Re:Myth will survive

[James McP]

Do you own your TiVo, or do you pay a fee for it?

Both. I've got an old Series1 from my inlaws that I don't pay for service and a Series 2 that I do. The Series1 does not get any program guide information due to our lack of a landline.

What we need is a simple tapeless video recorder that lets you watch a show that has already started while it finishes recording. That's all I want, and I want it in a 19" appliance and without any subscription to anything. I haven't found it yet.

Get a cheap TiVo, possibly a used one, and don't pay for service. We program the Series 1 like a regular VCR, by setting the time date and recurrence options. You can still pause live TV and start to watch a show being recorded from the beginning.

Re:Myth will survive

[zero_offset]

I read lots of books -- 20 a year, on average.
I go for walks outside.

Sometimes I also watch TV. Get over it.

Re:Myth will survive

[LordKronos]

Now they overlay advertisements on top of the advertisements you are fast forwarding through.

But are they actually doing this? I still haven't seen a single instance of that on my series 2 tivo, so I just assumed it was something they rolled out on a limited basis to gauge the response and then backed off the idea.

Re:Myth will survive

[zero_offset]

You've given me a whole new reason to never buy a used laptop. *shudder*

Re:Myth will survive

[janrinok]

So, if you're not getting value for money, why do you continue to pay it?

Re:Myth will survive

[zero_offset]

Who said I didn't get value for the money? I read a lot. I do things outside. I also watch TV. Doing one thing doesn't mean I don't do the others. In fact, a device like the Tivo makes it easier to do the other things you describe. It actually makes more sense to pay for it if I also wish to do those other things.

Re:Myth will survive

[timbck2]

MythTV already comes preconfigured with at least two Linux distributions:

MythDora (Fedora-based)
KnoppMyth (Debian-based)

Re:Myth will survive

[janrinok]

[quote]And to think I pay $69 a month for this bullshit.[/quote] My initial reply, regarding value for money, was to dosius if you follow the parent links. I'm not sure how you came to think I was directing it to you....?

Re:Myth will survive

[Anonymous Coward]

If you spend long enough on the toilet to consider it an opportunity to watch TV, then you likely need to change your diet.

Re:Myth will survive

[zolaar]

Son, we live in a world that has lines of code and those lines of code need to be written by nerds with vi. Who's gonna do it? You? You, CowboyNeal?

I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for MythTV and curse Zap2It; you have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that MythTV's current system, while tragic, probably saved time and that my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves time.

You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties you want me working on that bug, you need me working on that bug!

We use words like object, code, binary. We use then as the backbone of a life trying to develop something. You use them as a punchline! I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very software I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.

I would rather you just said "thank you," and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest that you start up an editor and send a patch.

Either way, I don't give a damn what you think is inefficient!

PS : no hard feelings - I just wanted to [ab]use the quote!

Re:Myth will survive

[zukakog]

MythTV doesn't fast forward

Um...I believe you can fast forward in MithTV with the keys.

Re:Myth will survive

[BobPaul]

That should have said "MythTV doesn't "just fast forward" or merely. Fast forward is the only way to bypass commercials on Tivo, whereas on mythtv a commercial break just looks like a scene change.

Re:Myth will survive

[Rich0]

"Tonight on Lost, sponsored by Coca-Cola, Jack and Kate have more awkward sexual tension, while Hurley tries to cheer everyone up, Sawyer acts rudely, and Sayid kills someone with his feet."

Sorry - I'm interested in episode descriptions - not generic show descriptions that apply to the whole series. Oh wait...

Dammit!

[Khan]

And I just got my MythTV box update to some nice hardware! ARRRGGGGG!!!!

Re:Dammit!

[superpulpsicle]

I just hopped over to Snapstream beyond tv. You do end up going back to windows though.

Re:Dammit!

[Afrosheen]

Sounds like one of those instances where the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

Re:Dammit!

[Anonymous Coward]

TV rots your brain son. You're better off with out it. If you're desperate to watch a couple good shows, you can find them online for download, or wait for them to come out on DVD and buy them. I think MythTV is cool, I have a friend who got it running. But I've never owned a television. I kind of think there's a lot better things to do, especially when a few giant corporations own all the channels anyways. It's not like there's really a free press or open information flowing across the channels anyways. It's all propaganda, advertising, brainwashing, and mindless distraction for most people. Good riddance. Heheh. You can still use that nice box to play the media you download though...

Re:Dammit!

[fidget42]

Or, you can go over to SageTV (http://store.sagetv.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Scr een=PROD&Store_Code=SOS&Product_Code=STVLS) and stay on Linux.

Re:Dammit!

[Khan]

I use it mostly for recording some shows during the day for the wife and a few that I can't sit down to watch at night due to parenting obligations. Hence the usefulness of the guide. If I miss a recording then yes, I'll find the D/L. Other than that, I use it as my primary DVD, Video, MAME, Music, Photos home unit. I'm sure that the Myth Crew will find an alternative. Hell, they have almost 4 months to figure something out. That's a lifetime in coding ;-)

Re:Dammit!

[nytes]

This sucks.

I don't have a MythTV box, but I just discovered the Zap2it web site after we got satellite a month or so ago. TV Guide's site sucks canal water, so it was nice to find a fairly simple site on which to read the listings.

Re:Dammit!

[MATTtheROGUE]

You're telling me? I run a backend/frontend/desktop computer, and I have 2 gigs of Ram set to arrive tomorrow!

Re:Dammit!

[Nerd4News]

I use Zap2It with 2 Myth boxes plus I always have the grid listing open in a browser. Sorry to see them go but... They recently redesigned the HTML grid list page and took it from fast, well designed and easy to use and turned it into a complete kludge that was slow and not at all user friendly. I wrote them 2 emails about it and got narry a response. I guess they just don't care anymore. Since it was free I guess that's their choice. I haven't found a replacement I like yet, the TV Guide and Yahoo grids both have a horrid UI. Oh well, something else will come along.

Re:Dammit!

[Anonymous Coward]

The regular human web site will still be there. It's just the downloadable TV listings for the computer's use that won't.

Re:Dammit!

[s_p_oneil]

From their TOS: Robots: Due to the potential impact on system performance and availability, the use of robots (automated HTTP requests) to retrieve Content from the Service is in most cases prohibited.

It sounds like MythTV is what's causing them to shut down.

Re:Dammit!

[hexhacker]

Have you tried TitanTV?

Re:Dammit!

[Nerd4News]

Looks promising. Thanks for the link.

killing blow?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering the continual improvement of MythTV and it's growing popularity I don't see how this can be considered anything other than a set-back. It's certainly a significant set-back, but there is no reason it should be a "killing blow".

sucks

[stew-a-cide]

This will break my favourite / most used OSX Dashboard widget: http://www.patrickpatoray.com/index.php?Page=101

Re:sucks

[stew-a-cide]

...I'd happily pay a (small) fee to keep this service available.

This is troubling

[quanticle]

I don't use MythTV, and so I was surprised to see that it relies on a private third-party source for TV listings. Isn't there any way to obtain this information in an "open-source" manner?

Re:This is troubling

[ajs]

I don't use MythTV, and so I was surprised to see that it relies on a private third-party source for TV listings. Isn't there any way to obtain this information in an "open-source" manner? I can't imagine how that would work. Ultimately, you need information from the studios, and that's going to require a business relationship. TV Guide has such a relationship, as did these folks it seems (or perhaps TV Guide and these folks have a common feed).

I'm a little shocked that these guys didn't just go commercial, though, and build a MythTV add-on that allows you to subscribe to their product.

Re:This is troubling

[QuijiboIsAWord]

The Zap2It Labs service receives all the data from the networks, typically directly, and aggregates it all into a customizable feed which users set up by signing up for an account and selecting the cable provider or broadcast area of their choice.
Many different applications, besides just MythTV, use this data. Some people have individually negotiated with their local stations to get the data they need, but that's extremely hit or miss, and about as convenient as attempting to negotiate with your Cable company to get them to carry broadcast networks in HD unencrypted - Not very, and most people in most areas won't bother.

Re:This is troubling

[MindKata]

"that's going to require a business relationship"

A lot of TV channels earn their living via adverts. The more people can find shows the better. It makes business sense to provide free listings. I suspect is more a case of the studios not being able to centrally organise their show listings.

However there's a simple solution. All studios simply need to be encouraged to distribute their show listings via RSS. Once a few start to do it, others will want to do it as well, because they will not want to loose out.

Re:This is troubling

[elrous0]

Not unless someone volunteers to compile the voluminous amount of information themselves, then set up a distribution method.

This was always MythTV's achilles heel, more than even HDTV. For all the talk about "Unlike Tivo, MythTV can NEVER be shut down or crippled," MythTV always had this dependency on a third party, for profit service. It's possible someone could replace them, but they're going to want SOME form of revenue (and since no one is going to tolerate ads on their MythTV, or pay for the service, this is unlikely).

Re:This is troubling

[sammy baby]

However there's a simple solution. All studios simply need to be encouraged to distribute their show listings via RSS. Once a few start to do it, others will want to do it as well, because they will not want to loose out.

Oh yeah, that's a simple solution. Just ask all the studios, possibly including multiple cable companies, to agree on a common data format with which to publish program information and then get them, to, um... you know. Do it.

Dude, it took Comcast upwards of three months to replace my defective DVR. What makes you think all the studios are going to jump on top of getting this done? Do you really think anyone is going to say, "Well, Sci Fi channel won't update my Myth TV. Looks like I'm not watching Battlestar Galactica anymore"?

Re:This is troubling

[SEAL]

and since no one is going to tolerate ads on their MythTV, or pay for the service, this is unlikely

Given the choice between:

1. paying Comcast's fees, DVR service, etc
2. paying Tivo or
3. paying for a subscription to an XML TV Listing service, and keeping my MythTV box

I'll take #3.

People will pay for it as long as no free alternatives are out there.

Re:This is troubling

[athakur999]

Also gotta consider that many broadcasters aren't exactly thrilled about DVRs... They rely on advertising to make money and aren't going to freely help people with a device that most people are going to use to skip advertising.

Re:This is troubling

[vux984]

They rely on advertising to make money and aren't going to freely help people with a device that most people are going to use to skip advertising.

They seem to forget that a substantial chunk of those viewers wouldn't be watching at ALL, if it weren't for DVRs. I like a show that's on when I'm usually playing with my kids. If I didn't have a DVR, I wouldn't watch that show period. Yes, I skip through many of the commericials during playback, but not all of them, and not if the commercial catches my eye, or is for a product I'm interested in. I even rewind to watch a commercial from the start (like if I skip into the middle of a Mac/PC ad I haven't already seen) etc.

Before I had a DVR I hit mute and/or pipped the commercials while I browsed the channel guide, or checked on the hockey game, or something. Its not like I was sitting there 'attentively watching' all the ads before.

I expect advertisers are probably losing eyeballs overall as people adopt DVRs, but its probably not nearly the issue they think it is.

Re:This is troubling

[fm6]

and since no one is going to tolerate ads on their MythTV, or pay for the service, this is unlikely

Why not? Because TV listings want to be free?

I can't see anyone needing an XML TV listings feed unless they have cable or satellite. Old fashioned newspaper (or web) listings are perfectly adequate if you only get a half-dozen TV stations. (If they're not, you need to get out more anyway.) It's when you have access to dozens of channels that you need high-tech help to filter out the stuff you want to watch from the firehose of crap. (Excuse the image!) So if you're paying $50/month, you shouldn't complain at having to pay few extra bucks for a feed. Of course, a lot of people will complain anyway, but a lot of people have an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.

What would really kill such a service is the same thing that killed the Zap2It service: people will subscribe and repurpose the stream for commercial use, just like they did for the Zap2It feed. Why is that fatal? Because the data has to come from somewhere. Unless you're going to sit down and write your own summaries of thousands of TV shows, you're going to use existing summaries. And if you do, then you have to have permission from whoever wrote these summaries. That's permission you're not going to get if you can't guarantee that nobody will repurpose and resell your data.

Re:This is troubling

[babyrat]

and since no one is going to tolerate ads on their MythTV, or pay for the service, this is unlikely

No-one is willing to pay for the service? I would be willing to pay a reasonable price ($50/year???) in order to get TV listings for MythTV.

Re:This is troubling

[opieum]

Actually a thought occured that perhaps an apt-get like repository could be setup for the listings. It could help in downloading the latest content listings and such. Or just pick up a TV guide and call it a day.

Re:This is troubling

[One Louder]

That may be true, the the broadcasters don't give a crap whether or not you watch or care about their programs. The programs are only there to make you watch the ads - it's the only way they make money. The eyeballs watching ads are the only eyeballs they care about, not the ones watching shows. Programs *cost* them money.

Re:This is troubling

[Reverend528]

Isn't there any way to obtain this information in an "open-source" manner?

The best possible "open source" solution would be to create some sort of wiki for tv listing data.

Re:This is troubling

[Ucklak]

Some people might find this hard to belive but on the business side of things, the commercials are considered content and the programming is considered filler.

Re:This is troubling

[Line_Fault]

They are commercial!!

Zap2It is "Tribune Media Services, Inc", they provide "bulk" guide data to large TV services, such as Telco's(IPTV) and Satellite providers.
http://www.tms.tribune.com/products.html

Re:This is troubling

[conufsed]

I use XMLTV feeds, and where I am in .au I only get 6 channels. Why? There are some shows I like watching, and TV stations here are quite good at stuffing around with schedules, so I just set MythTV to record the shows I like whenever they are on, and for this I use XMLTV via tvguide.org.au (community ran site which collects together TV schedules) TV stations here have said they won't make this info freely available, and we can't scrape it as its copyrighted information.

Re:This is troubling

[CerebusUS]

Isn't there any way to obtain this information in an "open-source" manner?

The best possible "open source" solution would be to create some sort of wiki for tv listing data.

Right. Cause what I want most in the world is to be the guy that discovers that the Battlestar Galactica entry got replaced by Discovery Network's real life surgery series (or CSPAN) right when my Myth TV went to update it.

The data can't be peer-reviewed, as there no way to verify it until it happens. It needs to come from an authoritative source. Especially when NBC starts shifting or super-sizing their sitcoms...

Re:This is troubling

[vux984]

If I'm not watching the show at all. I'm *certainly* not watching the ads.
DVRs, by enabling me to watch a show, give advertisers the 'opportunity' to see ads I wouldn't otherwise see.

Re:This is troubling

[Anonymous Coward]

about as convenient as attempting to negotiate with your Cable company to get them to carry broadcast networks in HD unencrypted Huh what? That is true of many, if not most, cable companies. (I am unsure if there is an FCC mandate over this, but there have been rumblings of new mandates like this.)

Re:This is troubling

[Cramer]

... to get them to carry broadcast networks in HD unencrypted ...

If the cable operator carries the HD content of a broadcast station, it MUST be unencrypted. The FCC has zero tolerance on this point.

Re:This is troubling

[dthree]

That is the first time I've ever seen "PIP" used as a verb. Nicely done.

Re:This is troubling

[Paradise Pete]

I'm a little shocked that these guys didn't just go commercial, though

Maybe they are. If they had instead announced that they would start charging then people would rebel and complain about them being greedy pigs. This way they just take it away, then respond to the outcry by saying "OK, OK, we'll bring it back as a small subscription service."

Re:This is troubling

[Danse]

and we can't scrape it as its copyrighted information.

Law and Order comes on at 1am, 2am, 3am, 4am, 5am, etc. This is a fact. How can that fact be copyrighted?

Re:This is troubling

[Anonymous Coward]

Well Dish Network currently broadcasts guide data in the dvb standard. They broadcast it unencrypted, so its free for anyone to see. Could this be used where someone with a Myth box just hooked up a dvb tuner and dish JUST for the program guide? And maybe a few unencrypted music channels. You can't get anything else, since its all encrypted.

Re:This is troubling

[1u3hr]

stations here have said they won't make this info freely available, and we can't scrape it as its copyrighted information.

You can't copyright information. Court cases in various countries have found that telephone listings, and databases in general lack the qualities (creativity, basically) to be copyrightable. Online, Google scrapes news sites, lots of sites scrape eBay. Summarising information, especially not-for-profit, is generally accepted as fair use even if the original information is copyright. Of course,large companies can still threaten you with lawyers regardless of merit.

Re:This is troubling

[Vengeance_au]

In Australia, I've been using reliably for over 2 years (it has been around longer) the Oztivo TV Guide data, which is community created, supported and maintained. It was originally set up by a group of people who imported Tivo devices to Australia, where there is no Tivo data available. This data has been extended so there are now Mythtv and MCE scripts to allow access to the data. I've found the data to be better than some of the Aussie pay-services, purely because the guys who maintain the data are using it as well, so have a vested interest in making it as useful as possible. This service supports TV across all the states and regional centers in Australia, as well as the cable and satellite channels.

I'm guessing it's down to a need - in the US, there has not been a need for this kind of community data source, as Zap2It has been a free source. Now that it's gone, I'd be guessing there will be multiple US community based solutions springing up within weeks, and within 6-12 months most will fall away or aggrigate, leaving one or two that everyone uses.

Re:This is troubling

[SeaFox]

...and to combine your post with the parent, many broadcasters, who include cable companies, aren't thrilled about DVR's. The last thing they are going to want to do is distribute the listings for their studio's channels for free for MythTV boxes that are directly competing with the CableCo's DVR offerings.

Re:This is troubling

[falstaff]

Zap2it must have a source for the information. Where do they get the feed? Does anyone know?

Re:This is troubling

[nsaspook]

The men in the black suits are now knocking at your door.

Re:This is troubling

[russotto]

Unfortunately, Option 3 is not available. Nobody sells XML listings retail, and you probably can't afford wholesale (the minimum mentioned in the forums is $500/month/market). Looks like zap2it only wants to deal with people "in the trade".

Re:This is troubling

[Nerd4News]

Yes, I skip through many of the commericials during playback, but not all of them, and not if the commercial catches my eye, or is for a product I'm interested in. I even rewind to watch a commercial from the start (like if I skip into the middle of a Mac/PC ad I haven't already seen) etc.

Funny, I rewind for the babes.

Re:This is troubling

[Jafafa Hots]

Actually, the commercials are the content, the programs are the BAIT. The eyeballs that the bait ensnares are the product that the broadcasters sell to their customers.

Re:This is troubling

[gbulmash]

"Zap2it must have a source for the information. Where do they get the feed? Does anyone know?"

They have a staff that collects and compiles the data, and maintains the relationships to get it, because they sell the data feed to newspapers and other services. "Zap2It" is just one of the consumer facing facets of a massive media conglomerate that recently reported $1.2 billion in operating revenues during the first quarter of 2007.

- Greg

Re:This is troubling

[meregistered]

Good point.

I hope your right. Not currently using MythTV but planning on building a box in the next few months. I will do it without a service to support the movement but that would really suck.

Re:This is troubling

[meregistered]

I definitely agree.

To both your pick of #3 and your statement

People will pay for it as long as no free alternatives are out there

Re:This is troubling

[meregistered]

I see the attempts of networks to limit our ability to DVR their shows as a more mild form of the same type of stupidity that the RIAA uses when they try to limit our ability to download music.
It's a new opportunity for you to make money, idiots!
Here's a little proof of intelligence showing through the idiocy: ahref=http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060407/17 20246.shtml/rel=url2html-29223http://www.techdirt. com/articles/20060407/1720246.shtml/>
(please read the second comment down... someone who says they are an advertiser...)

Re:This is troubling

[complexgeek]

Except in .au the phonebook is indeed copyrighted. The main telco Telstra and their information services arm Sensis have successfully shutdown businesses selling phonebooks on CD. I'm not sure of any legal cases, but at least one network has claimed their TV listings are copyright as well.

Re:This is troubling

[NoMaster]

As the OP said, he's in .au. Here, due to some legal oddities involving telephone numbers, it is copyrighted information. There's an ongoing case between Nine (who now own HWW, the TV guide aggregators) and IceTV over IceTV's provision of a downloadable guide service for PVRs. IceTV claim that their guide is based on history, common knowledge, and the network's own advertisements (i.e. facts & public knowledge); Nine claim that it's not - and even if it was, that doesn't matter, because it's the facts, not the collation of them, that's copyrighted. And strictly speaking, under Australian law, they're right.

As an aside, one of the other networks here has announced the introduction of Tivo. Many people seem to think that this will guarantee a free, hopefully EIT-based, EPG for everybody, based on conditions in the Broadcasting Services Act. To them, I'd say "go and read the Act - particularly, focus on the differences between the requirements for commercial broadcasters and national broadcasters (i.e. the ABC & SBS)". You'll see the Act was modified last year, and doesn't require commercial broadcasters to share guide information at all...

I haven't got it on hand, and it's been a while, but I seem to remember it being Sections 2 & 3, subsection 20-something?

Re:This is troubling

[NoMaster]

Further background info, in handy bite-sized YouTube videos:

IceTV case - Lateline, 16/10/06
IceTV case - Lateline, 17/10/06

Re:This is troubling

[Anonymous Coward]

Given the choice between:

1. paying Comcast's fees, DVR service, etc
2. paying Tivo or
3. paying for a subscription to an XML TV Listing service, and keeping my MythTV box

I'll take #3.

I don't want to sound like a Microsoft shill, but if you already have a MythTV box, isn't there the option of installing Windows XP Media Center Edition or Vista Home Premium (both around $130 OEM) on the MythTV box's hardware? Most MythTV hardware should have MS Media Center drivers, right? Microsoft's program guide comes free (no subscriptions) with the OS.

Re:This is troubling

[1u3hr]

Except in .au the phonebook is indeed copyrighted. The main telco Telstra and their information services arm Sensis have successfully shutdown businesses selling phonebooks on CD. I'm not sure of any legal cases, but at least one network has claimed their TV listings are copyright as well

I find this hard to believe. Did they actually win a court ruling, or just intimidate with legal threats?

As for "claim", businesses "claim" lots of things they have no right to.

Re:This is troubling

[babbling]

Don't TV guides get published in the US? Wouldn't taking the data from these be considered "fair use", and wouldn't other people be able to check their own guides to confirm that the wiki was most likely correct?

Re:This is troubling

[makomk]

There already is a suitable data format - it's called xmltv, and MythTV already supports it.

Re:This is troubling

[QuijiboIsAWord]

It's a bit late for this comments, but just to follow up:
Yes, they are required to carry it unencrypted, if they carry it. I've had direct experience with companies that either "accidently" encrypt it, as well as at least one that flat out stated that if since they weren't allowed to encrypt it, they wouldn't carry it either.
My statement was intended to cover both.

Re:This is troubling

[elrous0]

No one who has used a Tivo or other PVR for any length of time will EVER voluntarily go back to the "program it yourself, manually" days of the VCR.

As for the "firehose of crap" argument, I can tell you that IMHO, broadcast TV in (here in the U.S. at least) is garbage. The real creativity and originality can only be found on the cable channels (largely because, unlike broadcast TV, they're not regulated by the strong-arm of the FCC). So being able to filter through those many cable channels is pretty important to many of us.

I gave up the MythTV box myself some time ago, when I got digital cable and HDTV. A lot of people valued it because it was the one OSS PVR, and so protected them against crap like the "broadcast flag," DRM restrictions (not being able to burn a DVD of your programs, for example), and forced advertising. Unfortunately, the listings weakness was always there, and now threatens to turn MythTV boxes into glorified VCR's.

Re:This is troubling

[elrous0]

How many channels are included on this voluntary service? You should know that, in the U.S. at least, a cable subscriber can easily be dealing with 500+ channels. Even the ultra-basic, low-end cable customer is going to have about 75-100 channels. The only people still left here without cable or satellite are very unlikely to be MythTV or PVR users (grandma, cousin hillbilly, Professor I'm-too-good-for-TV-I-just-read-books, etc.).

That would take a pretty substantial volunteer effort.

Re:This is troubling

[spxero]

Interesting links. On a side note, would you mind explaining the apparel worn by the men walking in? Is that standard Judge garb, or standard Lawyer attire?

Re:This is troubling

[PetiePooo]

Microsoft's program guide comes free (no subscriptions) with the OS.

... and that may be the next step for Myth: retrieve guide information from MS as if it were a Media Center PC.

At least until MS intenitonally breaks compatibility. It'll be like the IM client wars all over again...

Re:This is troubling

[Waffle Iron]

The data can't be peer-reviewed, as there no way to verify it until it happens. It needs to come from an authoritative source. Especially when NBC starts shifting or super-sizing their sitcoms...

Um, I've already been shafted by that and other scheduling screwups many times with the supposedly "authoritative" data direct from Zap2It. How would a wiki be any worse?

My guess is that the quality of the info would end up similar to that of the FreeDB for CD tracks: lots of typos, but very rarely totally wrong.

Re:This is troubling

[Yer Mom]

That is the first time I've ever seen "PIP" used as a verb.

Clearly, you've never used CP/M...

Re:This is troubling

[Torg]

#4 Use EIT http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/EIT

If you are getting your TV from an ATSC, DVB-S or DVB-C card you can probably (I say probably because I have not tried every combination), use EIT. In fact I use EIT on my ATSC cards to ensure Zap2It (it is really DiataDirect), is correct.

Re:This is troubling

[fm6]

Dude, you are the classic "Everybody's like me" Slashdot Asshat. You're willing to spend huge amounts on HDTV hardware and cable, and you're still lecturing me on the economics of PVRs. Sure, if I still had cable, I'd want a PVR (it's a waste to have cable if you can't find and record all the good shit that's on channel 133 at 3 am). But I refuse to spend the money. A small screen and a Netflix subscription is all I need.

Yeah, most of (but not all) the creativity has migrated to cable. But I'm not going to spend $70 a month to see it on cable, when I can wait a few months and see in Netflix for $15 a month.

Re:This is troubling

[Danse]

As the OP said, he's in .au. Here, due to some legal oddities involving telephone numbers, it is copyrighted information.

Wow. I really thought that the US had the worst copyright laws in the world, but apparently Australia has gone above and beyond. I'm impressed. Wow.

Re:This is troubling

[dmsuperman]

Last I checked Man Vs. Wild isn't on Netflix, it's a show, hence the purchasing of the cable service.

Re:This is troubling

[slazzy]

I think those ATI cards come with built in TV guide support - maybe someone could tap into their feeds?

Re:This is troubling

[Reverend528]

Wouldn't taking the data from these be considered "fair use",

Well, the schedule itself is a list of facts and not subject to copyright. The episode descriptions can be copyrighted and it might be hard to claim "fair use" on them. However, the descriptions could be easily replaced.

Re:This is troubling

[elrous0]

That's all fine. But you're not the kind of person who would be using MythTV, now are you? I seriously doubt that many people who don't even have cable or satellite are using a PVR, much less one that's so complicated to set up.

Re:This is troubling

[tepples]

Except in .au the phonebook is indeed copyrighted. The main telco Telstra and their information services arm Sensis have successfully shutdown businesses selling phonebooks on CD. I like to keep track of exactly how copyright, patent, and trademark law statutes and precedents differ among the common law countries. Under United States law, Feist v. Rural went one way (exhaustive phone directory is entirely factual and therefore not original enough to qualify for copyright). So under Australian law, can anyone tell me the name of this case that went the other way?

Re:This is troubling

[tepples]

The data can't be peer-reviewed, as there no way to verify it until it happens. It needs to come from an authoritative source. And that's why Wikipedia invented the <ref> tag (to cite the reliable source that provided a given fact) and the recent changes patrol (to identify people who change listings to be contrary to their references).

Re:This is troubling

[NoMaster]

The robes and bibs? Standard barrister / Queen's Counsel attire - upper-level lawyers, basically. I believe it was only about 10 years ago that wearing of wigs (aka "dead sheep") was made optional instead of mandatory.

Note that this case is before the Federal Court, effectively the highest normal court in the land - the High Court, one last step above, is primarily for constitutional / government matters and final appeals of lower court decisions. I don't think normal solicitors can appear as primary counsel before the Federal or High courts - they have to hire a barrister or QC to present for them.

FWIW, strictly speaking we don't have 'lawyers' here; the legally-correct term is 'solicitors', although you'll see a lot of them advertising as 'lawyers'. 30+ years of American TV influence has conditioned people to expect/think of lawyers for legal matters, and they probably think 'solicitors' means 'young ladies who hang around city street-corners at night'...

Re:This is troubling

[BLKMGK]

If that were the case then there would be FAR fewer people bitching about the fees TIVO charges! Part of the fees for TIVO goes to paying for a reliable guide service and it just works, much like a toaster.

Re:This is troubling

[donarb]

Here's the trial decision:

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/federal_ct/ 2001/612.html

Here's the decision on appeal:

http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/cases/cth/FCAFC/2002/ 112.html

Oh no!

[Anonymous Coward]

Time to apply the EIT patches and rebuild myth.

Re:Oh no!

[dgatwood]

For those folks with DirecTV, that's not an option. In fact, at this point, we have no options at all other than writing a guide scraper for TVGuide.com. Fortunately, their website data is fetched in Javascript using xmlHttpRequest, so it is probably straight XML in some dialect that could be converted into the same format as Zap2It uses with very little effort. If done carefully (request the entire schedule exactly once, then only refetch the current day each day and fetch any new days added to the schedule), it might not add enough server hits for them to even care.

Re:Oh no!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is something for linux that provides tv listings in a variety of formats. Unfotunately XML is not one of them. Looks like the software costs $29 but can give text info and html. Seems that it gets the data from TVNow.
http://unihedron.com/projects/tvnow/tvnow.php
http://www.tv-now.com//index.html

Re:Oh no!

[ChrisMaple]

I don't know about the schedule format, but TVGuide.com just changed their search result format for at least the second time in two years. Writing a new shell script each time the format changes is a real nuisance.

Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[Palmyst]

Their website does not explain. Is just using the data in MythTV, "abuse"?

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[ajs]

I think the "abuse" they're talking about is programs that are pre-configured to hit their service so that everyone on the Net who tries them out hammers their servers.

It seems fair to start charging, but odd that they're just shutting it off. They say they're willing to license to other companies, so presumably they're hoping someone will come along and offer a package to the MythTV folks by licensing the data and re-selling subscriptions.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[ChaosDiscord]

Based on their previous complaints and this message, I think the problem was people were using the free data set, then redistributing it, probably for profit, possibly indirectly (say, selling devices that used Zap2It's free service). Zap2It makes money selling their data set and they were very generously offering it for free to individuals. But you weren't allow to redistribute it.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[Skater]

No. They specifically allowed it, all you had to do was answer a couple questions quarterly to renew the subscription. I'm not sure how people abused it, other than by maybe hitting too hard. Once a day should be sufficient, you'd think - pick up info for the "new" day as well as changes since the last time you checked. But, if you instead picked up a full two weeks every time you hit it, thrice daily, I can see how that'd be a problem for them...

Or if someone picked up the data, then rebroadcast it somehow...

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[ajayrockrock]

No. For us, all you had to do was register with labs.zap2it.com and then you can get the listings for private non-commercial use. So we (mythtv users) weren't abusing the system. I imagine that the abuse they are talking about is people signing up for the service and then reselling their data (that they themselves aggregate from other sources).

--Ajay

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[tgatliff]

I am sure they are talking about bandwidth bottlenecks because of updating times. The problem with MythTV in the early days was everyone updating at the same time, in addition to updating multiple times per day. This was resolved later on with a new feature to spread this out. Their response seems dis-ingenious, though, because if they would have just open up their data, an rsync backup server(s) at the university level would have been trivial to setup. Meaning, use the same approach as who OSS binaries are stored. I suspect this is what the longterm solution will be for mythtv.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[Minwee]

According to a posting on mythtv.org...

Some reasons and other comments given for the scheduled discontinuence, copied from the forum, copied from the mailing list:

• Continued use of the service to support commercial products, in violation of the agreement.
• Commercial products continued to grow despite previous appeals that this activity stop.
• There are significant changes to the supporting data structure forthcoming and we could not devote resources to the continued upkeep and enhancements of the service.
• Maintenance of the service is impacting our resource pool for other projects.
• We sought alternative options but were unable to find a solution.
• We recognize the hardship this creates for the user community. We are open to alternative solutions and would consider proposals that met the needs of the user community and our company.
• We looked into options to turn this into a paid service however we do not have the infrastructure at this time.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[Applekid]

While no longer linked from the front page, this link still works.

Basically, the content was provided free provided it remained for non-commercial use. After all, commercial ventures have to pay for those listings and if they could get it for free, nobody would pay.

I hope they at least tried to weed out the abusers before just cutting the cable.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[norton_I]

I think using the data stream in a commercial application/device was a violation of the TOS. The small number of pre-built mythtv systems for sale might constitute a violation, though I suspect that is a tiny amount.

What would be a problem for them is if TiVo or another commercial DVR, got an indivdual subscription to their service, and used that to do their client updates. This is a big part of their target market, so losing it would be a big deal. The suspicious part of me wonders if such a company did that deliberately to force zap2it to turn off their service, crippling their OSS competition.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[tigerc]

I don't think it was the hammering of their servers. There's an option in mythtv to mythfilldatabase at a time that's good for Zap2it. I'm not sure exactly what the option is called, but when I setup myth, it was there.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I'm not sure how people abused it, other than by maybe hitting too hard. Once a day should be sufficient, you'd think - pick up info for the "new" day as well as changes since the last time you checked. But, if you instead picked up a full two weeks every time you hit it, thrice daily, I can see how that'd be a problem for them...

Maybe they abused it by not hitting it often enough.

Remember, a few months ago, after a long beta, the website version of zap2it finally killed its old tables-and-HTML look to force everyone to use the styles-and-CSS look? And how the biggest difference wasn't the increased standards compliance, but the fact that you suddenly needed to "register" to get a 6-hour view rather than the default 3-hour view, and how all the things that had formerly been done with form submit buttons stopped working unless Javashit was turned on? Gosh, what a coincidence.

It's all about the ad impressions. 6-hour-view website users, hitting SaveAs four times a day (perhaps as infrequently as 28 hits, once a week)... don't make enough impressions to sell banner ads. So no 6-hour-view unless you give 'em an email address they can spam. MythTV users were only hitting the feed once a day, and without banner ads, and producing even less ad revenue.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sure they are talking about bandwidth bottlenecks because of updating times.

No, that is definitely not the reason. That was (and continues to be) a bit of a problem but they appear to be talking about people fraudulently redistributing the feed. I think that what is happening is that one or more TV tuner manufacturers are redistributing the free feed as part of their PVR product. This is a specific violation of the contract and probably impacts Zap2It's contract with the media companies.

A cynical man might also raise the possibility that the media companies are making a bigger deal of these allegations in an effort to further monetize or suppress this distribution of information.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[jez9999]

Who woulda thought that freeloading would result in the collapse of a company's business model? Oh well, doesn't matter, right? I mean the Slashdot model is, "your business model doesn't have a right to succeed", yeah?

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[dgatwood]

The whole point of DataDirect is that there were no ad impressions. It was entirely a back end thing done by your MythTV box, and that's how it was intended to be used. So no, not hitting it often enough would not be a cause for dropping the service. If anything, the opposite is true.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[dgatwood]

A cynical man might also raise the possibility that the media companies are making a bigger deal of these allegations in an effort to further monetize or suppress this distribution of information.

And a wise cynical man would use that to his advantage. We should compile a list containing a single primary point of contact for each cable provider so that all complaints go to a single person so that they don't get lost in the noise. Then, everyone should write a letter saying that their primary source of program information is going away in October or whatever, and that if they will not come up with an alternative means of providing guide data, you will have no reason to continue subscribing to their service.

I can almost guarantee that at least for the big cable/satellite providers like Comcast and DirecTV, the thousands of letters they would receive would be enough to get someone's attention. Then, maybe we'd see these companies actually trying to make things better for their customers instead of pretending the problem doesn't exist.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[Lijemo]

"It seems fair to start charging, but odd that they're just shutting it off. They say they're willing to license to other companies,..."

The infrastructure required to sell to businesses/institutions and the infrastructure required to sell to individuals is completely different.

In one model, salespeople develop personal relationships with contacts at the customer locations, discuss their needs with them, put together a custom package, and then make a small number of large transactions. Also, in the B2B model you don't need to provide the front-line "my computer's coffee holder broke" level of support to end-users: the customer deals with their users first, and only passes on to you the customer support they can't solve easily. In this model you advertise in trade journals, trade shows, and relevant conferences.

In another model you are advertising via mass media, processing a very large number of much smaller transactions. You have to keep track of a lot more customer data-- and if you offer online purchasing, then you don't have the easy answer of keeping customer data secure by just not connecting it to the internet. You have to offer a much higher volume of customer service calls from a much less technical variety of enduser.

Switching from B2B to B2C (or vice-versa for that matter) is a huge expense in terms of money, time, and energy, but generally not much chance of reward.If you're good at one of these two models, then you have no reason to switch to the other; if you're bad at the one you're doing now, then you aren't very likely to survive the costs and turmoil of the switch.

Thus, as someone that works for a company that sells to institutions but not to individuals, it doesn't surprise me in the least that they aren't changing their entire business model.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[canajin56]

Well exactly, having a pay service but giving free access to individuals minus redistribution rights, and no way of enforcing it or even checking it, isn't going to succeed. There's no law that says whatever decision you make, you are guaranteed to be successful. Unfortunately the way you fix a broken business model is to change it. In this case the bit that was causing problems was having identical pay and free versions, and trusting people not to use the free version if they should be paying, and the way you fix that is just have a pay version.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[El_Smack]

"We looked into options to turn this into a paid service however we do not have the infrastructure at this time."

So:

1. GET the infrastructure. Beg, Borrow, Steal. Make it happen.
2. Put a disclaimer up that says "We will now aggregate data and sell it to anyone who pays for it. If that bugs you, feel free not to use us. Otherwise, please enjoy not having to change a thing."
3. Then sell that data to whoever will pay for it.
4. Chuckle all the way to the bank.

Sounds like someone is thinking small, here.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[ChaosDiscord]

I think you're trying to suggest that Slashdot readers are, generally, hypocrites because they don't care if new technology or business models drive old ones out of business. Of course, that's utter nonsense. This isn't about Zap2It's business model being harmed by new technology or new business models. This is about Zap2It offering something to individuals for free out of simple generosity. This generosity has been abused and does threaten their business model, so they going to stop being generous. Zap2It doesn't suffer in the slightest, only those who benefited from their generosity do.

Now, if a third party started giving away television schedules without relying on Zap2It's data, harming Zap2It's business model, then we'd be on the same ground. Of course, if that happened and Zap2It whined about it, I don't think you'd see much sympathy here.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[CerebusUS]

having a pay service but giving free access to individuals minus redistribution rights, and no way of enforcing it or even checking it,

I'm pretty sure they had a way to check it. All you have to do is throw in some bad data and watch for it to show up in odd places. Pollstar does it all the time.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[PhotoGuy]

What about them providing the data set to an open source third party to redistribute for non-commercial purposes? Then there would be no abuse per se of Zap2It's service/site, and the open source community could bear the cost of the bandwidth, interoperability, and dealing with baddies...

Maybe the terms on which they receive their data wouldn't allow it, but it might be worth exploring.

(Another option might be a community-based effort; I'd be willing to bang in one week's worth of listings for a given provider each year. If 52 people, per broadcaster, were wililng to do the same, we could have an open and free listing source...)

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Does anybody know if there's a version of Bittorrent that does public key authentication?

If so, this seems pretty easy. (like I need another business to run...)

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[Cramer]

Ok, who's going to fork over the MILLIONS necessary to build this "new" company? People, offices, servers, metric butt loads of bandwidth... this things add up fast. And at the end of the day, very few people will be willing to pay what it will take to make such a service profitable. I see enough people bitching about paying Tivo, Inc. $6.95 - $12.95 per month for guide data, software development, and customer support. And Tivo still isn't making a profit. So, wtf makes you think there are enough MythTV users out there willing to pay anything for guide data? I bet you 100$ more people will resort to scraping web pages before they'll *gulp* P. A. Y. for guide listings for their complicated homebrew "tivo". (btw, that's exactly what they were doing before Zap2It Labs.)

I'm thinking this sounds like a good job for Google, Inc. They already have the infrastructure. (and a wad of cash the size of a small moon.)

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[LordKazan]

No, mythtv was explicitly permitted - they issued mythTV a service code for registering

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[Skater]

Yeah, as the other person said, I used DataDirect and have never seen what you're talking about, and I've been using it for years. If they wanted more ad impressions, why would they offer the DataDirect service in the first place?

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[volkris]

The Slashdot model? No.

No business model has a right to succeed. They succeed or fail based on the reaction of the market, whether they fill a need and get people to fork over cash.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[soundonsound]

I think the "abuse" is that the Tribune Company bleeds money, and the new owner isn't looking to put money into an essentially free service.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[Nerd4News]

I think the "abuse" they're talking about is programs that are pre-configured to hit their service so that everyone on the Net who tries them out hammers their servers.

They've effectively doubled their server hammering from their web grid with the changes they made a few weeks ago. They changed the date and time dropdowns to some stupid java applets (or whatever they are). Now instead of selecting the time and date then hitting enter, the damned page reloads automatically after each selection. Double the hits and double the bandwidth for one page update. Not sure what moron thought that was "better".

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[LordSnooty]

Except you'll also have to monitor your channel for the entire week and make any last-minute amendments (e.g. plane crash doco pulled due to real plane crash). And how many broadcasters are there in the US? A lot, I'd imagine.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[LordKronos]

Honestly, I don't want user entered data for my MythTV. I really don't want to be recording every rerun because some user typo-ed the episode number, or worse yet...not picking up the episode because somebody typo-ed the show name. Yes, peer review the data and let other people fix the errors....like a wiki or something. But that's a lot more complicated...now you have to worry about people mischievously corrupting the data.

Plus, there is just so much info in there that I believe would never get hand entered at all. Things like original air date, plot summary, actor list, etc.

Re:Anybody know what the "abuse" was?

[ajs]

Thus, as someone that works for a company that sells to institutions but not to individuals, it doesn't surprise me in the least that they aren't changing their entire business model. I don't think anyone was suggesting that they change their business model. However, they really should have just thrown out an API by which their pre-existing free consumer service could have been subscribed to by apps like MythTV, should their developers desire to use it. It's about a week of work to design and deploy such a protocol, and another week to set up the e-commerce piece that backs it up. After that you don't advertise or push it at all, it's just a service that either makes money or prevents the loss of money from unfunded bandwidth bleeding. Either way, problem solved.

Just shutting it off seems a poor choice.

How is MythTV dead?

[PolyDwarf]

... Without a data feed of this type, users will be reduced to scraping websites at best. Is this going to be a killing blow for MythTV?" I fail to see how, unless the screenscrapers specifically mentioned don't work. I wrote a scraper for my MythTV box to pull PPV information from somewhere, since it wasn't coming from Zap2it. It's not that hard, really, and took me all of an hour to do.

Re:How is MythTV dead?

[kalirion]

But...but... scrapers are so inelegant!

Re:How is MythTV dead?

[wicks0r]

It's not that hard, really, and took me all of an hour to do. Yes but the hard part comes when users need data scrapped for various states/countries for local programming, as well as digital programming. Having data come from a single source saved us a lot of time.

Re:How is MythTV dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but they can change the format whenever they want so the scrapers have to be maintained. Also, you have to worry about the format. It's easy enough to strip stuff out of HTML, but soon enough you're going to see listings embedded in Flash or Java applets, or worse, custom controls. Something like freedb would be ideal, but it has to be constantly updated and you have to rely on anonymous fucktards.

Re:How is MythTV dead?

[*ThE jEsTeR oF dArKn]

Why couldn't the company just share its listing info using a BitTorrent type system and update it that way? All users would have it, and its updating would be very fast, esp. once it fanned out across the 'Net. And if anyone would try to inject some malicious content into it, it would be drowned out by the shear amount of legit data (of course utilizing some kind of hashing/error checking service to make sure its legit)

Re:How is MythTV dead?

[dgatwood]

Fortunately, most folks are moving away from crap like Flash and Java because they're too hard to maintain. The trend these days is towards AJAX (the X standing for XML), which means that things are becoming easier to scrape, not harder.

Re:How is MythTV dead?

[RealSurreal]

Actually my Myth box gets its programme data straight off the digital TV feed over the air. No need to download anything else. This is Freeview DVB-T in the UK, BTW.

Re:How is MythTV dead?

[timeOday]

My home-made PVR used a yahoo screen scraper for a few years without problems, but then they started changing their site more often. It does get annoying to have your application randomly breaking and having to go and figure out what it is yet again.

Re:How is MythTV dead?

[geminidomino]

Not when you don't have a digital receiver, it doesn't.

Re:How is MythTV dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well since he said he does have a digital receiver, it surely does for him, which is all he claimed. As a matter of fact, this is also how my MythTV setup works, the only downside it that the listings are only for the next 7 days. Since I'm in the UK, I could also download the listings from radiotimes.com using xmltv for free and get 2 weeks listings, but I couldn't get it working first time and am not bothered enough to fix it.

Re:How is MythTV dead?

[jubei]

This is why you need to add another layer. The product has to provide a web server that lists up to date URLs and RegEx patterns, so that even when the site breaks the parsing, it can be fixed and deployed seemlessly before the users' cached data expires.

There must be a way

[jrwr00]

Some body will buck up and make a deal with someone,

if there is a major cry for a service, somebody will make a paid or a free one, maybe the mythTV devs should make their own service, i think this would be better

Re:There must be a way

[Anonymous Coward]

This just screems like something google might be interested in doing. If they could track what you watch on TV they could taylor ads to your interests more.

Achilles Heel

[L. VeGas]

I first became aware of MythTV some years ago from a developer that was excitedly working on the project. With all the effort that was going on at the time, nobody seemed to have a clear-cut idea of a long-term, stable way of getting TV listings. "Scraping web pages" was the only plan.

Looks like five years later, it's still the only plan.

Re:Achilles Heel

[pla]

Looks like five years later, it's still the only plan.

A solution will appear.

Even if the community can't somehow come up with a solution agreeable to Zap2It, this seems like quite a good opportunity for someone to make a few bucks...

How long does it take to manually enter a channel guide each day? An hour at most? Now Imagine tens of thousands of Myth users each paying one dollar per month for listing that you provide via a handful of minumum-wage employees getting it from the daily newspaper. You wouldn't even need all that much duplication, really, since only a handful of cable companies provide service to the vast majority of the US - You'd just need to stay up-to-date on local mappings of what the various CableCos offer in each region.

Hmmm... Excuse me, I need to go file for a patent and a business license... ;-)

Re:Achilles Heel

[misleb]

How long does it take to manually enter a channel guide eachday?

*A* channel guide? Doesn't each region/country/cable company/type of service (and every combination thereof) have its own listings? And you need it more than each day, you need listings for shows a week or more in advance so customers can plan their recording schedules. You'd also need to keep up to date with schedule changes, channel additions/subtractions, etc. And on top THAT, DVRs need more information that newspaper's provide. Is the show a repeat? Is the show already recorded (unique identifiers)? Full title for the episode w/ brief summaries.

Trying to do all this manually (from a newspaper!?!?) would be a nightmare and totally unreliable.

-matthew

Re:Achilles Heel

[Cramer]

Yep. Because people would rather spend more time and money building their own "crap" than buy a commercial product and pay for a subscription to tv listings.

Sometimes I'm amazed by how cheap people can be.

Re:Achilles Heel

[Cramer]

Ok, so you'll need to get a handful of people in every DMA to key in the guide data for every station in that DMA. Every. Day. At least a day ahead of time. That'll cover the thousand or so broadcast stations. This doesn't address how they know what's going to be on -- paying for newspapers, TV Guide, etc. or manually reentering data from various web pages.

And then get a second bunch of suckers, err, people to do the same for all the premium/non-broadcast channels. (btw, some of them don't even update their own listings correctly.)

In total, it'll take thousands of people all over the country constantly pushing updates. TMS has a dedicated, experienced staff with direct data feeds from the stations... and they still mess it up frequently. One might think this is just like CDDB, but TV listings are highly dynamic and time sensitive making it much more difficult to maintain -- nobody cares what was on last week; MythTV cannot record things in the past. It's closest to the undertaking of Moiveminder... and that was more than enough work for a dozen people to keep up with the slowly changing movie listings for RDU. TV lists are many orders of magnitude more work.

The best you could do is what Tivo, ReplayTV, cable companies, DISH, DTV, et. al. do... get a commercial data feed from TMS, transform it for the specific system(s) and push it to the receivers. This is VERY non-free. It takes infrastructure... mainly people and bandwidth. And then people will do to you what they've been doing to zap2it/xmltv... buy one account and use it on thousands of commercial systems.

I would love to see someone sell tv listing data feeds. It's far cheaper and more useful than dead-tree listings. Neither TV Guide nor local newspapers provide a "digital subscription." However, this still wouldn't address those cheap bastards that refuse to pay at all, but it'd be a start. (and it would still have the same issues of today's zap2it... commericial devices sold using a "personal" account.)

Re:Achilles Heel

[mysidia]

They don't need to do it from a newspaper, they can use online sources like zap2it.com's website, or some custom viewer software designed to load various online listing sites.

It sounds like a job for the Mehanical turk. Where one station's listings for a 72 hour period = 1 hit.

TV wiki

[Anonymous Coward]

There needs to be a TV wiki schedule for Myth.

This is quite bad :(

[kalpol]

This was an invaluable service - makes me wonder who's putting the pressure on them :(

Re:This is quite bad :(

[Lumpy]

Tribune put new management in Zap2it. They have been unresponsiveand treated the Data Direct service like a redheaded stepchild for a year now. The data has been bad, with long outages on it from time to time for a while now. Many of us that have used myth and other xmltv systems have tried to pay for a subscription for a couple of years now and they refuse.

it's the new management, they hate that OSS people are getting access to the data and want to stop it.

Re:This is quite bad :(

[ajayrockrock]

They were probably getting pressure from other companies.

I had Dish Network and signed up for one of their International channels, SET (Sony Entertainment Television). A few months ago they all of a sudden dropped the listing. It wasn't showing up in my Myth box, and the option to include the data wasn't even on their site anymore. It just disappeared. I checked Dish's site and sure enough the SET listings are there and the source is even from Zap2It! So I'm assuming that Sony told Zap2It to remove their channel data from the XML feed to cut off PVR users.

Hopefully someone picks up the slack, I'd pay a few bucks a month to keep using Myth without the scraping.

--Ajay

Re:This is quite bad :(

[rocca]

This was an invaluable service - makes me wonder who's putting the pressure on them :(

Probably the companies that pay for the commercial listings like TiVo and SageTV.

Re:This is quite bad :(

[ivan256]

Whichever company sends them their bandwidth bill I'd guess...

Some smart financial type there probably realized they were paying for it, but it wasn't generating any revenue. Goodwill of the OSS community is nice and all, but you can't spend it, or pay your bills with it.

Cue the people calling them "haters" any minute now though.

Re:This is quite bad :(

[gubbas]

They do state that it is only for non-commercial use. If I do recall correctly, Beyond TV (a commercial product) gathered TV listings from Zap2it. I wonder if Snapstream ruined it for everyone else?

Re:This is quite bad :(

[Bryan Ischo]

> Hopefully someone picks up the slack, I'd pay a few bucks a month to keep using Myth without the scraping.

That is such a funny thing to hear from a MythTV user. I cannot even count the number of times I heard the MythTV crowd say things like "TiVo SUCKS because you have to pay for the guide data! That stuff should be free! I would cut my own legs off before I'd pay for guide data because paying for guide data is THE BIGGEST EVIL IN THE WORLD!!!!" ... etc.

Now that the "free" guide data is gone, all the "I refuse to pay $12 per month for guide data" types are probably chiming in unison about how they'd "pay for the data if only this evil zap2it company gave me the option instead of just shutting off my feed of waah waah".

Not saying you're one of these people, maybe you always were willing to pay for guide data. But there were ALOT of MythTV users that fit the freeloader description.

Re:This is quite bad :(

[Etherized]

That's a good thought, but I think you miss the mark. Data Direct was created as a response to the various screen scrapers that existed before it - scrapers which had to pull down and parse entire HTML documents instead of simply using compact, per-user xml feeds. This service was intended to reduce total bandwidth use, and as far as I'm aware it succeeded at doing so.

It's possible that there has been a shift in management and that this history lesson was forgotten, but if their intention is to save bandwidth it seems doubtful that this is a good way to do so.

Re:This is quite bad :(

[TheGratefulNet]

I suspect its the usual suspects.

- those that think this service is 'stopping sales' of other services.

- those that want more control over the users and how they 'consume' tv (we don't watch, we're just eyeballs to be sent ads and an occasional bit of non-ad content along with it, as a rider)

- media companies (content owners) are having some say here, I would think. this is their turf and they probably want more control. that's their thing - "control". they thrive on it.

with HDtv getting more and more popular, expect the 'tv wars' to heat up even more.

this really affects me a lot as I JUST finished building a myth box to capture (and, yes, store) hdtv that is in clear-qam. after having a nightmare with directv on their HD box (what a buggy system!) I decided that DTV was not ready to be trusted for HD content and even worse, can't be trusted with your data (your shows). during the 2 days I had my DTV HD box, it crashed every time I tried to do anything with it! I did have a few saved shows that I successfully recorded but didn't watch - but when I called to cancel my service (which you CAN do inside of 2-3 days and get OUT of your 2yr committment!) - the very minute that I was on the phone with the CSR rep and he deactivated my HD account, the programs that were ALREADY on my disk were locked up. yup, that's correct - they lock up your data if the signal is not seen OR if there is a deactivate from 'home'. that was the final straw - remote lock-up of material I already paid to watch but didn't get to, yet.

it was that final straw that made me abandon their paid-for PVR service and go it on my own. yes, I can only get ATSC and clear-qam, but with my HDHOMERUN box, I can save perfect copies of the local PBS HD station and honestly, that's keeping me entertained more than the HBO/SHO/MC stuff that I used to watch.

worst case, I can go to the local pbs station's website and write a scraper for that. and keep the 'arms race' going. but its very sad that its gotton to that. that the listings providers are being paid off to NOT accept even a for-fee service to continue this.

Re:This is quite bad :(

[ajayrockrock]

not paying for guide data is certainly a benefit for Myth. But for me, the main reason to use Myth was to record shows and do whatever I want with them. So for me, it was control. I can do whatever I want with the recordings and I'm not subjected to some other company telling me how they want me to watch TV.

So yeah, I'd pay a few bucks for reliable guide data.

--Ajay

Re:This is quite bad :(

[The-Ixian]

You must have a lot of whiney friends. I have been a member of the MythTV mailing list for years and I have never seen anyone use that argument as a major reason why MythTV is better than Tivo.
 
The top reasons MythTV is better than Tivo (and other commercial DVRs) are: 1. Commercial flagging 2. Editing and Exporting utils 3. media center addons (mythdvd, mythvideo, mythmusic, etc).

Re:This is quite bad :(

[ivan256]

Or it could be that they're going to combine this with element randomization to make screen scraping their main site unreliable, or infeasible. That would be misguided, but companies make dumb decisions all the time.

Re:This is quite bad :(

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, when mythtv and tivo were both unrestricted in use of programs, some myth users DID use the "I don't have to pay for listings" as the big reason for using mythtv. Of course, now with tivo telling the owner of the box that they can only watch shows for a week or whatev, that's a damn good excuse for preferring a mythtv box.

Re:This is quite bad :(

[jedidiah]

Tivo doesn't suck because you have to pay for the guide data. Tivo sucks because you have to pay for the guide data over and over again if you have multiple TV's with PVRs. Each Tivo is another hit when you should get just one charge for the whole household.

Re:This is quite bad :(

[bill_mcgonigle]

This was an invaluable service - makes me wonder who's putting the pressure on them :(

Typically, one would suspect a competitor.

Re:This is quite bad :(

[enjerth]

Yeah, right. I wouldn't buy a TiVo because companies that provide digital subscription-based services (besides WoW and EQ, or email for that matter) are EVIL.

Or maybe because TiVo doesn't let me record programs to DVD or to USB drives.

I can't justify spending $16.95 (entry level TiVo subscription with a 1-year commitment, as low as $8.31 for 3 years prepaid) to see the same damn content that my digital tuner shows me with it's guide.

But I could justify spending $5/month on such a service, especially if I can do whatever I want to with the recorded program. I don't see why it would need to be more than $5/month. Unless the provider is getting greedy.

I don't mind giving someone a profit, but there are limits to my generosity. And $17 per month with a minimum 1 year contract is waaaay out of the bounds of my generosity.

Re:This is quite bad :(

[Cramer]

The tivo service fee isn't 100% "to pay for the guide data". Yes, Tivo, Inc. has to pay TMS per unit, but it also costs tivo to serve the files to each tivo -- a lot still use DIALUP -- and develop the software it's running. And I'll remind everyone again, Tivo, Inc. still isn't profitable.

(The fee for 2+ units is $6.95, so you get some break with more than one tivo.)

Re:This is quite bad :(

[jedidiah]

If Tivo had a client server model, this wouldn't be a problem.

I doubt SageTV gets soaked for every media extender they sell.

Not all units NEED the guide data. Most wont.

What constitutes "misuse" of the data?

[brouski]

Anyone know?

Re:What constitutes "misuse" of the data?

[falcon5768]

Myth TV is whats a missuse of data in their minds. They where getting flack from the networks about people using their data to make their own Tivo boxes which where then getting shows uploaded to the net.

The problem with this being, its not going to stop people in the least, so in the end all they did was piss off more people while solving nothing.

Misuse?

[Cerberus7]

How, exactly, does one go about "misusing" TV schedule listings? Is this really because Zap2It was making all other forms of TV listings obsolete while not making any money at it? The announcement is quite vague. Does anybody have details on what's going on?

Re:Misuse?

[gurps_npc]

Rude fools would download it for free, then charge other people to look at it.

Re:Misuse?

[geekoid]

Well, that is certainly within the OS model to do so, as long as you credit the source.
Presumably they weren't doing that.
BUT how does that hurt Zap2it?

Re:Misuse?

[Anonymous Coward]

HOW does it hurt Zap2it to have a commercial entity user their free data for sale in a product?

Well, the obvious answer would be that Zap2it has to pay for that data in the first place (contracts to get it, staff to work with it, hardware to host it, bandwidth to distribute it, etc), and while the 3rd party makes money off Zap2it's work, Zap2it makes NOTHING from it.

Zap2it SELLS data to companies that want to use it for commercial purposes and THAT is where their revenue to run comes from. If the commercial company that is copying their data is selling it to others (not just using it in a product), that is an even bigger impact on Zap2it, as every customer of that company is a company they COULD have sold to, but don't get to because the customers have a "different" data source, and have no NEED to go to Zap2it.

Now there will no doubt be the argument of "well, if the company that is copying it is selling it at a lower cost, to companies that couldn't AFFORD to buy from Zap2it, because they are too small and Zap2it won't work with them, they are really helping them out, those companies might one day buy from Zap2it", but that's a flawed argument.

If there are companies that are too small to do business with Zap2it directly for one reason or another (can't afford their fees, or Zap2it won't talk to them becase they are too small, and there is a company that WANTS to work with small companies and supply them with the data (but doesn't have the data/the ability to gather the data themselves), the company wanting to supply the data can probably negotiate a contract as a Zap2it "distributer" and and thusly service the "small customers". Perhaps license 50K "users" from Zap2it, and than sell those to the small companies or individuals. A contract with between Zap2it and the "distributer" could easily be structured to state that the "distributer" can ONLY sell to those small entities, at a STEEPLY discounted price from what Zap2it sells for directly (or perhaps even just buying the number of licenses they need, instead of large blocks that may go unused), and if those customers grow beyond a certain size/profit from the data by a certain amount, they have to go to Zap2it directly for the licenses, and perhaps even the "distributer" gets a "referral fee" for the customers so it's not a total loss to them.

The benefit of the distributor relationship to all 3 companies can be immense. Zap2it gets access to an additional revenue stream from the small customers, without having to incur all the costs of the infrastructure to manage them (and depending on if those "small customers" are individual users, that can be a tremendous amount of work to service), the "distributer" gets to run their business, doing what they know how to do (sell to small customers/individuals) and make a profit off that, and the "small customers" or individuals that otherwise couldn't get the "commercial quality" feeds/clean data get access to it.

TitanTV

[rlp]

I use a Windows based PVR that works with the Web site titantv.com Clicking on the 'record' button on the Web site sends a small file that a helper app converts to a Windows scheduler entry. I can't believe it would be that hard to adapt to Linux.

The Titan TV web site includes advertising and also does tracking. While personally, I don't care if anyone knows I watch StarGate and Myth Busters, privacy issues may be a concern for some.

Re:TitanTV

[TinheadNed]

Or, use the MythWeb plugin. I have my own website of my PVR which I can instruct to record things. It's also secured so it's private and not in the hands of anyone else. And it doesn't have adverts.

Re:TitanTV

[borgboy]

IIRC, the TitanTV bits involved a application-specific mime type and a little xml file download which provided the info for the scheduling magic. So, no. It shouldn't be difficult for MythTV to interop with that.

Re:TitanTV

[timeOday]

Where does TitanTV get their listings? Mayabe TitanTV was one of Zap2it's biggest "abusers" and is panicking now? (Hope I'm wrong).

Re:TitanTV

[gEvil (beta)]

Where does TitanTV get their listings?

Well, since you're asking that, you might as well ask where Zap2It got their listings? Maybe it was the guys in marketing and sales who were abusing the product created by R&D. Think about that one for a minute...

Re:TitanTV

[bl8n8r]

difficulty isn't the issue. you probably need IE to use the service, and there are likely some royalty payment shenanigans going on also. Those two issues make things difficult because one of them is a heinous security problem, and the other isn't compatible with free software.

Re:TitanTV

[nwbvt]

No, it works just fine in firefox (why are you assuming everything on the web only works with IE?) and you can sign up for free. And even if they did charge, how would that make it incompatible with free software? There are many business models out there than involve free (both in terms of beer and speech, to borrow a hackneyed expression) software and paid for services. You already have to pay for a TV tuner, so its not exactly like you can set up a MythTV box for free anyways.

Re:TitanTV

[Anonymous Coward]

TV Guide.

celeb posting

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I'm soo going to get flamed for this...and the Board and the Foundation are going to give me hell for this PR misstep...I don't care anymore. Here goes. Hey there, um, Linux guys, this is...um, this is a certain somewhat well-known former CO/owner of a large software firm. I'm doing a celeb posting today, because I realized...I can actually do what I want. And I want to say, while the Free TV listings are going out of the biz, I'm going into the biz of fucking another company. I'm gonna buy M...it's get better, and we'll give it higher synergy to work with users....

Actually, I was found dead in my home today at 2:30 PM...check CNN. I guess you must realize that to write the above stuff, I must be full of emotionlessness and callousness...don't mess with me, I guess.

Going, going, gone?

[scribblej]

I've been a Zap2it subscriber for at least three years for my MythTV.

At first, they made me fill out a big online survey as "payment" for the service. The first time it was about 30 questions.

The third time (this is like every 3-6 months) they only asked one question.

For the last year, the survey has been "click here to renew."

What's with that? I'm willing to give up some personal time and info to pay for this service, and they can't even think of a way to leverage that?

The main listings

[DaveWick79]

It doesn't appear that this will affect their main listings on their website, just the programs that tap into their database.
I've always just setup an easy shortcut to their web page to get listings, so I really don't think this will affect my usage in the least.

Re:The main listings

[Anonymous Coward]

> I've always just setup an easy shortcut to their web page to get listings,

Care to share that? I can get as far as the "right now" page by stuffing a ZIP code into the URL, but I can't navigate to arbitrary dates/times without some combination of cookies/Javashit/Referrer-ID enabled, which is what I'd need to properly scrape the "2.0" version of the website via curl/wget.

The killing blow? I think not.

[ChaosDiscord]

This will be the killing blow for MythTV and other open source DVRs? I think not. MythTV predates Zap2It and managed to do okay. Yes, it relied on screen scraping, but it worked. Furthermore, I know I'm perfectly prepared to pay a small monthly fee for a good data source. Maybe $5 a month? Since a company offering such a service doesn't need to recoup costs for selling hardware below cost (as Tivo does), such a price should be feasible. Since Zap2It was free, there wasn't much incentive for someone to offer the service, but now there is. I'm hoping the free market will see the opportunity and we can work something else.

Re:The killing blow? I think not.

[OverlordQ]

MythTV predates Zap2It and managed to do okay. Yes, it relied on screen scraping, but it worked.

Back in the day when everything was nice plain HTML, but thanks to all this Web 2.0/Ajax/ZOMGPONIES bullshiat, you're going to find it a lot harder to scrape the same data.

Re:The killing blow? I think not.

[dgatwood]

$5 per month is way, way overpriced for what you get. The data is free from other sources. There's no reason to pay $60/year just to get it in a slightly more convenient format. That's extortion. I might pay $5 per year, but I'd write a TVGuide.com scraper long before I'd pay $60. It would cost me less than $60 per year worth of my time to maintain a scraper myself.

Put another way, at $5 per month, that's as much as TiVo charges. When you're going directly to a guide data company and cutting out the middleman, you could reasonably to pay significantly less per month.

Put yet another way, as I understand it, for $500 per month, I could get the rights to the guide data for the SF Bay Area with the right to redistribute. I guarantee there are more than 100 MythTV users in the Bay Area. Do the math, and you should have a ballpark of what a fair cost should be, and it isn't $5 per month or anywhere close. Maybe five cents per month. It's worth so little that you'd have a hard time taking subscriptions for less than a year at a time because you'd lose almost the entire fee to the CC company.

No, $5 per month is way more than the data is worth to me. I'd drop my DirecTV subscription and buy content from iTunes long before I'd do that... and I'm seriously considering doing so after this announcement.

Re:The killing blow? I think not.

[smclean]

In light of the number of MythTV users, and the resourcefulness of the community, I don't think anyone is going to let a little AJAX get in the way of a scraper. Someone only has to do it once..

Re:The killing blow? I think not.

[ChaosDiscord]

Assuming you're a technical professional, I think I can safely assume your time is worth $30 or more per hour. So you believe you can write and maintain a web scraper in less than two hours per year? This includes coping with the web site changing their formatting occasionally as hordes of scrapers start hitting their site as other MythTV users switch over. Me, I'm expecting it will take more than 2 hours of my time per year to deal with it, so it's a bad tradeoff. I'm prepared to pay $5 a month for reliable data that just works. Now, of course, if your time is worth less than this, perhaps because you enjoy doing it and it's a hobby, or your a student with more free time than money, it might be a good tradeoff for you.

As for $5 a month being what Tivo charges, it's never been that cheap. (Lifetime service could get you that low, but the "lifetime" expired when your Tivo did and it hasn't been available in years.) The cheapest Tivo service is $8.31 per month and that requires that you pay in advance for 3 years. If you're not so keen on coughing that much out up front, the best you're doing is $12.95 per month.

Is $5 too much? Possibly. Ideally we'll have competition and prices will drop to just above the production cost.

Re:The killing blow? I think not.

[timeOday]

Someone only has to do it once.

...until the next trivial formatting change in the listings, of course.

Re:The killing blow? I think not.

[topham]

You realize that with the number of people who are going to leech guide data from the various websites that publish it that all of them are going to actively make it difficult.

Zap2It should be smart enough to set up a company, or encourage one to distribute their data for products like MythTV, etc. But there is no way it won't be commercial. They have been more than generous up to this point.

Re:The killing blow? I think not.

[Anonymous Coward]

AJAX makes it a lot easier -- you forge AJAX requests and get the data back in a nice regular machine-readable format. Flash on the other hand, might be trickier, but it has to get data from the server too, and that format is also well understood.

Re:The killing blow? I think not.

[dgatwood]

Care to guess how many MythTV web hits TVGuide.com would get compared with their normal daily hits? I doubt it would be a hundredth of a percent of their traffic. Unless they were specifically watching MythTV sites, they probably wouldn't even notice that it was happening unless somebody did a really stupid scraper that hit their site constantly or something.

Re:The killing blow? I think not.

[dgatwood]

$60 is less than one hour at my current pay scale. And yes, I think an hour is a good ballpark of what it would take to write a scraper for TVGuide.com. It looks really straightforward.

What you're failing to take into account is the economy of scale. Unlike a scraper for each TV station's website, a scraper for TVGuide.com would be shared among all MythTV users. If I wrote one and threw it out to the community to maintain it, the cumulative cost to me for helping to maintain it when I notice something wrong is nearly zero, as chances are, someone will already have fixed it before I notice the problem 9 times out of 10. Spread over the whole community, the average cost of maintaining it per user is also nearly zero---it would certainly be much less than an average of even a tenth of an hour per user per year.

Re:The killing blow? I think not.

[topham]

There is a big difference between casual browsing and scraping the entire guide.

Zap2It started offering their service because the hits on the website were causing them serious grief.
They could have taken a more hostile approach and made it more difficult to harvest the data but instead tried to be accommodating.

Re:The killing blow? I think not.

[Cramer]

No, $5 per month is way more than the data is worth to me. I'd drop my DirecTV subscription...

I do love the hypocrisy. You refuse to pay 5$/month for clearly useful information, but you're already paying over 50$/month for hours of content you won't ever care to watch. (BTW, as a DTV subscriber, you're already paying TMS for guide data... that's where the program guide comes from.)

If you think it's so easy to write and maintain a scraper, Go. Right. Ahead. I'll sit quitely over here and time you. And "throwing it to the community" to maintain it isn't "maintain[ing] a scraper myself." That's not your time being invested... that's you mooching off everyone else -- translation, your time is more valuable.

Put yet another way, as I understand it...

Please tell me you have professionals managing your finances. Providing a tv listings service will take far more than the $500/month paid to TMS for the data itself. You're ignoring the cost of servers, co-lo rack space, bandwidth, billing, and of course, customer support -- just to name a few things. It'll take a fair ball of cash up front and at least a year to get it back (if you ever do.) [there's much more to a business plan than a rant on slashdot.]

Re:The killing blow? I think not.

[dgatwood]

Casual browsing requires you to pull lots more ancillary content, though---javascript code, images, etc. Also, you only scrape the entire guide once when you first install. After that, you only really have to scrape today's data (to catch last-minute changes) and the new content two weeks out. If you're really pulling down the entire two weeks worth of guide data every day, it's no wonder they got mad at you. :-D

I guess a lot of it depends how much of the pop-up data is embedded in the initial XML feed and how much is pulled on request. OTOH, if the show isn't in your season pass equivalent, you don't really need to pull the detailed data about it until you use it anyway. That's a good case for rearchitecting MythTV (if necessary) to be a lot smarter about what data it collects under normal circumstances and adding the ability to do a callback into the scraper software to get additional data only upon request.

Re:The killing blow? I think not.

[dgatwood]

I do love the hypocrisy.

From Wikipedia: "Hypocrisy is the act of condemning another person, where the stated basis for the criticism is the breach of a rule which also applies to the critic." How does that apply here? Contradiction, perhaps, but not hypocrisy. I'm not charging people money for guide data to which they are already entitled.

You refuse to pay 5$/month for clearly useful information, but you're already paying over 50$/month for hours of content you won't ever care to watch.

Who said I'm paying over $50 per month? I'm not. I am paying for it, but I'm not paying that much.

(BTW, as a DTV subscriber, you're already paying TMS for guide data... that's where the program guide comes from.)

Yes. That's why I don't want to pay a second time for data to which I am already legally entitled. That's not hypocrisy. That's just refusing to be a complete chump.

If you think it's so easy to write and maintain a scraper, Go. Right. Ahead. I'll sit quitely over here and time you. And "throwing it to the community" to maintain it isn't "maintain[ing] a scraper myself." That's not your time being invested... that's you mooching off everyone else -- translation, your time is more valuable.

Come again? How is writing the tool in the first place mooching off everyone else? That statement is an insult to every open source developer out there. And no, I didn't say that I wouldn't be one of the people maintaining it. What I said was that by having a lot of people working together to handle the maintenance, the odds of me having to spend more than $5 per month (on average) worth of my time in the process are slim. That's not saying that I'd do a little quick bit of code and then sit on my ass. I don't know how you could possibly have read that into what I said.

Providing a tv listings service will take far more than the $500/month paid to TMS for the data itself. You're ignoring the cost of servers, co-lo rack space, bandwidth, billing, and of course, customer support -- just to name a few things.

Of course that wouldn't be the only cost, but it should be the largest cost until you get up to a fairly decent number of users, and it is the only cost that shouldn't be approximately linear in the number of users. That said, you could front-load most of the costs of doing business if you're really careful, thus making the ongoing cost of doing business fairly close to that $500/month even for a pretty large number of users.

Billing is simple if you only do it once a year and let a third party handle the transaction details. Everybody and his mother can set up a PayPal-based billing system or that Google checkout thing. Customer service? Have you seen companies that actually provide customer service lately? It wouldn't be that unthinkable to have a policy of "if it doesn't work for you, tough luck, and don't subscribe next year." Customer service is only mandatory if you're trying to make money or if you're charging enough that you might reasonably get sued if things don't work. Nobody will take you to small claims over a $5/year service that stopped working for some reason. Plus you could get a lot of that support almost for free by setting up a Yahoo Group mailing list so that users could help each other. Most of the support issues will be people just trying to get the setup running in the first place anyway. Oh, and good documentation can significantly reduce those support issues.

As for servers and bandwidth, the data throughput for MythTV users in the Bay Area would probably be pretty minimal if you designed the distribution protocol correctly. Register all clients up front so that their IP addresses are known by the servers. When you subscribe, you get a randomly selected list

Re:The killing blow? I think not.

[Cramer]

How is writing the tool in the first place mooching off everyone else?

Writing it isn't -- and I didn't say so. Throwing it to the community hoping someone else will fix the problem before you have to invest any more of your expensive time. In your own words:

If I wrote one and threw it out to the community to maintain it, the cumulative cost to me for helping to maintain it when I notice something wrong is nearly zero, as chances are, someone will already have fixed it before I notice the problem 9 times out of 10.

The "$50" figure was an estimate. The cheapest selection is $39.99, or so. Add in tax, tag, and the other BS and 50 is good round number. Plus, it's a good bet your subscribed to more than the absolute dirt cheapest minimum package. I see I'm wrong.

Billing is simple if you only do it once a year...

Hah. For someone who makes as much as you claim, you should have better sense. You do realize how businesses actually work? You're going to be picking up new customers one at a time spread out over time. Do you plan to stack up everyone's bill and process them all on one day a year? And presumablly not allow them access until then? See. Laughable.

The service will be charging people the instant they sign up. And there must be confirmation that a bill has been paid. There has to a channel ("CUSTOMER SUPPORT") for dealing with billing errors -- there will be errors... even the teenager taking your order at McDonald's messes up occassionally and they're 2 f'ing feet in front of you. If you think you can use paypal without any such support, and a "no refund" policy, I will warn you not to hang your entire business on it. Paypal is a very dangerous way to fund a business -- paypal has and will continue to close accounts for unspecified reasons (and you may never get your money out of the account.)

Customer service is only mandatory if you're trying to make money or if you're charging enough that you might reasonably get sued if things don't work.

Making money: Check. Charging for something: Check. You are vastly underestimating people's willingness to sue, esp. when a $60 trip to small claims court can put you on the hook for much more than that. (and ruin your credit rating. etc. etc. If you won't spend 5$ for guide data, why would you waste a day for to defend yourself in small claims court?) There's a great deal of satisfaction in screwing the one who screwed you.

As for servers and bandwidth, ... would probably be pretty minimal if you designed the distribution protocol correctly...

A bittorrent inspired push model is doomed to fail, for a miriade of reasons. Not the least of which is the port forwarding for an inbound connection from nearly random outside hosts. Granted, MythTV users tend not to be complete idiots, so the expectation of the users getting the port forwarding setup correctly is better than average, but still not 100%. (btw, the spider web distribution you appear to be suggesting is patented. it's been around as long at bittorrent.)

The simplest method with the least complexity that will Just Work(tm), is a simple http request. Each user asks for the data of interest to them. That's how tivo does it; it's how everybody does it. Tivo's been doing this for a decade. If there were a better way to do it reliablly, others would already be doing it.

As an expensive hobby, it might be doable for a single DMA. I know of torrent sites that cost as much (and more) per month to operate. But even that can be a non-trivial amount of work with the variations in cable lineups. But I still think this is a perfect project for Google!

Re:The killing blow? I think not.

[dgatwood]

Writing it isn't -- and I didn't say so. Throwing it to the community hoping someone else will fix the problem before you have to invest any more of your expensive time. In your own words:

I have the urge to stop reading your reply entirely from here. Your attitude is that me or someone else writing it isn't enough; that person has to be the sole maintainer and bear the entire burden of the entire community him/herself. And you're calling me selfish? Congratulations on exemplifying the true definition of hypocrisy. Don't do anything yourself and expect everybody else to do all the work.

Hah. For someone who makes as much as you claim, you should have better sense. You do realize how businesses actually work? You're going to be picking up new customers one at a time spread out over time. Do you plan to stack up everyone's bill and process them all on one day a year? And presumablly not allow them access until then? See. Laughable.

I never said that they would only be processed once a year, smartass. I said that they would be billed annually. The point is that I doubt there's over a few thousand (single digit thousand) Bay Area MythTV users. Even if it's on the unbelievably high side and there are 20,000 users in the Bay Area, that's still only 54 invoices a day. Even if I were stupid enough to do them with paper mail, that's well within the realm of automation for a single person to handle sending them all out after work each evening without even having to hire a single actual employee.

Further, nobody would use paper mail. Again, I said Google Checkout or PayPal, which completely isolates you from all of the effort in billing, etc. You just set up a cron job to email people 30 days out with the next year's invoice. When they pay it, you get an automated email from PayPal or GC that tells you that it is paid. Using relatively trivial procmail filter rules, you stick this in a separate mailbox and a cron job goes through the mailbox nightly. The payer's email address is looked up in the client database, and the account expiration date is moved forward by a year. Then, the message is moved to a "processed messages" mailbox where it sits until it is a few months or years old before being purged. There are even ways to tag the transaction with a unique identifier so that it works without human intervention even across email address forwarding/changes....

Paypal is a very dangerous way to fund a business -- paypal has and will continue to close accounts for unspecified reasons (and you may never get your money out of the account.)

Only if you're stupid enough to keep money sitting in the account in the first place. Besides, I have yet to hear of such a case that didn't involve either A. a charitable organization, B. a seller failing to respond to Paypal complaints (and even then, only if they make a habit of it), C. a seller selling something that violates the terms of use, or D. a seller buying something using the same account and then issuing a chargeback or other things that are frowned upon. I've never once heard of this happening to a legitimate for-profit merchant that used the account solely for sales.

Making money: Check. Charging for something: Check. You are vastly underestimating people's willingness to sue, esp. when a $60 trip to small claims court can put you on the hook for much more than that. (and ruin your credit rating. etc. etc. If you won't spend 5$ for guide data, why would you waste a day for to defend yourself in small claims court?) There's a great deal of satisfaction in screwing the one who screwed you.

Amount lost if things don't work for you: $5. Cost to take it to small claims court to get your $5 back: $45 filing fee. Do the math. Most small claims courts cannot award punitive damages, so the best you could hope to achieve would be a moral victory, and it woul

Re:The killing blow? I think not.

[Cramer]

Spiderweb distribution?

Multiconnected distribution mesh. Whatever. The system I was remembering was on slashdot a few years ago, but I still don't remember what it was called.

What I'm suggesting is precisely preseeded Bittorrent...

Nope. What you are describing is the distribution properties of bittorrent. However, bittorrent can never work in this manner. BT is designed for distributing a static block of data; flip a single bit and it's a different block. Guide data is highly variable. So, unless you are going to seed the data file(s) you are getting directly from TMS without much or any modification, then maybe BT would do, but that supposes everyone wants the same data -- i.e. everything.

What you are talking about is much closer to the search system for Kazaa/Fasttrack/etc. In a way... an internet sized spanning tree.

Translation: because it has always been done this way, there can't possibly be a better way.

Translation: I'm smarter than everyone else on Earth. In one afternoon I'll think up a better system than those who've been doing it for a decade.

If there were a better solution, someone would've thought of something different by now. And you're going to create one (that works) on the back of a cocktail napkin in response to a slashdot post? Right. I'll be sure to hold by breath.

Re:The killing blow? I think not.

[dgatwood]

Guide data is highly variable. So, unless you are going to seed the data file(s) you are getting directly from TMS without much or any modification, then maybe BT would do, but that supposes everyone wants the same data -- i.e. everything.

Please do understand that I'm not proposing having one setup for the entire planet all with a single torrent file. Guide data for a particular channel isn't variable at all. The key to BT distribution is to chunk the content appropriately. For example, you might have a base DirecTV package containing the program data for one day worth of all of the Total Choice(tm) channels, a second one for the extra channels in their next tier, a third one for SF Bay Area local channels, etc. One file per package per day's data. Your client only pulls the content that it cares about from other peers.

For that matter, you would probably be most efficient with a separate file for each individual channel's schedule per day plus a tiny file containing the current channel lineup, plus one master update file containing all of the last-minute schedule changes sent in a particular day. That way, the data for KTVU is completely generic whether you're pulling it as a DirecTV subscriber or as a Comcast Cable subscriber.

I don't see the problem

[Grishnakh]

What's wrong with just "scraping" web pages (I assume that means writing code which automatically downloads the webpages and captures the data of interest, rather than requiring a human to do it. I do this all the time with Perl code.)?

There's multiple sites out there with TV listings: Yahoo TV, Zap2It, MeeTV (the one I use), etc. Just write perl scripts to capture the listing information from these sites, and modify MythTV to allow the user to choose any service he wishes. Of course, some of these sites may (stupidly) screw with their HTML in order to throw off these scripts, but that's easily worked around with regular updates. So we just need to have a "myth-scripts" distribution site where your Myth box automatically checks for updates to the perl scripts every day and downloads them if necessary, just like we already do with many other things.

No, it's not quite as reliable and efficient as a static interface to this data, but if these companies are stupid enough to remove static interfaces, thinking we're just going to go back to doing everything manually and looking at all the ads, this seems like a reasonable solution. There's no way of preventing automated scripts from downloading webpages.

Re:I don't see the problem

[garcia]

No, it's not quite as reliable and efficient as a static interface to this data, but if these companies are stupid enough to remove static interfaces, thinking we're just going to go back to doing everything manually and looking at all the ads, this seems like a reasonable solution.

That's exactly the problem. Scraping relies on the format remaining mostly unchanged. I had to write a scraper to compile data for work. Because of the way the site was designed, I had to make 600+ queries to the site to get all the information I needed and that puts an enormous strain on my connection and the remote server (it's like 55MB at a time).

There's no way of preventing automated scripts from downloading webpages.

It's called an IP ban and that's exactly what plenty of webservers do when you start pulling enormous amounts of data from their site on a regular basis.

Re:I don't see the problem

[drinkypoo]

Scraping relies on the format remaining mostly unchanged.

this is easily solved by simply scraping multiple sources of the data and then checking them against one another.

If one blows up, the others still do the job.

It's called an IP ban and that's exactly what plenty of webservers do when you start pulling enormous amounts of data from their site on a regular basis.

We're talking about text, which is small data any more, and there are many ways to get around such restrictions, including using an anonymizing network so it looks like the data is being fetched by multiple clients. You could probably just run a private tor net.

Re:I don't see the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

If they do what Cartoon Network does for their listings (i.e., flash based listing browser)... and even worse, an encrypted flash-based listing browser, it could get pretty difficult to scrape...

Re:I don't see the problem

[MS-06FZ]

What's wrong with just "scraping" web pages (I assume that means writing code which automatically downloads the webpages and captures the data of interest, rather than requiring a human to do it. I do this all the time with Perl code.)?

There's multiple sites out there with TV listings: Yahoo TV, Zap2It, MeeTV (the one I use), etc. Just write perl scripts to capture the listing information from these sites, and modify MythTV to allow the user to choose any service he wishes. Of course, some of these sites may (stupidly) screw with their HTML in order to throw off these scripts, but that's easily worked around with regular updates. So we just need to have a "myth-scripts" distribution site where your Myth box automatically checks for updates to the perl scripts every day and downloads them if necessary, just like we already do with many other things.

No, it's not quite as reliable and efficient as a static interface to this data, but if these companies are stupid enough to remove static interfaces, thinking we're just going to go back to doing everything manually and looking at all the ads, this seems like a reasonable solution. There's no way of preventing automated scripts from downloading webpages. They can't prevent it - but if they decide they don't like you doing it, they can come up with all kinds of ways to make it hard.

For instance, they could replace their nice little HTML table with some flash code - that's not going to be impossible for you to read with scripts, but it'll be a lot harder.
Another option would be to use images instead of text - possibly even breaking up the images into smaller images, to make it harder for automated tools to pull it and OCR it.
They could load their page with bogus invisible text.
They could provide the listing data in a funky character encoding.

So if these TV listing sites decide that the impact from web scrapers is becoming significant, they have options that can make it very difficult for you.

Re:I don't see the problem

[dgatwood]

Fortunately, most web site developers don't do stupid crap like that. But if Cartoon Network wants to lose 90% of their viewers overnight, that's a good place to start. Hint: Adult Swim is almost entirely watched by geeks, so the MythTV percentages are almost certainly abnormally high compared with other networks....

Re:I don't see the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

So we just need to have a "myth-scripts" distribution site where your Myth box automatically checks for updates to the perl scripts every day and downloads them if necessary, just like we already do with many other things.

Yeah, and how is this not a huge security hole?

Re:I don't see the problem

[mikee805]

They could throw a login in front of it or use captchas.

Re:I don't see the problem

[dthree]

Like this one, most of these load up xml files to populate the listings. That's probably easier to deal with than a screen-scraper.

Re:I don't see the problem

[Grishnakh]

That's exactly the problem. Scraping relies on the format remaining mostly unchanged.

No, not necessarily. With an auto-update system, even a complete site change would only require someone to rewrite the Perl script for scraping the site. That site would only be unusable for the Myth users while the script was under development, which shouldn't be very long. With multiple TV-listing sites, this shouldn't be a problem as at least one should work at any given time.

I had to write a scraper to compile data for work. Because of the way the site was designed, I had to make 600+ queries to the site to get all the information I needed and that puts an enormous strain on my connection and the remote server (it's like 55MB at a time).

Huh? I don't know what kind of data you were dealing with, but we're only talking about TV listings here. The only data that needs to be downloaded by the scraping script is the exact same data that you would download if you manually pointed your browser to zap2it.com, typed in your ZIP code, and looked at the day's listings.

It's called an IP ban and that's exactly what plenty of webservers do when you start pulling enormous amounts of data from their site on a regular basis.

Again, what enormous amount of data are you talking about? No one's proposing downloading the entire site. Each user would only download the same HTML pages as if he was looking at the listings in person. And because of this, there's no way for the website to tell if it's a real human or just a script.

Re:I don't see the problem

[Grishnakh]

This would be a pain, yes, but to my knowledge, Flash is a published standard, just like PDF. That's how Gnash is able to write their application. So it would still be possible to write a program to download the .swf file, read it, and automate the responses necessary to get the listing data. Certainly not as easy as writing a Perl script with libwww-perl, but still possible.

Re:I don't see the problem

[Grishnakh]

If they do some of these things, like the images crap, they'll be putting even more load on their webservers. I fail to see how this would accomplish anything other than shooting themselves in the foot.

No matter what they do, their options are limited if they still want to make it easy for a regular (non-Myth-using) person to point IE to www.[tv-listings-site].com, enter their zipcode, and look at the TV listings. There's no way to only provide access to human browser users, and to exclude automated scripts. And all it takes is one good script writer to update the script every time they monkey with their site, and through an automated update mechanism, provide this to all the MythTV users automatically. Anything they do to make this hard will be even less effective than all the silly DRM schemes that have been tried with CDs and DVDs.

Re:I don't see the problem

[Grishnakh]

For the same reason using Ubuntu auto-updates isn't??? You only point it at a trusted site, like "myth.org".

Duh...

Re:I don't see the problem

[Grishnakh]

Logins aren't much of a problem. I've written scraping scripts in Perl which used logins. libwww-perl has functions for dealing with that, storing cookies, etc.

Captchas are a problem; that's a very good point I hadn't thought of. However, I do wonder if they would resort to that. After all, if they make it a PITA for the regular TV-watching, non-Myth-using, IE-browsing public, they'll just go to one of the many competitors (meetv, Yahoo TV, TV guide, etc.). Most people put up with captchas on blog sites because they want to put in their $0.02 while they're reading a discussion. Some sites, like Yahoo Groups, requires you to pass a captcha when you first create an account, but not on subsequent logins. But I've never heard of a site requiring you to pass a captcha every single time you browse there, or log in. It's possible, but I'm doubtful they'd go that far, because it'd piss people off.

Re:I don't see the problem

[Cramer]

Protected Flash 9 applet fetching data via https with a custom certificate chain... NEXT.

(the custom CA certificate makes a man-in-the-middle ssl proxy impossible. the protected applet makes it very hard to hack the flash into accepting an invalid cert... and the applet can be changed regularly.)

Re:I don't see the problem

[mikee805]

Everything you said is true, the point being all of this just makes it difficult to deal with something that is already less than reliable. I could see them doing something if they notice you are checking too frequently.

Re:I don't see the problem

[Grishnakh]

Everything you said is true, the point being all of this just makes it difficult to deal with something that is already less than reliable.

That's true; it'd be a lot easier if we could just download an XML file from zap2it with all the listing information we need. But them shutting this down is just a small roadblock, which can be easily worked around, I think.

I could see them doing something if they notice you are checking too frequently.

Even that doesn't make sense; why wouldn't a regular human check the TV listings frequently? The only thing they could do (and it'd be a constant arms-race) is look at the scripts (which would be publicly-available) and try to use them to identify script users by their specific pattern of usage. But again, that's a technical problem: a little randomization should throw them off. Have MythTV run the script at a semirandom time (like any time between midnight and 2AM), have the script insert random delays between various actions during the script execution, to simulate a real human's response times, etc. If they try to set up filters to identify script users after all this, they'd probably have a lot of false positives, which would piss off a lot of people.

Overall, we're not talking about a lot of data here. The script would only need to log in once per day, then scan through the listings for the next 24 (or 25-26) hours and save that. If the user wants additional program information, that can be retrieved on-the-fly just as if they were manually looking it up on their computer.

Re:I don't see the problem

[LordKronos]

We're talking about text, which is small data any more

Are you kidding? The zap2it guide data for a single day is about 350K, and thats just for basic cable...not including all the digital channels and movie channels. Now take that 350K, spread it out over dozens of pages (possibly thousands, if you need to go to a separate page for each episode to get the full details) then add in the tons of html on each of those pages. In the end, you will probably be looking at a huge amount of data downloaded. Then you need to at least double it, as at a minimum you'll want to load the data as soon as its available, then refresh it the day before to account for any changes. For myself, I have my mythbox load the data a third time 4 days ahead so that I get a chance to be notified of most of the significant changes.

This may not seem to be a lot of data from an end user standpoint, but from the standpoint of a company serving this data to thousands of mythtv users (how many of us are there, anyway?) each day, I suspect they will notice and take action rather quickly.

Re:I don't see the problem

[LordKronos]

Again, what enormous amount of data are you talking about? No one's proposing downloading the entire site. Each user would only download the same HTML pages as if he was looking at the listings in person. And because of this, there's no way for the website to tell if it's a real human or just a script.

Sure, if all you want is the show name and episode name. I'd prefer information like:

start/end times - remember, you can't just go by the grid, because some shows start 1 minute early or run several minutes late. I'd rather not try to reverse engineer the times from the pixel widths of the table cells or anything like that.

episode descriptions - its nice to be able to see what the episode is about.

original airdate - I could live without this as long as the grid provides listings of whats new vs rerun. Zap2it appears to do that, though I'm not sure what they consider a rerun. If an episode is only a few weeks old, I'd probably still prefer to consider it new so that it could be picked up if there was a conflict during the original airing.

actors, genre, and other stuff like that I could live without, though I bet some people would feel differently. Especially if they do things like "wow...I've never seen that actor, but he's great. I want to see what else he's done" and then setup an actor record list. I personally don't do that, but I'm sure many do.

All of the above details would require going to a separate web page for each episode. Thats one web page per timeslot, per channel, per day.

Re:I don't see the problem

[MS-06FZ]

If they do some of these things, like the images crap, they'll be putting even more load on their webservers. I fail to see how this would accomplish anything other than shooting themselves in the foot.

No matter what they do, their options are limited if they still want to make it easy for a regular (non-Myth-using) person to point IE to www.[tv-listings-site].com, enter their zipcode, and look at the TV listings. There's no way to only provide access to human browser users, and to exclude automated scripts. And all it takes is one good script writer to update the script every time they monkey with their site, and through an automated update mechanism, provide this to all the MythTV users automatically. Anything they do to make this hard will be even less effective than all the silly DRM schemes that have been tried with CDs and DVDs. You're assuming that because they haven't yet felt the need to devote significant resources to this problem, that it can't be solved. From an empirical standpoint, sure, if a human can read it then there must be a way to write a script that can do it, too. From a practical standpoint, they do have the possibility to make this difficult enough to be impractical - it just has to be worth their while.

I think the situation is analogous to Bayesian filters or web ad blockers that are based on text matches of the URLs they're fetching - people tend to think these methods are pretty much fool-proof, but that's only been the case up until the point at which the "adversary" starts writing with these things in mind. (Spam started including text designed to slip past or overburden a Bayes filter - and at some point web ads are going to stop having such obvious matchable text strings in their URLs - you won't be able to match things like "*/ads/*" and expect it to actually do you any good, once advertisers wise up...)

I'm not saying that now's the time they'll do this - but if you want to assume that scraper scripts are always going to be a viable option - well, there just may come a point where they won't, is all.

Re:I don't see the problem

[drinkypoo]

This may not seem to be a lot of data from an end user standpoint, but from the standpoint of a company serving this data to thousands of mythtv users (how many of us are there, anyway?) each day, I suspect they will notice and take action rather quickly.

Oh, sorry, I guess I wasn't clear; someone is going to have to run a gateway for this data.

It could probably be run on donations, since it won't cost that much (the bandwidth/hosting fees are almost the entire cost.)

You could put it on Lunarpages for $100/yr with over 2TB transfer per month... ObDisclaimer: I am not a customer or employee of theirs but I have tentatively chosen them for my next host.

Re:I don't see the problem

[LordKronos]

First issue: you need to handle data for every individual market. Remember, showtimes and even the show lineup can be different in each town, plus any local channels.

Second issue: Now you are going to be hosting the scraped data for download. I'm sure you'll run into copyright issues (yes, you can copyright a compilation of facts)

Re:I don't see the problem

[Grishnakh]

You have a point there. But is it really necessary to get all that at once?

For instance, the episode description is only necessary if the user is sitting in front of the TV choosing shows to record, right? So instead of downloading everything, just fetch that data if and when the user selects it. It won't be quite as snappy as if it was all prefetched, but it's still a solution.

Again, for the exact start and stop times, only fetch those when the user selects that episode for recording. Again, not quite as good as having that data prefetched, but it is a workaround.

Re:I don't see the problem

[Grishnakh]

I'm not so sure. This is a little different from the anti-copy stuff on HD-DVDs, DRM technology, etc. where encryption is used. There's no way to encrypt this data that I know of, at least if you're going to continue to deliver it through a standard HTML-compliant browser. All the data ends up being regular text data, javascript code, etc. delivered to the browser for rendering. How can you prevent someone from writing a script to capture that? You can try to obfuscate it, but that's only a small roadblock. I think the only thing that would be really effective here is changing the HTML code for the site on a continual basis, but this seems like a lot of trouble to go to to keep a few people out. It'll end up costing them more than it would save them.

Re:I don't see the problem

[LanMan04]

Protected Flash 9 applet fetching data via https with a custom certificate chain... NEXT.
(the custom CA certificate makes a man-in-the-middle ssl proxy impossible. the protected applet makes it very hard to hack the flash into accepting an invalid cert... and the applet can be changed regularly.) OCR... NEXT.

Re:I don't see the problem

[LordKronos]

That would probably require a rewrite to several portions of MythTV, and it would be a gigantic kludge. Not to mention, it wouldn't even work if you want to do things like making wish lists based on the description of the program.

Re:I don't see the problem

[MS-06FZ]

I already explained how they can make it difficult. The trick is that scripts rely on things being sensibly encoded (and current scripts, of course, are based on the premise that nobody's trying to stop you from pulling data from the site), while people rely on vision - they read the listings. Getting that visual could mean executing page scripts, rendering the page, maybe running dynamic code (such as Flash) - and then interpreting that visual is not an easy or reliable operation on computers.

I'm not saying they can make it impossible for scripts to read site data - I'm just saying they can make it into a big hassle, if they want to.

Just Wondering...

[Nom du Keyboard]

Just wondering if Big Money got to them. Whenever a free alternative to a lucrative pay service disappears, one wonders if the competition just bought them out (secret deal) and killed the competing product.

Then it's just a question of who is benefiting from this the most?

Re:Just Wondering...

[rocca]

Zap2it is part of Tribune Media Services who in turn sells these listings commercially. Their other licensees (like Tivo and SageTV) likely aren't too happy that they are buying the same listings and then Zap2it is giving them away free to competitors like MythTV.

References at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=239123&cid=195 85753

Re:Just Wondering...

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is with all this tinhat stuff? They are a company. They want to make money. A ton of users are sucking up bandwidth, but not providing any income or other benefits so they cut off the freeloaders. No conspiracy theories needed.

Want the service again? Try paying them at a minimum what you are costing them in bandwidth and a little more so they make so profit so it's worth doing for them.

Re:Just Wondering...

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe the mythtv guys can work out a deal where they get the data from zap1it and require a small fee ($20 a year maybe) for the plugin. Use that to pay them?

Killing blow?

[grasshoppa]

Me thinks that someone doesn't quite grasp the strength of OSS: That strength not just being free. Ultimately, it's the dissemination of data. Which is precisely why this problem is uniquely suited to being solved by OSS.

This will be a minor set back at worse. But, like any set back, it will make the overall product stronger.

That said..."NNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OO!!!!!!!!!!!!!". Zap2it was damn handy. Thank you Zap2it, for a great service.

MythTV devs are working on this...

[cesman]

http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users /275533#275533
And it isn't just MythTV that uses the guide data provided...

Re:MythTV devs are working on this...

[Lumpy]

dont expect them to do anything about it. MythTV dev's are scared shitless of lawsuits. They squash threads in the mailing lists about web scrapers all the time and trhreaten to ban anyone that even hints to it.

If a solution shows up, it will be the XMLTV guys that find it NOT the MythTV guys.

Re:MythTV devs are working on this...

[V. Mole]

Maybe you should have looked at the link first. The "MythTV devs are working on this" refers to them actually talking to Zap2It, not trying to screen scrape.

How to keep it going

[FranTaylor]

They could keep the service going if they charged a small monthly fee. I mean really small, on the order of couple of dollars a month, at the most, hopefully less. At that rate, it's not worth the effort for anyone to "misuse" (redistribute) it.

Google should provide a WebService

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't Google or Yahoo or Microsoft or any of the other big media / tech companies of the 21st century provide this information as a free WebService? Seems like something Google would jump on top of since their mission statement is to organize the worlds information. Well, TV listings is information.... get on that Google!

Re:Google should provide a WebService

[Anonymous Coward]

There are yahoo listings and msn tv listings. However, if Google could do it better (which they can) and provide it as a service - they would again win the day. I second your motion sir, Snap2it Google!

Re:Google should provide a WebService

[Sunshinerat]

I am not to worried about post September 1st at this time, someone will step in. Zap2It was not happy with people scraping their websites (mostly all around the same time at night) and came up with this (generous and genius) model where the daily interface time was suggested to the client and data provided in a neat package. Much less traffic was the result (one xml file vs. 100+ pages scraped). I assume this made them much happier than the misuse model of the past. It is not unlikely that Zap2It will feel some pain again. Maybe their investors like the increase of daily visitors, I am just not sure if the network/server guys are. One fact cannot be dismissed; the data is out there (whether it is Yahoo, Zap2IT, NBC/ABC/HBO/etc.) and ready to be scraped... Many countries other than USA are using MythTV screen scrapers for their guide feed. Maybe Google or Yahoo can make a buck or two by providing the MythTV team with new interface code that reads XML from their servers and reports back my MythTV usage (an eye for an eye). I am not too concerned with Google or Yahoo knowing my recording habits. And if someone is, the code is right their for you to inspect and modify. And with a little luck, this will report back the fact that a lot of people are no longer interested in reality shows... More SciFi for everyone! MvE.

Re:Google should provide a WebService

[Frenchy_2001]

Actually, Microsoft already provides such a service for their Media Center Editions users.
The media center shell will get that data automatically, with a 2 weeks forward visibility.

I suppose that microsoft either pays for that service or just provides it from a known good stream and you pay for it in the cost of the OS (either Win XP MCE or some of the Vistas).

As all those streams, they are not always correct (programming DOES change unexpectedly), but usually, works just fine.

Re:Google should provide a WebService

[zetaprime]

Microsoft uses Zap2it listings for Media Center. Evidently they don't want to do their own.

Re:Google should provide a WebService

[Anonymous Coward]

uhm, media center USES zap2it. i have media center and know this for a fact.

Re:Google should provide a WebService

[kaizendojo]

".... get on that Google!" Stephen Colbert, ladies and gentleman, give him a big round of applause....

I bet zap2it IS getting squeezed.

[xgr3gx]

Either there are too many people using the service, (which shouldn't be a problem) or bots/spammers are hammering it.
Even still, there are ways to stop that.
My guess is (like some other commenters above) that someone is putting pressure on them to stop.
Tivo perhaps? M$? Who knows.
I'm sure the community will get around it. I love mythtv. I'm not buying a Tivo.

Re:I bet zap2it IS getting squeezed.

[ivan256]

My guess is (like some other commenters above) that someone is putting pressure on them to stop.
Tivo perhaps? M$?

Their CFO, who realized they were spending money providing a service which generated no revenue?

Re:I bet zap2it IS getting squeezed.

[wwahammy]

In what way is spending bandwidth on too many people using the service for free not a problem?

Re:I bet zap2it IS getting squeezed.

[Robert The Coward]

Because it replaced even more people scraping there pages using even more bandwidth.

It has another source

[TinheadNed]

MythTV can read the broadcast schedules on the airwaves - see EIT. At least that's what I use in the UK. I can also still scrape the Radio Times website in XMLtv as well.

Re:It has another source

[Kichigai Mentat]

But what about the bazillion of us who don't have HD, and don't have enough money or time to upgrade to HD? We're kind of out of luck. I mean, there are some on-air TV stuff (like built-in-TV TVGuide stuff), but those work really poorly. Someone is probably going to create a scraper for some other guide site, like the TV Guide website or something.

FreeDB.org, similar to

[athloi]

Running a massively-popular, industry-unsupported service like freedb or free TV guide is difficult, apparently. Revenues need to come from somewhere, whether Google ads or private donors or corporate sponsors. It wouldn't surprise me if the open source community retaliated with a resource to replace Zap2It within months, along the same advertising-supported lines as FreeDB.org.

Then again, watching less TV might be good for all of you...

Re:FreeDB.org, similar to

[Anonymous Coward]

Running a massively-popular, industry-unsupported service like freedb or free TV guide is difficult, apparently. Revenues need to come from somewhere, whether Google ads or private donors or corporate sponsors.

If that was the case, all they had to do is include an ad or two with the survey. Considering what advertisers would be willing to pay for a guaranteed clickthrough or a receipted page view directly to a specific demographic, one has to assume that there's more than subscription fees at stake. It is sad: they really did provide an extraordinary service. Unfortunately, in America greedy and shortsighted inevitably trumps extraordinary.

That said, the OSS community will replace Zap2It quickly. Hopefully, we will replace it with something that is readily adaptable because I suspect this is just the beginning of a long war for control of our remotes.

In the Uk we get the EIT data from the DVBT stream

[fiddlesticks]

Myth just tunes to it (alongside the digital multiplex) and grabs a lot of info. It's not perfect, but it means we don't need to bother with zap2, radio times, etc

http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/index.php/EIT

TV stations are hardly interested in helping...

[SuperBanana]

Isn't there any way to obtain this information in an "open-source" manner?

The best way to get the information is from the stations and cable operators.

Unfortunately, MythTV and other PVR users are in the game of cutting out ads; TV programming is purely to sell ad space, and always has been, save when programs were entirely paid for by one company and the show was branded in their name. What motivation do TV stations have to assist people who are purposefully going out of their way to cut out the ads?

Re:TV stations are hardly interested in helping...

[Cro Magnon]

Without a DVR, there is zero chance that I'll see any show that doesn't air between 7-10PM on weekdays. For that matter, the odds of me seeing shows that ARE between 7-10PM is slim, since I'm often doing other stuff too. From their POV, they'd probably be better off with me seeing bits of pieces of commercials at FF speed than with me seeing nothing at all.

Re:TV stations are hardly interested in helping...

[Perp Atuitie]

If they want people to watch their shows they have to let people know what's on. Simple as that. If They think anybody's going to go to scifi.com and then nbc.com through all 99 or 155 channels, they're nuts. Pretty much every program guide in print, on tv, or on the Net seems to depend on Zap2It except maybe Yahoo. The cable companies are going to have a hell of a time selling their DVRs and digital packages if there's no way to know what's on. But the "entertainment" industry is run by folks who run about as dumb as it gets, so maybe they will destroy the TV business as we know it. Not such a bad idea.

Re:TV stations are hardly interested in helping...

[Anonymous Coward]

hmm...just a note, but your comment spurred the thought that advertising seems to be reverting to what it consisted of originally. Take "The Office" for example. That show purposely incorporates ads for their sponsor directly into their programming...

it's really not that bad though. Personally, if all shows went that route, then I wouldn't mind.

Re:TV stations are hardly interested in helping...

[Jaffa]

Indeed. In the UK, the two biggest broadcasters are the BBC and ITV. Both contract out to "Broadcasting Data Services" (BDS) to collect royalties for the publication of TV listings.

This royalty is enshrined in law (The Broadcasting Act 1987).

The BBC, however, get the Internet and have opened http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/ which gives free non-commercial access. ITV, however, do not. This means that you can't publish any listings for any of the four ITV channels without paying ITV money. More details here.

Given they're in dire straits, it's amazing they aren't more interested in boosting their viewership. A petition has been created to get them to allow free non-commercial use.

.

XMLTV?

[prostoalex]

Anybody worked with XMLTV and care to share their experience?

Re:XMLTV?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

From www.xml.com

This brings up an important question: what's the legal status of XMLTV? The Zap2IT license seems to be broad enough to allow for it.
While you may interact with or download a single copy of any portion of the Content for your own personal, non-commercial entertainment, information or use, you may not and may not authorize others to reproduce, sell, publish, distribute, modify, display, repost or otherwise use any portion of the Content in any other way or for any other purpose without the prior written consent of TMS. Requests regarding use of the Content for any purpose other than personal, non-commercial use should be directed to Feedback at Zap2it.com.

In other words, XMLTV is screwed, too.

Re:XMLTV?

[drinkypoo]

Not only that, but apparently XMLTV was one of the companies misusing the data, and causing zap2it to shut down...

Re:XMLTV?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was using MythTV before Zap2it started providing their service, and back then XMLTV was the only way MythTV got its data. I remember watching XMLTV parse(a.k.a. scrape) yahoo listings from their website(I don't think that was ever legal). Eventually someone realized that zap2it's license legally allowed people to parse their website. zap2it's HTTP servers were getting swamped by the parsers and labs.zap2it.com started up their free service to relieve the load on their servers. I feel bad for zap2it here... they are trying to run a business and help out the public, but their public resources were getting abused, then they tried to fix it and it got abused again.

I will probably go back to web scrapers to get listings for now... The click-through licenses of all sites prohibit scraping, but the legality of the click-through licenses is questionable at best.

What if I was to write a web service?

[rehtonAesoohC]

What if I was to write a web service that exposed the data garnered from website-scraping? You could just write a standard XML request, wrap it in SOAP tags and send it to the web service, and you'd be returned whatever information you requested- by channel, time, or show name...

Any takers?

Re:What if I was to write a web service?

[soxos]

The hard part isn't writing the code to make the data available, the hard part is getting the hardware, securing a data center location, and paying for bandwidth, all without a revenue stream.

The difference comes down to OSS and Free Services. The same rules don't really apply.

However... we could create a project that would allow for smaller ad-hoc communities and not have to have one site serving the entire internet, just 100 or so users per site...

I'm on board if you want to discuss more (and you got the skillz to pay the billz).

Re:What if I was to write a web service?

[Anonymous Coward]

Writing a program to do this is trivial. That isn't the problem. You need a source of data to populate your listings.

Re:What if I was to write a web service?

[OverlordQ]

Like mentioned, serving the data is easy.

The hard part is where do you get the data from now?

Re:What if I was to write a web service?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't mind helping out.. I could provide a dedicated server, in a location with 20Mbps symmetrical fiber connection. I am not a programmer, nor do I have some huge data center available, so would I be considered useless? If some type of load balancing solution is devised, I think someone in my shoes might be able to provide some type of assistance.

Re:What if I was to write a web service?

[soxos]

No, that seems like a pretty good start. Like I was talking about, if we don't try to create a Zap2It replacement, but instead, small communities that can run the same codebase, then this could work without having to have a humongous server. Check this blog entry where we can create a discussion about creating a new project for this Pat F.

Re:What if I was to write a web service?

[rehtonAesoohC]

Think of it as a P2P type of community.

The main web service periodically queries websites that list channel information and programming, storing those results in a database. User A submits a request for all programs running on Fox for October 10, 2007. User A's data is then retrieved from the database and returned, and user A is then flagged as having all current Fox scheduling for October 10, 2007. Subsequent requests will then be made to User A for said data instead of the original web service. Following this, all requests for that same data would be load balanced between available peers.

If any cash is needed for infrastructure, an ad and donation supported revenue stream could easily offset costs.

I'm really liking the sound of this.

Re:What if I was to write a web service?

[soxos]

I'm not against P2P, but how does user b get the info that they're supposed to ask user a? From the main server or list of known clients. Full P2P system would cut down on the bandwidth, but might require some more intense programming (and leave the system open to data poisoning). Also, various bandwidths may be problem with that.

I'm not sure how much data is involved, but i'd guess it would be text only. Other comments here listed scripts that do screenscraping. Maybe the project could just be a way to plug in multiple versions of scripts (assuming a known format is the output) and then be able to handle activating those scripts until a full days schedule is received. Then it could expose a web service to publish those results...

Re:What if I was to write a web service?

[ttrafford]

So, basically just segment the database and push with bittorrent.

Re:What if I was to write a web service?

[LordKronos]

don't forget that you'd have to have that data localized. You'd have to deal with things like stations that carry their own programming at non-prime time hours, and the difference in airtime between timezones (sports are often live everywhere, where as prime time show are usually aired simultaneously in a couple of timezones and then an hour or 2 later in the other timezones).

Rather than a Million Screen Scrapers...

[Nom du Keyboard]

Rather than a million screen scrapers each hitting various listing sites, better one screen scraper sharing the resulting data with a million video rebels. This solution would probably leave everyone happier.

Now there's just the question of who? Who is expert at spidering the web? Who likes to provide new cheap-to-free services in their quest to take over new markets. Who would love to put yet another spike into Microsoft's side by removing yet another possible revenue source for them? Who doesn't have to worry about financing such a small, cheap service alongside their already multitudes of underutilized servers and bandwidth?

Google?

Re:Rather than a Million Screen Scrapers...

[fm6]

Rather than a million screen scrapers each hitting various listing sites, better one screen scraper sharing the resulting data with a million video rebels. This solution would probably leave everyone happier.

Except for the owners of the data being scraped, who would each issue a takedown notice faster than you can say, "So sue me!"

Re:Rather than a Million Screen Scrapers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Except for the owners of the data being scraped, who would each issue a takedown notice faster than you can say, "So sue me!"

That may depend on whether you are scraping the individual stations or the listings aggregators. Unless the individual stations are trying to go out of business or are laundering money for organized crime, they have a vested interest in having potential viewers know what they have to offer.

There's about a 60,000,000 household difference between saying "we don't want our customers to use PVRs" and "We don't want customers that use PVRs". I don't buy TV Guide or the newspaper. The listings I see are those offered by Zap2It and the listings channel. If a station isn't listed on either then it doesn't exist. If it is only on the listings channel then it only exists if and for as long as I happen to turn the TV on.

The interesting personal question will be "do I cancel my cable?" The backstory is that I built my PVR and ran it off an antenna. The convenience of the PVR led to more TV which in turn led to cable. If I have to go through a tedious process to collect my listings then I probably won't bother with more than two or three channels at which point I might as well drop the cable and go back to broadcast.

Re:Rather than a Million Screen Scrapers...

[Lumpy]

honestly there was a group heading that way. web scrapers running in key locations and thne putting up torrents for the Data. Nobody suffers from bandwidth problems and everyone shares.

It never went anywhere as zap2it started their Data Direct service AND the mythtv devs started their screaming about lawsuits and copyright violation problems. I guess a list of What is on TV is copyrighted.

Re:Rather than a Million Screen Scrapers...

[bill_mcgonigle]

I guess a list of What is on TV is copyrighted.

Probably not the list of what is on, but the text of the descriptions.

Re:Rather than a Million Screen Scrapers...

[Paradise Pete]

Except for the owners of the data being scraped, who would each issue a takedown notice

Facts don't have owners.

Re:Rather than a Million Screen Scrapers...

[Paradise Pete]

I guess a list of What is on TV is copyrighted.

The facts themselves can't be copyrighted, only the presentation. If you know when something is scheduled to be shown there's nothing stopping you from telling people.

Re:Rather than a Million Screen Scrapers...

[fm6]

No, but a copyright on a document summarizing those facts does have an owner.

Re:Rather than a Million Screen Scrapers...

[IthnkImParanoid]

Facts don't have owners, but specific compilations do. You can compile your own database of facts, but you can't copy and distribute someone else's (and people have been catching others doing exactly that for a long time by inserting a couple fake "facts", e.g. bad phone numbers).

Re:Rather than a Million Screen Scrapers...

[complete loony]

Add in P2P distribution to those rebels and you'd have a hit on your hands.
How about using RSS and bittorrent to distribute new listings?

Re:Rather than a Million Screen Scrapers...

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess a list of What is on TV is copyrighted.

  Actually, yes. Tribune Media Services (the evil bastards) have an exclusive licensing deal. Everyone else has to buy listings through them. They took over Zap2It and shut this stuff down, and they would most likely try to shut down (via lawsuits) any small mythtv-community site that scraped webpages and released the data for mythtv users.
  Tribune is the EA of print media, only far more crooked and evil.* Hangings are too good for 'em, I say we bring back the guillotine!

  * Scale of evil goes kinda like this, descending order: game publishers -> Microsoft -> ..(various evils).. -> Fidel Castro -> news media giants -> book publishers. I swear there are book publishers out there who wouldn't just sell their grandmother down the river, they'd kick her in the ribs first and then publicly jack off while counting the money.. NEVER trust a publisher.
  "Fry, I'm an 80's guy. Friendship to me means that for two bucks I'd beat you with a pool cue 'til you got detached retinas." (Spoken like a guy who's almost ready to start a publishing company!)

Re:Rather than a Million Screen Scrapers...

[cpt kangarooski]

That is correct.

In the US, at least, you cannot copyright a fact. While it is sometimes possible to copyright a compilation of facts, this is only possible where the selection and arrangement of the facts is itself creative, and even then, that copyright only covers the particular compilation, and not the facts in the compilation. Uncreative compilations are uncopyrightable.

In the case of TV listings, the selection is all the channels and shows offered by a given TV provider in a particular area, during a particular time. That's not creative. The arrangement is typically a grid with time on one axis and channels on another, in ascending order. That's not creative either.

Re:Rather than a Million Screen Scrapers...

[toccoa]

IANAL but I thought a non-trivial problem was TV Guide / Gemstar have a number of patents in this area. So it needs to be someone like Google , Y!, M$ with deep pockets. Otherwise it is an guerilla site that stays up only until it becomes popular and the lawyers notice it.

Re:Rather than a Million Screen Scrapers...

[Paradise Pete]

Facts don't have owners, but specific compilations do. You can compile your own database of facts, but you can't copy and distribute someone else's

Certainly you can. A fact is a fact. If you've summarized them in some clever way I can't copy your summary, but I can extract all the facts and summarize them myself.

As for the inserted "facts," that's not to demonstrate copyright infringement, but rather to help enforce some other agreement, such as "I'll show you my list of facts of you agree not to redistribute them." In that case you've broken your agreement, but it's not copyright infringement.

Re:Rather than a Million Screen Scrapers...

[tepples]

Even if a compilation is not creative, it can still be subject to contract or trade secret law.

Re:Rather than a Million Screen Scrapers...

[cpt kangarooski]

Even if a compilation is not creative, it can still be subject to contract or trade secret law.

True. However, in the case of tv listings which have been published online, they're clearly not trade secrets. A contract is possible, but AFAIK none of the sites that have the listings bother with them. Specht v. Netscape would be instructive in such a case.

In the end we'll be better off

[TigerTime]

There are too many (open source/free) programs out there and too many users that need this information to just let it fall to the way side. Someone somewhere will come up with a service that i wouldn't be surprised is free and without the re-registration that was needed with zap2it.

I wouldn't be surprised if it were Yahoo either. They already offer stock information for parsers for free.

Snapstream

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I had the same thought- Snapstream or TitanTV ought to come out with a *paid* MythTV plugin at this point. It's not like they don't already have the listings.

We need GoogleTVListings (tm)

[Blasphemy]

Google needs a TV Listings aggregator!

Of course it would be the best ever... With version numbers for each day and diffs available that only contain the changes. The whole thing would be available as an rss feed and would be free, of course.

Why not use Guide+?

[maillemaker]

My TV automatically downloads, somehow (over the air? cable?) channel lineup listings through the Guide+ system.

Could a computer not do the same thing?

Re:Why not use Guide+?

[Anonymous Coward]

MythTV does do that as I use it here in the UK but I think the guide service is only in certain countries (possibly excluding the U.states) and most certainly not in areas where there is only an analogue signal (which I think also applies to the U.states)

Re:Why not use Guide+?

[maillemaker]

I don't know - I'm in the United States, and I've never had digital TV, and my old 1998 RCA does it just fine.

Re:Why not use Guide+?

[zzxc]

Guide+ is based on Gemstar's proprietary encoding. Channels implement it by inserting the data into the VBI portion of their signal. However, many cable companies override or block these signals, and the encoding is secret and (probably) patented. Thus, the data is sporadic at best, and any software implementing it without paying Gemstar royalties _and_ showing Gemstar's inserted banner ads would be sued.

Re:Why not use Guide+?

[MrNemesis]

That's certainly the situation in the UK. The new digital TV (DVB-T) has a 7-day programme guide embedded in the stream, which almost all DVB apps on Linux (MythTV, Kaffeine to name two) have out-of-the-box support for. Does the US version (QAM?) not provide similar functionality? Won't solve the problem of OTA analogue or people recording from their cable box, but it's a start I guess...

Personally, I use the free Radio Times service (fully compatible with XMLTV) since it provides more informative listings and a 14 day schedule.

Re:Why not use Guide+?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Thus, the data is sporadic at best, and any software implementing it without paying Gemstar royalties _and_ showing Gemstar's
>inserted banner ads would be sued.

Well, it's always worked on my old TV. As for being secret, well, that never seems to stand for very long for determined programmers, and as for being sued, someone could just write the code anonymously and release it to the wild - then the cat is out of the bag.

Canadian canoe.ca?

[coren2000]

What about the Canadian site canoe.ca. It has free TV listings.

Re:Canadian canoe.ca?

[Massif]

I just checked canoe.ca. They get their listings from zap2it as well! Dang!

Re:Canadian canoe.ca?

[bouchecl]

I just checked canoe.ca. They get their listings from zap2it as well! Dang! Yes and no. The French-language Canoe site (http://horairetele.canoe.com/html/) site has a different set of listings for channels available on Videotron (Canoe is a subsidiary of Quebecor, who owns this cable operator). Descriptions are different than those provided by Zap2It, as far as I can see.

No it doesn't

[dharbee]

"MYTH TV offers everything TIVO does"

With a TiVo, you can plug in three cables and press power, at which point you are done but for the watching. You're claiming MYTH can do this too?

So no, it does NOT offer everything TiVo does.

Re:No it doesn't

[drakaan]

Sure it does...you just have to buy it from someone who preconfigured it...just like they did to your TiVo.

Re:No it doesn't

[Minwee]

MythTV is software. TiVo is hardware.

Apples, meet oranges.

Re:No it doesn't

[dharbee]

Talk to the GP, he made the comparison.

Re:No it doesn't

[Reapman]

Average joe doesn't look at it like that. He says a service. One service "just works" the other requires work. For the majority of people, they'd rather pay for a finished product then build it themselves. The apples / oranges would be each of these products are designed for different audiences.

Re:No it doesn't

[lonechicken]

Since commercial breaks don't always total to multiples of 30 seconds, I always use fast forward anyway, instead of setting up my Tivo for the "double secret 30 second fast forward" feature.

So question... does MythTV, which "offers everything Tivo does", do the FF and REW overshoot compensation when you press play? The underrated, once I used it I don't want to be without it anymore, feature that when you fast forward really fast, once you hit play, it rewinds back a few seconds to compensate for your overshooting.

Re:No it doesn't

[norton_I]

Yes. Also, myth has content-based commercial detection using blank frames, audio dynamic range, and scene cut rate. For most programs, a single button jumps an entire block of commercials regardless of the length. You can set myth to automatically cut commercials, and literally never see another commercial at any speed. It doesn't do very well catching very short segments such as the "moment of zen"/credits at the end of the daily show, so I don't do that, but the auto-skip is far better than tivo's FF overshoot compensation.

Re:No it doesn't

[j79zlr]

Actually my MythTV box flags commercials and skips over them without me having to pick up the remote.

Re:No it doesn't

[cayenne8]

"So question... does MythTV, which "offers everything Tivo does", do the FF and REW overshoot compensation when you press play? The underrated, once I used it I don't want to be without it anymore, feature that when you fast forward really fast, once you hit play, it rewinds back a few seconds to compensate for your overshooting."

Doesn't really need it. I click a button, and it automaginally skips all the commercials for me...doesn't matter if they are 30 sec or what, works damned well. You can actually set MythTV to, while playing, auto skip the commercials, no clicking anything required.

Is it perfect? No...but, I rarely have to hit the 10 sec back button due to mistakes. I'd say it works for me in the 99% range of accuracy.

I use my keyboard, hit the 'z' button, and without a blink, the show starts again past all the commercials.

Re:No it doesn't

[homesnatch]

>do the FF and REW overshoot compensation when you press play? MythTV has an intelligent commercial skip. When a commercial starts, you press the "commercial skip" button and it skips the 2 minutes or 3 minutes or whatever amount of time is taken by the commercials. Tivo could never do this because they'd be killed by the networks..

Re:No it doesn't

[toleraen]

Great! Where can I get a MythTV box preconfigured for $100? I will patiently await your link. Thanks ahead of time!

Re:No it doesn't

[garcia]

Average joe doesn't look at it like that.

I consider myself far more computer savvy than the typical "Average Joe", running Linux for over 10 years, yet I cannot be bothered with purchasing, building, installing, and dealing with a MythTV setup when my DirecTivo does everything I need just fine.

Re:No it doesn't

[jZnat]

I don't suppose you expect to get your TiVo service for free, do you? You're still paying a monthly fee to use the hardware, and just like with mobile phone companies in the US, the hardware price is subsidised so that you'll sign up to a multi-year contract that nets them more profit in the long term. With MythTV, once you buy a box or set one up, you don't pay anything ever again with regards to the hardware or any sort of subscription. I'd like to see TiVo do that (they used to, but not anymore; can't get a lifetime subscription thing from them anymore). TCO, my friend.

Re:No it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

MythTV offerers Cable Cards? OTA HD, and Cable HD? Wow, news to me.

Re:No it doesn't

[sfbiker]

To be fair, your Tivo costs $100 + $179 = $279 if you keep it for a year. If you keep it for 2 years, then it's at least $100 + $299 = $399. Prices are higher if you pay monthly.

Subscription rates are here: http://dynamic.tivo.com/2.0.plans.step.2.asp?box=s eries280hrDTDVR

I doubt you can build an equivalent MythTV box for $279, but perhaps for $399? A quick google search couldn't find any for sale -- does anyone sell preconfigured MythTV boxes?

Re:No it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like anything that is better than something else in the hardware world, MythTV costs more than a TiVo. Are you actually surprised at that?

Re:No it doesn't

[jedidiah]

The Tivo doesn't magically decide what to record. If it did you would be onto something. As it is, it is still a quasi-technical process of working the interface to figure out if there's something on and how you can record it while eliminating conflicts and not running out of space before you can see something.

It offers some simple built in functionality that can be easily thwarted by your show jumping channels.

Programming it is still a chore that's more intense than the average electronics consumer is willing to endure.

Want to view your recordings on the device of your choice, or other terminals in the home? Forget about it.

Admittedly, if Tivo Corp stopped resting on their laurels, they could easily best the MythTV in all most respects. They don't seem interested.

Re:No it doesn't

[jedidiah]

...for small values of "just works".

I can tweak my recording rules in ways on the Myth that can't be matched on my Tivo. Really easy and cheap to add storage too. Plus I can compress using MODERN compression algorithms and avoid the blockiness of Basic quality.

Lack of an mpeg4 unit is another instance of that laurel resting I mentioned earlier.

Re:No it doesn't

[The-Ixian]

Lets see. 2 CATV coax cables, 1 IR cable, 1 power cable, 1 video cable....so 5 cables for me, you win. However, I only hit one button to turn my machine on just the same as you do and then just use the remote control from there. It really is idiot proof.

Re:No it doesn't

[jedidiah]

A DirectTivo doesn't even do as much as a standard S2 Tivo does.

My own Myth Odessey was started based on that alone.

Re:No it doesn't

[raw-sewage]

MythTV offerers Cable Cards? OTA HD, and Cable HD? Wow, news to me.

Cable card, no. OTA HD, certainly. Cable HD, maybe. For cable HD, you might be able to use an HD tuner card (e.g. pcHDTV-5500) to tune directly from your cable outlet. Generally this only works for the stuff that's already free over-the-air. The alternative is to use your cable box's ieee1394 output. But then some HD cable channels might still be encrypted, in which case, you're out of luck.

Re:No it doesn't

[norminator]

I built my mythbox for about $250, including a 900 MHz P3 I got for $40. That also includes a 250 GB hard drive, so I can record about 110 hours of TV. I'd like to see the $100 Tivo do that.

Re:No it doesn't

[Lumpy]

Tivo's come with lifetime free service now? I patiently await your link to that deal!

Re:No it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea. MythTV offers a learning curve.

Tivo requires opposable thumbs. That is all.

Got it? Good.

Re:No it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

The Tivo doesn't magically decide what to record.

Ahhh, I see you aren't familiar with the "Suggestions" feature. This is exactly what it does.

Re:No it doesn't

[dthree]

My replaytv does this. Although they took it out of later versions.

Re:No it doesn't

[bill_mcgonigle]

Great! Where can I get a MythTV box preconfigured for $100? [compusa.com] I will patiently await your link. Thanks ahead of time!

If you don't care what the monthly fee is, I'll sell you a MythTV box for a hundred bucks.

Seriously, though, we *expect* to pay more for more features. If you don't need MythTV features, it's not appropriate for you.

Re:No it doesn't

[toleraen]

I don't suppose you expect to get your TiVo service for free, do you?

You might want to read the summary, or even the title. From what our fine /. editors have implied, you won't be getting your MythTV feeds free either.

TCO indeed...when you figure in TCO for MythTV, you are taking into account the risk you take in your reliance on a free service that you have absolutely no control over, right? Because that's kind of necessary.

Re:No it doesn't

[jedidiah]

...which still needs something to prime iself with.

They're also remarkably more useful if you manually give the Tivo as many hints as possible.

Then there are things that Tivo insists on recording despite all attempts to tell it otherwise. ...I'd managed to forget about that one.

Re:No it doesn't

[toleraen]

Actually I built a MythTV box a while ago. If my wife would let me buy one, I'd take a Tivo over my MythTV box though. From my experience, they just plain work better, smaller form factor, etc etc.

Re:No it doesn't

[toleraen]

Thankfully MythTV can't guarantee lifetime free service, but right now they're giving you a three month free trial!

Re:No it doesn't

[TheSkyIsPurple]

Well, to be fair... I have to use a Coax cable as well, but there is no power button, so I guess that evens out again =-)

Re:No it doesn't

[bill_mcgonigle]

. If my wife would let me buy one, I'd take a Tivo over my MythTV box though. From my experience, they just plain work better, smaller form factor, etc etc.

'Better' depends on your requirements list. Last I checked Tivo didn't edit out commercials for you, e.g., or integrate with your DVD collection. If Tivo meets your requirements, it's much more appropriate.

Re:No it doesn't

[pakar]

http://www.xyzcomputing.com/index.php?option=conte nt&task=view&id=589&Itemid=0&limit=1&limitstart=6

There you have a short story about someone that built a box... and about the prices..

VIA EPIA board - $100 (these are a bit expensive, so it might even be cheaper to go with some low-end motherboard with built-in gfx card and a AMD-Sempron..)
128Mb RAM - $30 (128Mb is quite enough for a pure mythtv box)
HD 160Gb - $40
TV-Card (DVB-T) - $80 (With a CI-Slot)
Case - $50

hmm... so that's $300, and with this you have full control...... Want to have a HDTV capable box, then just go with a bit more expensive EPIA board with DVI output... Want to have more than one PCI card, maybe 2 hybrid tuners, then go with a case that supports a raiser card.

So there you go... with $300 you can have a simple tv-box, add a few more $ and get dual-tuners, add a few more and have a HDTV capable box... add a few more and control you X10 home-automation system..
Don't like the remote? Well, get a bluetooth dongle for the system and use your cellphone, or just buy some other remote...

This is the charm with mythtv.. You can do just about anything if you want to.

And a tip if you are going to build a system like this. Do keep in mind that you might want upgrade the system in the future so try to think of what you might want to add in the future.. And if you are going to have it as the main entertainment system try to keep everything on the system at stable-versions and no SVN checkouts :)

Re:No it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

What are you talking about, you still have to select what you want to record/watch? I don't see why MythTV can't do this? 1) Power cord, 2) Ethernet cable (or wifi), 3) Coax ?

Re:No it doesn't

[westlake]

Sure it does...you just have to buy it from someone who preconfigured it...just like they did to your TiVo.

The local custom build PC market here is doornail-dead and has been for years.

Re:No it doesn't

[AeroIllini]

With a TiVo, you can plug in three cables and press power, at which point you are done but for the watching. You're claiming MYTH can do this too? "With an Aibo, you can charge it up and press power, at which point you are done and have a fully functional robot dog at your disposal. You're claiming that LEGO Mindstorms can do this too?"

MythTV is not, on its own, a plug-and-play solution. It is a tool used to accomplish a task, and in its current form right now, it is designed for people who want to build their own system and configure it just the way they like. It does not include hardware, and it does not benefit from the economy of scale in manufacturing that TiVo does. If you want the ease of use of TiVo and are willing to put up with the shenanigans of a company who is slowly reducing what you are allowed to do with the downloaded content (which, by the way, is reducing your fair use rights) then I encourage you to buy a TiVo, and stop trolling in a MythTV thread.

Do not confuse "I want it to work RIGHT NOW" with "I want to build it myself". These are very different and, in some cases, mutually exclusive concepts, and they require different tools. We want to build our own boxes. Go away and let us play.

Re:No it doesn't

[snuf23]

I understand what you are saying but there is a one time registration and configuration step for Tivo. It also takes awhile to pull down the initial channel listings. So it's not exactly a 5 minute install and you are ready to record.

Re:No it doesn't

[SMITHEE]

stop trolling in a MythTV thread

This thread, before the name change, started with an out nowhere slam at TiVo. Your objection to off-topic trolls would have been more appropriate several hours ago.

Re:No it doesn't

[rhendershot]

You're forgetting the signup and service provisioning. I've never used Tivo but did you not have to subscribe? Give a credit card and other identifying information? Was the service then instantly on or did you wait till they got around to "installing" it? In any case, it wasn't just plug the box in and turn it on.

And really my MythTV, for me, is just about as easy.

And it cost me around $100USD just once. For the capture card (available over my home LAN from any computer using MythWeb or slave-Mythfrontend clients) so I routinely watch TV from one of our computers. The computer -all other hardware- comprising the Myth box was a discarded dual-P3 that would otherwise have no other use.

and MythTV can do much more than TiVo:
1. unlimited storage (burn to DVD or copy across LAN to additional fixed drives)
2. customize the scheduler - [where] program.title like '%4400%' and program.originalairdate > '2007-05-01'
3. upgradeable - to go from the 80hr tier to the 160hr tier, (120GB HD about $80)
4. extensible - to go from dual channel to quad channel recording add hauppage 150, about $70
5. portable - backup MySQL data, lift tv card, place new box underneath, restore data
5a. skip data operations if mysql runs on some other machine
6. phone-line free operation
7. ad-free operation
8. schedule online from your own webserver
9. watch online from your own webserver

well... and really, a lot more.

Re:No it doesn't

[Taevin]

You might want to read the summary, or even the title. From what our fine /. editors have implied, you won't be getting your MythTV feeds free either.

If you honestly believe that one free service becoming unavailable is going to stop the FOSS community... have I mentioned I'm in the bridge business?

TCO indeed...when you figure in TCO for TiVo, you are taking into account the risk you take in your reliance on a paid service that you have absolutely no control over, right? Because that's kind of necessary.

Fixed. Newsflash: just because something is paid for does not mean it's better than something free. Honestly, I would rather go with an "unreliable" free (particularly, open) service than a paid one any day. At some point TiVo may close up shop (for whatever reason) at which point you have a useless set-top box. If the developers of MythTV stop one day, someone else will take over. If the providers of a third-party TV listing service discontinue that service, the community will find/create a better alternative. Try the same with a proprietary system that's locked up all nice and tight so that no one will ever have access to it.

Re:No it doesn't

[kefler]

I use my keyboard

....

Re:No it doesn't

[Dibblah]

I don't know which Myth you're using, but the one available from mythtv.org only uses blank frames, scene change detection and logo detection. Audio and subtitles (closed captioning) are not currently used.

Re:No it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

Because he wants to. Not because he has to. There's no reason you can't hit a button on your remote instead.

Geez, some of you really do have a problem with the idea of a flexible system, don't you?

Re:No it doesn't

[Anonymous Coward]

You're joking, right? MythTV will _always_ be free. When Data Direct services goes away there _will_ be screen scrapers up and running. Even if the majority of Myth users move to some pay service there will be some that stick to the free (albeit annoying) route.

The people that are barking about the cost of setting up a myth box are looney tunes. If you've already got a linux box that you run the only real cost is whatever storage space you wish to devote to recordings, possibly a tuner card*, and the electricity to power that sucker. If you want a dedicated box and so on, be my guest; you don't need one though. Shell out for a hardware-encoding tuner and there's virtually no overhead to run myth's backend.

* If you're lucky enough to have a law-abiding cable co and you get an HD box then you have a firewire out enabled on it (by FCC mandate). You can record a straight digital stream from that into your firewire on your computer.

Re:No it doesn't

[makomk]

Of course, over here in the UK we can get free TV listings for a fortnight ahead via radiotimes.com (or, if using Freeview, a week ahead via that - those aren't as good quality, but they're more up to date). Plus, there's no Tivo here and most of the available hard disk based recorders are fairly dumb (except Sky+, which is £99 + a Sky subscription + an extra £10 a month if you've got one of the cheaper Sky subscriptions, though they're removing the extra £10 a month fee soon).

Re:No it doesn't

[James McP]

Sure, here ya go.

There is a service called "Tivo Basic" that is a lifetime service attached to some products. It does not have the wishlist or the online TiVo component but it does provide the guide service and program search which appears to be on par with Zap2It's listing system.

It comes on the Toshiba SDH-400 TiVo/DVD player (which I own) and the Pioneer DVR-810H and DVR-57H DVD recorders. You can pick up an 810 for about $250. There are probably more but I stopped at the first Google hit.

http://www.google.com/products?q=Pioneer+DVR-810H& hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:offic ial&hs=Vm0&um=1&sa=X&oi=froogle&ct=title
http://www.google.com/products?q=Pioneer+DVR-57H&b tnG=Search&hl=en&show=dd
http://www.google.com/products?btnG=Search&hl=en&s how=dd&q=Toshiba+SDH400

Re:No it doesn't

[kevorkian]

Three cables ? Even tivo cant do that

Even the simplest connection requires 4

1) RF in ( from your cable company )
2) RF out ( to the tv )
3) POWER
4) Some sort of data connection. Either phone line or network. The bulk of tivos sold ( Series 2 ) dont have wireless networking built in yet. YOu would need to attach at least a USB type device.

AND there is still a nice long setup process with tivo .. Registering the box .. configuring your channles .. Perhaps configuring your cable box ..

its not "plug and play"

Re:No it doesn't

[dharbee]

"However, I only hit one button to turn my machine on just the same as you do and then just use the remote control from there. It really is idiot proof."

Bullshit. You may like your MYTH box (that is what you're talking about right?) but idiot proof? Liar.

And as to your setup, it must suck not having HD.

Re:No it doesn't

[jagilbertvt]

There is no way any of the VIA EPIA boards would handle HDTV, they are much too underpowered. Heck, I doubt it could handle standard def recording and playback simultaneously.

Re:No it doesn't

[pakar]

You probably need update your knowledge about those... Normal TV works out of the box with plain mpeg2 (got a hardware decoder for it even!) but for HDTV you will need one of the new boards with support for it... if you wanna offload the cpu for xvid and such you can go with one of the boards with one of those CN400 chipsets that has mpeg4 acceleration...

Just have a look at this chipset...or any of the others...
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/chipsets/c-serie s/cn896/

Before stating things like that please do a check of what people already are using for this and what's supported on those boards...

Re:No it doesn't

[reezle]

$79 at Fry's for the Kworld 115 TV card. It does Analog, ATSC, and Digital Cable.
Since I'm a Comcast customer, the digital channels it picks up are only the Basic cable channels. (But including the hi-def channels)
Between that card and a firewire to my cable box, I've got all the channels, and two tuners. (1-1/2 tuners I suppose)
Even on the Firewire I find some content like HBO/Showtime channels are blocked. That's about the only downside I've seen to MythTv, and it's really more of a downside to Comcast not playing nice with their signals.

Upside is my Myth box runs 1080p, and seems to do a great job of making lesser signals look pretty nice. When I'm tired of TV, browing the Interweb on a 42" LCD is pretty nice, too. (Does Tivo have Firefox, can it bring you naked women?)

Re:No it doesn't

[jagilbertvt]

Good luck getting it to play h.264 content, though. Here's a fairly recent article regarding that.. http://www.theinq.com/default.aspx?article=39717

Re:No it doesn't

[pakar]

h264 content is no problem... The problem is if you wanna play some some h264 HDTV content.. But can you really do that with a tivo??

Basic configuration i listed was just for normal 'low-def' recordings.. If you want to get some higher resolution you of course need a bit more power in the system.

I have played h264 on my Sepron64/GeForce7200 system without to much problem... So instead of the 100$ board go with $40 cpu, $50 motherboard and a $50 gfx-card.. Will bump up the price with around $50 and will increase the power-usage of the system, but it will manage to play hdtv content...

And once again, here is the power of a DIY HTPC, you can choose what hardware you want for what you want to do.. If you wanna play that 1080p content go get some hardware that can manage to play it.. If you just wanna view plain old mpeg2's recorded from your analog or DVB-t card then you can manage with one of the budget via boards...

TVGuide.com does the same thing...

[NIN1385]

They do the same thing HERE

I have had a hard time figuring out why anyone buys the TV Guide for the last few years since they post the listings for free on their site.

Re:TVGuide.com does the same thing...

[belg4mit]

Why the articles of course.

Re:TVGuide.com does the same thing...

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the article was fine, it's the verb that's missing...

Plead with Google to buy them out?

[CnlPepper]

Anyone considered asking Google to buy them out?

Benefit for us:
- google tend to be fairly decent with providing data to users, would likely continue the service.

Benefit for them:
- yet another resource they can provide as a search and generate revenue from providing it online with small ads.

Is this the end of MythTV...

[pjviitas]

...I doubt it...there are too many good people involved with MythTV.

Is it a serious problem to be overcome...yes, because EPG reliance is one of MythTVs biggest flaws. Without an EPG, a MythTV box is pretty well useless.

Basically, the MythTV community does not have a choice in the matter. Either find a work around or the MythTV project is dead in the water.

Hedghog

Is this this same as their TV Guide web page?

[techmuse]

Zap2It has a TV Guide-like web page that tells you your personal TV listings. Is this the same thing that they are shutting down? Or is there some other service that they are talking about?

Make it a paid service

[pz]

Like many others, I'm a little surprised that they aren't moving to a subscription model. Clearly they know better what their available resources are, and what they are and are not capable of handling, but it seems like a missed opportunity to walk away from a situation where their servers are getting hammered, and start charging a small fee. Many, many of the MythTV users would happily pay a few dollars a month to have a steady stream of information. Sounds like it could be a million dollar annual income right there, and that's got to be very hard to walk away from for any company.

As for commercial abuse, if they know it's happening, they presumably are taking steps to quash it as well, without much luck. Probably like playing whack-a-mole.

Let's all hope Google comes to the rescue.

Re:Make it a paid service

[Buelldozer]

I was happy to find your clear, concise, comment down here all by itself. It makes it easy for a clean response.

Let's say that MythTV implemented your paid service plan and began charging the princely sum of $2 per month for the data.

I would give it all of 7 days before that paid for data became available for free. Someone, somewhere, would buy the data for $2 per month and load it up for others to have free of charge. It would be a daily torrent that you could pull, or a streamed RSS feed, a static layout site with a downloadable screen scraper, or any one of a dozen other ways I can think.

So now instead of a million dollar revenue stream you'd get a thousand dollar revenue stream coming from the 500 users who would actually be wiling to pay when a free source is available.

If you can answer the question of how to prevent the above scenario from happening I can put you in touch with some content providers who will pay REAL money for your idea. The kind of money that allows people to retire for life...at the age of twenty.

Re:Make it a paid service

[pz]

I would give it all of 7 days before that paid for data became available for free. Someone, somewhere, would buy the data for $2 per month and load it up for others to have free of charge. It would be a daily torrent that you could pull, or a streamed RSS feed, a static layout site with a downloadable screen scraper, or any one of a dozen other ways I can think.

Absolutely. The thing that prevents this from happening is that the data are all localized for a given market. My channels 3, 4, 5, 18, 32, 55, whatever, are not the same as yours. Heck, they probably aren't the same as the ones two towns over for obscure reasons due to arcane infrastructure. Time zone differences. State differences. Markets with different numbers of cable providers. Broadcast. It's a huge, wide data set, of which each of us would want only one thin slice. Each user cares about the channel lineup and scheduling for the signals at their end of the cable and no other, so creating a torrent of any single slice doesn't necessarily serve many people.

Re:Make it a paid service

[Anonymous Coward]

Who cares? Assuming the main cost is the bandwidth and you can get the feed for free/cheap (maybe a poor assumption), you *want* people to steal your results and serve them. It takes the load off you. Now if you were actually a business and wanted the margins, you might complain, but if you were using it to promote an associated product... say preconfigured MythTV boxes, then no problem! It's the same business model as Digium (PBX cards) and Asterisk (open source PBX software they develop).

Someone could make a lot of money off this...

Re:Make it a paid service

[Nos.]

But its not tough to create a bunch of accounts that each subscribe to a few threads and harvest data for a large portion of the population that a site focuses on. At even $2/month/account this is pretty minor. The different line ups aren't going to stop the redistribution of the data, which is the real problem. In the end, I think what they should do is to customize the listings for each user.

There's a name for this, and the film companies use it for screeners, governments use it for leaked documents, but basically, you put hidden codes into each "copy" of the data. Then, when you find a site using data, you find that hidden code, and trace it back to the account. At that point you can cancel the account (or better yet, provide corrupted data).

The point is, even though a lot of us are willing to pay for the service, changing it to a paid service won't fix the real problem, which is people going against the terms of use and redistributing the data.

Re:Make it a paid service

[TheGratefulNet]

its just business. dollars and cents.

at some point, people will pick the buy over the don't-buy (steal, snarf, what have you) when the price is right.

its just simple people and money theory. if its easier and cheaper to support a service (that you have an interest in seeing continue) then people will do it.

look at allofmp3.com. they charge for mp3's when you could argue that mp3's can be found easier, more locally, and free. but people DO pay for it. and a lot of people would not pay the itunes price (even if drm-free) yet they'll pay the russian site's price.

value is a balancing act. the trick is to pick the right numbers.

at the right numbers, this is a viable and sustainable business.

I don't buy the argument that people will -always- choose the free (as in 'no money') solution. not when they know that if too many people freeload, then the -whole- service goes away.

Re:Make it a paid service

[Lost Engineer]

DRM? Nah the MythTV guys would never accept that.

Re:Make it a paid service

[smchris]

Particularly in this case. At a hypothetical $2/month, Geez yes, I'd rather have it automatically updating like it is now instead of hunting down a file to manually run a MySQL DB import weekly.

Shame. I realized this was the proprietary albatross but I just assumed it would go subscription -- so folding does blindside me.

Re:Make it a paid service

[ben there...]

Apparently it already is. I use SageTV and it appears they use Zap2It. I assume I paid for it when I bought the app. But I guess they don't have the infrastructure or desire for direct payment, rather than B2B.

Re:Make it a paid service

[pavera]

well, sure, but lets say you want to provide this "free" service, to even be marginally popular/useful, you would need at least the 50 largest markets, and the top 3 providers in those 50 markets, so you're going to have to cover at least OTA/local, incumbent cable, dish, and directv. So that is 4 accounts for 1 market, times 50. That is 200 accounts. You really think there are tons of people out there just dieing to pay $400/month to give away free tv guide data? I really don't think so. At first I thought the original reply was spot on with the criticism of the idea of trying to make money from this, but your parent made me rethink it. The market is entirely too fragmented, different localities, different channels, different providers. Plus for sports you've got market blackouts, stuff that is available in Nevada might not be available in California...

There is no way to efficiently pirate this data. It only makes sense for a centralized provider to charge a small fee and distribute the information directly from there.

Re:Make it a paid service

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't get me wrong, I'd like to retire young just like everyone else. What I don't want to do though is find a way to put shackles on my legs. Giving you the answer would (in my opinion) be tantamount to producing the perfect killing machine.

In short, it's just wrong.

As others just like me have said before, if you've got to take extraordinary measures to prop up a business plan that is flawed from the outset, then your time and money is better spent re-working your business plan.

Honestly, every single goddamn content provider out there could take the lesson of a life time from allofmp3.com

Don't discount them because they don't play by the same rules. Keep in mind that those folks are making a fucking mint while the rest of the morons in the US are whining about letting customers buy music at a reasonable price.

In short, yes, your content is *your* content, but our culture is *our* culture. If you'd downplay the problem of content sharing and play up your service that allows anyone, anywhere the ability to quickly and easily get what they're looking for at a *reasonable* price, then you'll never have to worry about content sharing again. In fact you might even laugh when you think that someone might have ever been so obtuse as to try to *prevent* it.

I'll just keep on saying it...eventually someone will listen

Re:Make it a paid service

[Buelldozer]

No way to efficiently pirate this data? Really?

How about this:

I'll write a snap-in for MythTV that looks to see if you have a Zap2IT feed. If it does that module will take your data and upload it to a repository somewhere. Again, perhaps a torrent file. If it doesn't find a Zap2IT feed it goes to the same repository that people with the stream upload to and it downloads what is available. If it doesn't find what you need it prompts you to go get the Zap2IT subscription. When you do, and you will, it will detect your Zap2IT subscription and then start sending that data up to the repository.

I would guess that it would take someone with the right skills about 24-48 hours of programming time to make this work. From there it is easily installed by the end user as a package from some repository or another and presto, your data is not only being pirated easily but also AUTOMATICALLY.

Under this scheme no one person would have to pay the entire sum for all of the data, only one person in each market.

Tell me again why Zap2IT should even go down this road? Their rules are not going to be enforceable and if they try and constrain the data sharing they are going to be right where the *iaa's are at.

Re:Make it a paid service

[Buelldozer]

The problem you're going to have with "watermarking" the data in this fashion is keeping it in the file. Unlike Video or Audio what you really have here is a pile of text. Show names, descriptions, channel numbers, run times, start and stop times, whatever. It would be trivial to parse that back into strict text, grep/remove the watermark, and send the data out to someone else.

I'm not sure how you could keep a watermark in a file when the file has no layers to hide it in.

Re:Make it a paid service

[pavera]

Problem number 1:
Central repository. If there is a central repository or even a central directory where these files are being stored, then Zap2It has every legal right to sue that central repository into the ground.

Problem number 2:
Why are all these people going to give away their subscriptions for free? I see it evolving one of 2 ways, either a) the free service is very spotty, maybe you can get the cable channels, but no one with dish network has started giving their data away, so people sign up for the pay for feed anyway. or b) you get people to share their data they paid for, and this central repository gets flooded with requests and zap2it shuts down the pay service and the whole thing goes under.

Problem number 3:
This free repository is going to need quite a bit of bandwidth, even if this person isn't buying 200 accounts, he's going to have to have at least a good $600-700 colo account, with a lot of spare bandwidth, and when it really catches on, he'll be paying upwards of 3-5000/mo. (My suspicion is this is the reason zap2it is dropping the service). Even if you're not paying for the data you gotta pay the telcos.

Re:Make it a paid service

[adrianmonk]

Let's say that MythTV implemented your paid service plan and began charging the princely sum of $2 per month for the data. I would give it all of 7 days before that paid for data became available for free. Someone, somewhere, would buy the data for $2 per month and load it up for others to have free of charge.

If you can answer the question of how to prevent the above scenario from happening I can put you in touch with some content providers who will pay REAL money for your idea.

It's pretty easy to solve this problem, actually: each individual consumer only needs access to a limited subset of the data. For the hypothetical $2/month, you'd get access to data for one lineup (or maybe 2 or 3). That is, since I live in Austin, TX and have Time Warner Cable, I'd buy access to listings only for what Time Warner Cable offers in my area.

Now that person that wants to upload all the data has to have a separate $2/month subscription for each cable operator in the country. They're not going to bother.

And to make it just a little tougher, they can easily toss some kind of digital watermark into the data. This is similar to what map makers do: they throw in a street or two that doesn't exist. If a commercial TV listings service did this, they'd have some chance of tracing the data back to the original account who bought it. Now they have somebody to sue.

And yes, both of these methods can be defeated. They are imperfect. But combined together, they should make it pretty impractical to give away the data.

Now, who are these people that are going to pay me real money for my idea? My idea only works for TV listings, but you didn't say it had to be a general solution.

Google

[zaphodb001]

Google should step in -- or better yet, Yahoo!

Re:Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm...

You mean like this?

What happened to Mythtv's paid service, TechnoVera

[digitalderbs]

A year ago it was announced that an alternative paid service through TechnoVera was available to replace Zap2It with part of the funds going back to OSS and mythtv -- and no periodic surveys. Couldn't users switch to this service? -- or is it no longer available? (I've never used this service myself.. any users care to respond?)

TitanTV

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not switch to using another service, such as titantv.com?

Doom and Gloom

[tbannist]

Perhaps this Doom and Gloom is unwarranted? Surely if Zap2It could provide listings someone else could do so as well. It might be a little work to figure out how to make money off it, but I think for someone this represents an opportunity to make a little money.

Re:What happened to Mythtv's paid service, TechnoV

[$RANDOMLUSER]

TechnoVera's data came from Zap2it. Meanwhile, their URL http://www.lxmsuite.com/ is parked.

But EIT has limitations

[LionMage]

Excellent link. However, using EIT has at least one drawback:

Unlike DVB systems, an EIT in ATSC covers a limited time span. [...] It's possible to transmit up to 128 EIT tables for any virtual channel, but it's very rare that so many are transmitted - terrestrial systems have to transmit EITs covering at least the current time slot and the next three time slots.

So at least in the U.S., the EIT would be of limited utility to MythTV users, since it is unlikely that one would be able to use this data to schedule multiple days in advance. Also, the article you linked only indicates that EIT is a standard part of ATSC (the terrestrial digital TV broadcast standard), and wouldn't necessarily be present in analog broadcasts (which are going to be around for a little while longer) or in digital cable transmissions (which use QAM here in the U.S.). It's entirely possible that a broadcaster might supply EIT data, and a cable operator might strip it out to save some bandwidth.

I've seen some of the newer LCD HDTVs sold here in the U.S. which have the ability to display program guide data, no doubt culled from available EIT data, but this is really intended to allow viewers to see what's on right now or in the immediate future without resorting to channel flipping. I bought a Sharp Aquos one generation before this feature became standard, so I missed out, but I really don't feel like I'm missing too much because of the described limitations.

Re:But EIT has limitations

[LionMage]

Whoops, scratch what I said about QAM. After more careful reading, it looks as though EIT is available for cable systems in the U.S., although the article cited doesn't address the issue of encrypted QAM (which most open hardware and software can't decrypt, making the QAM capabilities of most HD tuner cards limited at best). So even though EIT might be technically available for digital cable users in the U.S., it might not be practically accessible to MythTV. And there are no guarantees for how far in the future scheduling data will be provided.

Re:But EIT has limitations

[martin_b1sh0p]

Actually, if you use TV Guide On Screen, it's 8 days worth of info here in the states (not just the next three time slots). Not as good as Tivo's 2-3 weeks but still better than nothing. I know this because I have an LG LCD TV with a DVR built in downstairs which has the TV Guide as well as a Tivo in the bedroom upstairs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Guide_On_Screen

http://www.tvgos.com/

Re:But EIT has limitations

[zozzi]

I don't know with ATSC, but in the DVB world (Europe), it is certainly possible to transmit a week's data (or more) for 100s of channels.

Though you can only transmit a set of EITs in a session, nothing prevents the box at the other end from caching the results so you can transmit different slots in sequence and the box will eventually receive them all.

Re:But EIT has limitations

[Anonymous Coward]

http://atscap.sourceforge.net/
http://www.penlug.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/DigitalT elevisionAtscap

EIT's update every 3 hours and they carry at a minimum 12 hours of event programming information within 4 EITs.

It takes about 1 minute to fetch how ever many hours of programming the station is sending in their ATSC PSIP. For the 7 English speaking stations in my area, all of the program guides are updated in about 5 minutes.

atscap automatically updates the EPGs once every 3 hours. If a capture is in progress and it's unable to run the EPG update for all the stations, it's automatically postponed until it can run. The EPG for the station that is currently being captured is already updated, so that's one less EPG that has to be updated when the postponed EPG updates do eventually run. You're not very likely to watch a 12-hour event, so it's not very likely you will miss an event.

As for recording a specific event an unknown time in the future, a simple search event entry will add the event to the timer list when the EIT updates, if it finds a match in the updated EITs.

I don't understand what you mean when you say "So at least in the U.S., the EIT would be of limited utility to MythTV users, since it is unlikely that one would be able to use this data to schedule multiple days in advance."

Perhaps you aren't being as imaginative as you could be. "24" sat on my atscap search event list for 7 months before it finally found the events in the EIT in January and onward. I didn't miss a single episode of "24". The channel filter in the search event prevented capturing all of the NBC re-runs of 2 year old "24" episodes.

Granted, atscap is for over-the-air broadcasts only, and it's only for digital television, not analog. Some of us are looking forward to the day when all of the NTSC transmitters go dark, because some of us can't receive over-the-air NTSC if our very lives depended on it, yet ATSC comes in fine with less than 1/5th the power output of the NTSC transmitters.

Unlike MythTV, atscap doesn't heat up your CPU compressing the video into some lower-quality format. If it's HD, most people will want the original picture quality, not some weirdware NippleVideo compressed low-quality version.

The flip-side of that coin means because it stays in the standard ATSC format, it's quite possible to play back the event with [blech!] Windows. I know someone who is right at this moment sitting on their couch with their Centrino Windows Vista laptop, watching captures made by atscap via their WRT54G wireless router, happier than the proverbial bug-in-the-rug. I suppose they could sit on the toilet and do the same, but I don't recommend that. You might get hemorrhoids!

atscap is painless to install, compared to MythTV, and also requires much less resources than MythTV. atscap doesn't need an SQL server for the EPG. atscap will do captures fine on a 300MHz CPU, and will probably work even on a 100MHz CPU.

atscap doesn't care what you use to play back the events. You could use it as a replacement for the MythTV backend, and still use MythTV for all the bells and whistles that you feel you need. Some people are using the Roku HD1000, some are using VLC, some are using Xine and some are using mplayer. The player decision your decision. You can choose what works best for you.

The drawbacks to atscap? You're *almost* at the mercy of the broadcasters to send proper PSIP information, much like MythTV is at the mercy of Zap2It XML. Also, some stations have buggy ATSC PSIP generators that send garbage, or something worthless, like "Normal Programming - 180 minutes". The Late Show with David Letterman is listed on the local CBS station EIT as 60 minutes. If I were to depend on the EIT event length, it's likely the musical guests would be truncated.

Weekday event timers to the rescue. I use a 65 minute weekday timer

Re:But EIT has limitations

[ars]

Unlike MythTV, atscap doesn't heat up your CPU compressing the video into some lower-quality format. If it's HD, most people will want the original picture quality, not some weirdware NippleVideo compressed low-quality version.

Um, you know you don't have to recompress HDTV streams in MythTV? And what's the point of advertising capture with a 100Mhz CPU (which MythTV can do just fine, BTW) if you can't play it anyway?

Oh, and you don't have to play them in MythTV either, you can play them using mplayer.

You sound like you're ranting against MythTV, but for no good reason. If there something about the MythTV backend that bothers you?

Re:But EIT has limitations

[Lee Cremeans]

I've heard at least one person I know comment that they got a TiVo instead of setting up MythTV because "they don't want to sysadmin their TV." I can sympathize, somewhat; MythTV is somewhat complicated to set up for the first time if you're not considering running it client-server; it does indeed require MySQL, something of a tall order for a single-user DVR (an SQLite option would be nice); and I've had issues over the past few days with it crashing while recording something (after months of solid operation; I get the feeling my new microATX board doesn't like my cheap BT878-based capture card).

I use DVR but what is Zap2It

[Sciros]

I have an HD cable box at home with built-in DVR that functions like Tivo... yet I haven't even HEARD of Zap2It, let alone needed to use it ever. Warner's digital cable boxes have great TV guides, so as long as cable provides have that, why need another online one?

Re:I use DVR but what is Zap2It

[smclean]

Don't use Zap2It, or know what it is? Well, sounds like you really have nothing to add to this conversation then.

Oh, but we're all glad to hear the details of your DVR setup, thanks for that.

Re:I use DVR but what is Zap2It

[Vortran]

Do you own your DVR? How much do you pay per month for it? How many $250 DVRs could you have if you keep paying for it for 5 years?

Can you plug another source into it and record to the hard drive? Can you burn a DVD from it? What if you got satellite TV and still kept the cable sub, would the DVR work with the satellite?

To each their own, you know.. I just personally want a no-strings-attached DVR for myself with no program guide, no fee, no Internet connection, time-shifting (watch show while it finishes recording) and VCR-like programming. Please write if such a thing exists. In the meantime, I'll save my money.

Re:I use DVR but what is Zap2It

[Sciros]

You missed the point... I'm saying that a decent cable-provider-provided (hehe wording..) TV guide should exist as an alternative to an internet-based TV guide... it's more convenient anyhow since one can just set a show/series to record upon finding it in the guide.

But I didn't think about MythTV and that it's a PC app in the first place, so I didn't appreciate what the loss of a standalone TV guide means... so there is no TV program listing for MythTV to use now that Zap2It is gone? Bummer

Re:I use DVR but what is Zap2It

[Sciros]

Well.. there's a fee for the DVR on top of it being an HD digital cable box box but it seems worth it to me... it does have time-shifting, doesn't require an internet connection, has a good program guide (why not want one?), has *better* than VCR-like programming (can record manually set times, all episodes of a particular show, or all NEW episodes of a particular show, and of course just one-time recordings of something like a movie).

The DVR setup I have is literally part of the digital cable box, so sadly I am incapable of anything you listed in the second paragraph.

Re:I use DVR but what is Zap2It

[HobophobE]

There are two ways to get the data:

1. Grab it (somehow) from someone else's precompiled form
   
2. Compile it yourself

The former is obviously easier of the two. The latter requires that you get the data somehow and then combine it into a usable format.

The former is easiest with the existing solution (data direct from zap2it), but is feasible through other mechanisms (most notably programs that download some flavor of HTML and then parse to get the useful data).

The latter would require either:

1. Individuals that use the data to copy or write or scan it somehow
   
2. Stations or cable providers to send the data to a central source

The first is feasible, but there's a strong question of how much effort it would take and how reliable it would be.
The latter would merely require the stations to replicate an existing behavior, but it would take contacting them and getting them to agree to do so (difficult depending on what sort of contract if any they have with zap2it and so forth).

The main benefit of the latter would be if a simple format were designed (or possibly already exists?) that would allow for listings to be easily distributed across the internet.

Such a format would provide precise station information (who provides it, where, what frequencies geographically, and if it's a 'local affiliate' then it could have a depends->(inter)national station and only list its differences.

If such a system/format were deployed and became used it would effectively put the companies that currently gather/compile the data out of business. It would also mean that the differences in regional datasets could be largely nullified and that any market could have good data.

To recap: the best solution is the hardest solution. It is a suite of software for both pushing and pulling the data and its main hurdle would be gaining acceptance/use by the stations. The worst solution is basically the existing one. URL-scraping is a little bit worse, but not sufficiently worse to be distinguishable from the data direct solution.

This is troubling-asking for compensation.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Isn't there any way to obtain this information in an "open-source" manner?"

Funny how "open source" comes with the tag:"but we don't want to pay for the effort to get what we want". Maybe one of these days you all will wake up and realize that the world runs on more than just good feelings.

Re:This is troubling-asking for compensation.

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the summary, fool.

"There is no other direct source, and no option to pay for the service even if the users wanted to."

Re:What happened to Mythtv's paid service, TechnoV

[ElForesto]

According to the article, the project was to be hosted at LxMSuite.com, now a squatter domain available for sale. I think it's dead, Jim.

So what?

[PhreakOfTime]

Post or moderate?

I have to say its rather disconcerting to see so many people actually bothered this much by something as trivial as moving pictures? And in all honesty, the same people who gravitated to mythTV are the ones who percieve themselves as somehow above 'regular' TV watchers.

In my opinion, MythTV is going to be looked back as the 'bridge' between the old model of what a TV station is today, and what IPTV will transform the market into in the next decade. Sure there will still be those who want and use MythTV or something of the like, just as there are old people today who still listen to music on AM radio. At some point in many of our lives we attach certain emotions on top of the technology that we use. Thus leading us to a point where the 'old' stuff is fine for our tastes. Because our tastes are based on more than hardware, they are based on the emotions and feelings garnered in the entire process. We all know the 'tubes sound more rich' audiophiles, its the same principle.

So, now that there are cadres of phosphor zombies worried about their 'listings' being taken away, you can all rest comfortably knowing the next step is to pull your pants up well above your waist-line

For some reason, every generation thinks 'they' wont get old. But as someone wiser than me once said; "Same shit...different day"

Re:So what?

[Vortran]

What is the new alternative? I personally don't want any additional fees or subs. I'm not nostalgic, I am just cheap!

Re:So what?

[grommit]

The TV market will be transformed by IPTV in 10 years? That's cute. Really. I have no doubt that there will be more people using IPTV in 10 years than there are now (all dozen of them) but to say that it will transform the market is stupidly optimistic. You seem to forget that for better or worse, media companies control the TV market currently and just like they control the music market (hear of RIAA?) they are not willing to change how they do business. Yes, I know there are plenty of places to get indie music but unless you're one of those people that think so highly of themselves that they refuse to listen to any music that becomes mainstream, you are missing out on a lot of music.

It'll be the same way with IPTV for a very long time to come.

Re:So what?

[PhreakOfTime]

Blah, blah, blah. Same tired garbage every century... "The horseless carriage will never succeed, the horse and buggy manufacturers control the market"

By IPTV, I mean the broad sense of video delivery by internet. Not the narrow view of IPTV being pushed by MS and the like. Think bigger, like youtube, or facebook, or myspace.

And from the sounds of it, you have already reached the 'old age' personality. And instead of throwing out nonsense facts such as 'all dozen of them' perhaps you should pay more attention to the trends already developing. Here is a link to get you started along those lines. Judging by your ID on this site(5 digits) my guess would put you in the 35 yr old range... +/- 3 years.

Frankly, whatever your view of the world happens to be right now, it matters little to those already dropping their cable TV for the alternatives. The world changes, you dont need to, nor are you required to. Among my circle of friends, I would say about 20% have rid themselves of a cable bill over the last 5 years. Myself included. Those numbers are running about the same at my place of work, where you will hear such things as 'I dont watch video unless its streamed'.

As far as stupidly optimistic, well Im not sure how being aware of something currently happening that you dont seem to be aware of is stupid, but whatever makes you feel comfortable in a world of change is not for me to dictate. Like I said, you dont have to change, nor are you required to... but to claim something thats actually happening is not happening, meets the definition of 'stupid' moreso than your own use of the word.

Not stopping myth

[a9db0]

It will slow it down, perhaps making it more cumbersome to use until an alternative is developed, but it won't kill MythTv. Far from it.

And, as a longtime MythTv user I'd cheerfully cough up $50/year for access to the data. Zap2it has been reliable and accurate for me, and I'd support them. But then I'm weird - I subscribe to comics and journals.

Web 2.0 TV? User power it?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a lot of talk about screen scraping, but what about harvesting user knowledge to build some sort of database? Assume you give a person a blank chart for times. They would set a time to start and stop recording, because they want to record some event. Assuming the grid is blank and they want to record more than one show, they would necessarily need to label the item. You send that information out to some sort of server, and it compiles them all. Now people's data would all be slightly different, but you can use statistic analysis, and maybe some formatting on the text, to get what appears to be the "most likely" time and name for a show. The more people that use the service, the more fleshed out the database becomes. The service can send all the data it compiles back to the individual users, and everyone gets a more complete listing. When something doesn't show up, if someone wants it, and knows what it is, it can be added.

This, of course, could be supplemented with screen scraping a website or two, or scraping the TV guide channel that some cable providers use, but at heart it gets brought to fruition by the power of the long tail. Why not?

Common sentiment

[UnknowingFool]

I'm sure I represent most other MythTV users when I say: "FSCK!"

Re:Common sentiment

[atezun]

I sincerely doubt a filesystem check will change Zap2it's mind.

Re:Common sentiment

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I rebooted my MythTV box, it forced me to fsck it, since I hadn't fscked it in well over 200 days.

*cry*

Re:Common sentiment

[dodongo]

"FSCK"

Funny. My exclamation had one more vowel and one fewer consonant than yours.

(That's right, I yelled "ASCK!")

Re:Common sentiment

[Anonymous Coward]

Just say fuck, you unfunny nerd

Anybody know what the "cause" was?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd bookmark this story into your slashdot folder. So next time someone says "but I'm not hurting anyone". You not only can show cause and effect. But show that sometime the effect strikes the abuser instead of the innocent. This leaves two choices. Doing without, or creating a non-abusive alternative, which is the way it should have been anyway.

Re:Anybody know what the "cause" was?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly the reason that for all the years I stole DTV and DISH I still kept my sub going. If no one pays there won't be anything to steal......

Re:Screw them

[jjohnson]

You obviously haven't configured your grey market Tivo, your MythTV install, or simply a browser bookmark for yourself to take advantage of the remarkable free service they've been offering all this time. They're definitely not an email harverster site.

Huh?

[clang_jangle]

Yahoo and TVGuide both had free listings online last I checked. What's wrong with using theirs? (If that's a stoopid question I apologise, I do not watch TV or use any PVR:)

TVGuide.com/Gemstar is the REAL culprit

[haggie]

Gemstar got lucky in the patent lottery and has been trying to extort money from anyone that lists television schedules.

I'll bet that they will offer integrated television listings to any application for about twice the price of an annual subscription to the TV Guide per user because "integrated TV listings have more value..." or some crap like that.

Signed,

Bitter SageTV Owner

It's funny

[rockhome]

The whole argument over who skips commercials better is moot at best.

Commercials are going to be a thing of the past, at least commercials as we have grown used to them.
As DVRs become more ingrained, advertisers and providers will find new ways to get the message across,
ways that blend the content with the message. We are probably a couple of years away from a real change in how
"Commercials" are shown on TV.

Re:It's funny

[Rakarra]

"Hey Starbuck, what are you watching?"
"Oh hey Apollo. Nice Levis! Very retro! I found these videos in that old outpost we thought might lead us to Earth. Apparently they used to watch "American Idol" on Tuesday and Wednesday nights at 8pm on the FOX network. I'm all caught up to the second to last episode. I can't wait to see whether Blake or Jordon will win!"
"Yeah, too bad that all happened in the past. If we'd watched the show while it was on, we could have voted for who would win."

Yeah.. product placement will work better in some shows than others. :(

Re:It's funny

[HTH NE1]

I don't think we'll be seeing ads for Fox programming during Battlestar Galactica.

It'd be frakking more likely they'd be for NBC shows.

Re:It's funny

[Belacgod]

On nbc.com, they use the commercials to cover the loading time. I.E, while the next 10 minutes loads completely enough to play through without stopping, they show a 30-second spot. I don't object, as the alternative is watching nothing while it loads or having the show stop partway through. Commercials like that do have a future.

Re:It's funny

[Rakarra]

Or, the BSG universe could likely exist in the present, thanks to the inspiration of Galactica 1980.

re: how to prevent data "stealing"?

[King_TJ]

It seems to me this is a problem with a number of very workable solutions. For starters, how about people receiving only a compressed download of their guide data with a password protected archive file? The correct password to decompress the archive could change daily (or hourly even, whatever), based on information exchanged between the paid subscriber's Myth box and the server. To discourage "reverse engineering" of exactly how these passwords were determined, you might have to release the guide module without providing open source for that little component .... but I think that's something most Myth users could live with, given the circumstances. (They already happily use nVidia drivers that don't include source, right?)

Sure, someone could brute force hack the archive file to get it decompressed, but how worthwhile could all that effort really be for a service people are ok spending maybe $1.99 a month for? And considering the password would change often (maybe with each new guide update?), it would have to be brute force hacked over and over and over.....

Open Source != Free as in Beer

[r_jensen11]

Open Source doesn't mean that a company can't charge something. Look at Redhat. They sure as hell don't give everything away for free. What we're talking about here is also a service, not necessarily a product. People ought to be willing to pay for a service in one form or another, be it with regularly scheduled fees, putting up with advertisements, etc.

Re:Open Source != Free as in Beer

[EvanED]

Open Source doesn't mean that a company can't charge something. Look at Redhat. They sure as hell don't give everything away for free.

No, but CentOS does.

Open source means a change from a product-based market to a service-based market, at least to a FAR larger extent than is acknowledged by the typical "look at Red Hat" line. Remember, Red Hat makes most of its money because people want support. That's fine if you want to be in that business and can come up with some value to add to the product that only you can provide.

If you have something like TV schedules, there's no service there, unless you want to talk about providing the bandwidth to you to get it. If Bob generates the schedules and Fred buys them from Bob and starts giving them out, what's the incentive to go to Fred and pay for them? I certainly can't think of any added value Bob can give. So if Bob spends a good bit of money compiling the listings and the only people who actually buy them from him are those who want to actually support Bob while the people who just want the listings go to Fred, that could very easily be a losing proposition for Bob.

Where can I buy a MythTV box?

[rockhome]

I am curious as to why I can't seem to find a pre-configured MythTV system anywhere, at least not in the first page of Google hits.

If MythTV is so great, how come no one has built a company around providing MythTV for a fee?
I have no interest in rolling my own because my TiVo provides all of the features that I need with none of the hassle. Certainly,
If MORE features were available, I'd be interested.

Can MythTV work with CableCards?
Why doesn't someone produce these things commercially?
BTW, I am going to patent, copyright, and trademark this idea, so if anyone does do it, I am going sue, sue, sue.

Leeching off generousity

[ChaosDiscord]

Relatedly, some comic artists are no longer doing free sketches for fans because too many "fans" actually turn around and hawk them on eBay. Because some people can't play nice, everyone suffers. It's a shame. Perhaps unsurprising, basic economic theory predicts these results.

couchville

[jameseyjamesey]

why not use couchville.com?

How to get this started

[Skapare]

Having one person or business try to get all this data would be hard. It would cost money and would not be free without the risk of abuse. However, there is a way we can do that. The operative word is "we". What it takes is for the right people in each TV market area to convince the stations in that market (that they can communicate directly with or even visit) to provide them their listings (free, with no restrictions). As soon as one is convinced, more will follow. They might need to be converted to a common XML/RSS format. Then we merge them together at a few central points, and redistribute. If those stations can be convinced to do so in an RSS feed, that could make it easy. But what we should do is work with them to make it easy for them.

Then we'll need other approaches to get the national cable/satellite listings. This might get harder.

And keep in mind there will be resistance from those who make revenues from listings.

Re:How to get this started

[meregistered]

Yes, I agree. You're right.

It's interesting how many problems can be resolved by a distributed approach.

Re:How to get this started

[tepples]

What it takes is for the right people in each TV market area to convince the stations in that market (that they can communicate directly with or even visit) to provide them their listings (free, with no restrictions). In the case of cable television, "each TV market area" would be the whole United States, right?

Zap2It Labs Discontinuing Free TV Guide Service

[zetaprime]

Windows Media Center uses listings supplied by Zap2it. Does that mean they're going to screw Microsoft too?

P2P Listings

[Doc Ruby]

TV listings seems like a great P2P app for MythTV. Listings for future broadcasts can be read by users from their local media.

In small entries (enforced by the GUI) that don't trip the copyright of the original publisher. Or, like most P2P users, they'll ignore the copyrights.

It's like a Napster index that doesn't point to copyright violated media, but to fair use of one's own media subscriptions.

Re:P2P Listings

[ben there...]

I've thought about that before, but the last thing I'd want to do when using my HTPC is input large amounts of data. Browse the guide, hit the record button, later hit play. Occasionally add a favorite. That's about the max for me. I'd rather pay the $80 for app + listings (SageTV, BeyondTV, etc) than have to "correct" the listings manually. P2P metadata is usually completely useless (and spammy) anyway.

Re:P2P Listings

[Doc Ruby]

Who said anything about entering large amounts of data? I said enter just a little data, just like everyone else. More P2P users than data to enter means everyone shares the task.

And P2P metadata, when the redundancy is used to confirm good data, is more reliable than just centrally produced data without quality control.

Re:P2P Listings

[GerryHattrick]

IP is worth watching though. In the UK, channels were able to claim that their forward listings were copyright, and print media then had to restrict what they republished (or buy a license). Sure it's easy enough to steal, but any really capable service (compare 'VideoPlus' in UK) could best operate if fully legit.

Re:P2P Listings

[Doc Ruby]

Collections of facts are not copyrightable. Publishers for centuries have pulled the trick of publishing deliberate "mistakes" that aren't "facts", which can be copyrighted. But I bet that a good P2P redundancy QA algorithm from multiple sources would eliminate those booby traps.

Re:P2P Listings

[ben there...]

I thought I explained the relative scale of "large" in the very next sentence. But to clarify, when watching TV, especially with a remote, entering Program Title, Season, Episode, Start Time, End Time, Actors/Actresses, and Description, or for that matter, any one of those items individually, is "a large amount of data." TV time is when I kick back and get away from computers and keyboards and reading and typing. I have a feeling I'm not alone in that.

It's enough work just keeping up with my favorite shows and actors and scheduling non-conflicting recordings, then ensuring I have room on my 1.3 TB, burning stuff to disc, etc. It's not helpful to add more work on top of that. Really, I'd pay $50-100 a year to avoid that.

Re:P2P Listings

[Doc Ruby]

You might not enter any data at all. But there's lots of TV geeks out there who will. I feel the same way about my CDs, but I still entered a fair amount of data into the CDDB - maybe a few hours work over a couple of years. But there's such a large consumer:content ratio that a little by a few goes a long way to many.

The P2P world has lots of incentives, including up/down ratios that can be boosted with metadata entry, wieghted by how much their quality agrees with the redundant averaging. Just because your motivations are (legitimately) selfish and (relatively) lazy doesn't mean you won't get to pay to consume data produced P2P that good producers get for free.

BeyondTV/Snapstream

[greywire]

If beyondTV costs $70 and gives you listings, couldnt somebody set up a company and buy their data from the same place that snapstream does, and sell a small mythtv addin for $70 and probably make a tidy profit? I'd rather pay $70 to a mythtv company than snapstream. Hopefully they wouldnt be greedy and would use some of that $70 to further develop mythtv...

Or does snapstream get their data from zap2it? In which case my backup plan (buy beyondtv and format my mythtv box with windows...) is fubar'd..

Re:BeyondTV/Snapstream

[Anonymous Coward]

SnapStream is a TMS commercial partner, so BeyondTV users aren't affected by the labs.zap2it.com smackdown.

Old link, but establishes the relationship:

http://www.tms.tribune.com/newsreleases/050524_ent ertainment.html

Not all is totally lost.

[swbuehler]

www.titantv.com; it's the online guide used by EyeTV and is run by DecisionMark (no relation to Zap2it).

Re:Not all is totally lost.

[bughunter]

Mod Parent Up.

I use TitanTV with my EyeTV-based PVR setup, and it works pretty seamlessly. And TitanTV is the ONLY listing service, either print or intertubed, that gets the correct channel lineup for my basic analog cable service (Charter in Altadena, CA).

The ads can be annoying occasionally, but the site can be configured with your favorite channels, and to display the listings in fonts readable from across the room and is somewhat navigable with the TAB key and directional arrows, which I like, since I am using a wireless keyboard as my "remote."

The only thing it can't do that some other listing services can do is allow me to browse the listings from work, and send programming instructions to my PVR at home.

Re:Not all is totally lost.

[russotto]

TitanTV offers no XML feed, so you're back to scraping it.

Tivo pricing

[grahamsz]

I pay $7/month for my service. Granted I bought one of the first series 2 boxes (when they were ~$300) and ran at least a year at $12/month.

If they've broken even on you then it's likely they'll off favorable pricing instead of losing you to a cable company dvr.

Cold day in hell, but....

[Kamokazi]

Maybe Microsoft could do it? Wouldn't this be where Media Center pulls its data from too? Kind of important for the product. And then maybe out of the goodness of their heart they'll make the listings openly available (I know, unlikely).

It's not like they'd sell very many extra copies of Home Premium Vista by keeping it closed...so maybe earn some brownie points with the OSS community, and not to mention having some degree of power by having quite a few people rely on your service. (I know you like power Microsoft, so hook us up :-)

So you can automate scanning the data.

[DrHow]

A number of the comments here seem to take the view that one source of listings is as good as any other. However, the power of getting the listings data (as opposed to a look at formatted listings) is that you can then use software to read that data and find all the programs that might interest you. The XMLTV package itself offers a number of tools for scanning the data and selecting programs based on rules you specify. There also exist other application programs which have sophisticated search capabilities for treating XML program data. The number of different TV stations I receive now is staggering. I would waste much more time finding the programs I want to watch if I did not have software that automatically weeds out most of what I would not care to consider. Furthermore, there are programs, which would interest me and which I would enjoy watching, but which I would miss if I did not have the tool to spot them for me because it would just take too much time for me to scan for such shows in the listings for all the stations which I rarely watch.

Re:So you can automate scanning the data.

[clang_jangle]

Well seeing as how so many people do live for their TV time I am more than certain someone will put together XML TV listings for you all soon.

It ain't over 'till it's over.

[camperdave]

In the wise words of Douglas Adams, "Don't Panic". There is plenty of time for Zap2it to change their minds about providing the service for free. There's three months of backlash (forelash?) that they have to deal with before closing, and who knows how much backlash to deal with when the general public finds out. Besides, this may just be their direct download closing down. Their free website may still be up and running afterwards. I'm sure it wouldn't take long for the clever folks on the internet to figure out how to squeeze the same data out of the website.

Re:In the Uk we get the EIT data from the DVBT str

[Anonymous Coward]

We get guide listings even on the analog broadcasts in the US.
They aren't two weeks worth, but you can find the next few
hours of programming for a station.

It requires tuning into the station to get it though, and some
stations don't send it.

I haven't heard any discussion about using it, which I find
strange.

Zap2it

[kahrytan]

They have made a fatal mistake. They could have made money from it and kept the free use. By using basic XML feed with text based ads embedded in the individual listings. With the growing number of HTPCs, That could have brought revenue to zap2it. When you change the channel, you often get description of the show/movie. The ad would also show up as well. And Zap2It could have used Licensing to ensure unaltered feeds.

On other hand, Google could do it and bring adsense to the TV.

Re:Zap2it

[Anonymous Coward]

On other hand, Google could do it and bring nonsense to the TV.

Fixed.

Nice opportunity here for Google

[Tinman_au]

Seems to me that there is a great opportunity for Google to step in, but NOT just limit itself to producing/compiling the TV data lists, but also to team/partner with the MythTV team to provide a GoogleTV (GoogleVision??) version of MythTV.

That way they can provide a nice tidy package.

Thanks

[ImaLamer]

Thank you for being the first to thank them.

It sucks that it' shutting down (I use it for GB-PVR)- but they did do it for free for years. Let's not demonize them, no matter the reason, and start looking for alternatives.

Advertising?

[phorm]

I'm fairly sure I *wouldn't* want to see the ad for that... *shudders*

TV listings by XML/RSS

[rHBa]

All UK channels except ITV are also available as an XML/RSS feed.

A Comment On This Situation From Scott Lockwood

[Anonymous Coward]

*fart*

*defecate*

*belch*

**FART**

um, isn't TitanTV.com an alternative for PVRs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not that familiar with MythTV, but TitanTV.com offers the same kind of listing services Zap2it did, and some kind of PVR support, and from what I recall the web site offered better customization services for web use of the listings.

Seem to me that MythTV screwed themselves if they encouraged what was essential commercial services using software exploiting the free services at Zap2it. Plus, I suspect that as others suggested, Zap2it had more issues with Tribune not finding a way to make the service profitable or seeing long term value in continuing the service.

Looks like Zap2it is still offering to license the service, but without that happening on a large scale I can't imagine they'll keep running the data collection. I know from working with Zap2it via a small cable company a few years ago that keeping the all the channel lineups current is probably a full time job alone.

TiVo Canada

[naeim]

This is also bad news for the Canadian TiVo users because the unofficial service relied on feeds from labs.zap2it.com. argh.

Re:TiVo Canada

[topham]

So pay for a subscription; the problem with disappear.
(And yes; it is now possible to subscribe from Canada).

Why can't I find a MythBox for sale?

[xenocide2]

The open source hobbyist nature of mythTV attracts the kind of people who'd rather spec out their own hardware and help tweak the software. But the reason you can't find any for sale is probably because you didn't think to look at the ads.

Recording TV is so yesterday...

[plazman30]

It's about time we had TV on-demand for everything. I have been seriously considering the AppleTV for this reason. If I buy only the shows I want to watch, then I could turn around and cut my satellite bill from $65 a month to about $20 a month. I just wish the shows were in xvid format. so I could take them anywhere.

My only current hangup is the 6 and 4 year old. Apple doesn't sell most of the stuff they want to watch on-demand.

Andy

Other projects...

[singularity]

While everyone is mentioning how MythTV is going to ahve issues with this, I would remind everyone that MythTV is not the only program out there relying on the Zap2It data.

I have a program on my Mac (MacProgramGuide) that uses the data, and up until today I was developing my own product using the Zap2it data (for anyone interested - adding a "Season Pass" ability on to the eyeTV software)

Now I am going to have to either give up the project or find another source.

In a word - "NO".

[buss_error]

Is this going to be a killing blow for MythTV?"

.

The advantanges of MythTV aren't in the guide. The advantages are in the freedom from corporate interests, corporate profits, and corporate bullying. Sure, the guide is important, sure it's an annoyance to lose it, but I frequently send/receive programs I've recorded with MythTV to friends also running MythTV. Some limited function for that is also in other DVRs, but limits are placed, track the path, and result in all kinds of ads.

What will kill MythTv isn't the guide situation, it's the erosion of the Home Recording Act freedoms that Rupert Murdoc, RIAA, MPAA and other main stream media outlets are wetting their pants over.

The other day, someone was telling me that they pay out over USD2,000 per year for cable service. Does it strike you as strange to pay that much to watch a one hour program for 40 minutes of content versus 20 minutes of ads?

The problem is profit. Too much greed ruins anything.

To answer another post about buying a MythTV dvr, and not being able to find one, visit G-DING.TV and download MythDora. Load it on to that old computer you've shoved in the corner because the old windows box has too much spyware and malware on it, and fixing it is more expensive than buying a new computer. Go to Circuit City and buy a USD80.00 Hauppage PVR-150. If you have half way standard old hardware, it's likely you have a working DVR in about an hour. WARNING: IT DOES ERASE THE DISK.

Re:In a word - "NO".

[mshurpik]

>The other day, someone was telling me that they pay out over USD2,000 per year for cable service.

$150x12=1800. It's believable, if a bit extreme.

>Sure, the guide is important, sure it's an annoyance to lose it

I'm still paying $13/mo for my TiVo guide. The guide is kinda important. If I lose the TiVo guide, then I just have a digital vcr that I program manually, like the vcr's of old.

another source

[Anonymous Coward]

www.titantv.com ??

It ain't all sunshine and roses

[ffrinch]

You do get a lot of deliberate obfuscation, though. The biggest one in Australia is YourTV; they're using JavaScript obfuscation like String.fromCharCode(149-(50*2))+ '.' + '3' + '&#x30;' + String.fromCharCode(120-8) + '&#109;'. Easily foiled, but still.

Every single listing has the same comment in it: <!-- PLEASE DON'T RIP. http://yourtv.com.au/legal/?action=copyright -->. (At least they're polite with their threats.)

Network Ten goes to absurd lengths to hide theirs, in the process making the site completely inaccessible to the blind.

I think someone (Yahoo?) uses a JSON API, though, so that one is easy.

Re:It ain't all sunshine and roses

[dgatwood]

At some point, it makes more sense for the scraper to link against JavaScriptCore or equivalent and just run portions of their javascript....

too bad but...

[razpones]

I've been using Zap2it with Directv and it never really worked well, instead since I only record cycling races and they only happen so often I check the listing on the Directv box, keep the Mythtv on channel 3 and use it like a vcr, the Directv box is the one that selects the channel and the Mythtv box uses the manual programming to record channel 3 from x time to x time. If not I just do it manually, start the Mythtv box with enter press R (record) come back a few hours later and stop it. Not a big deal, it won't say what program it is on the file but thats ok.

TVease Hannibal - $499

[douglips]

Here you go:

http://store02.prostores.com/servlet/tvease/StoreF ront

Welcome to Our World

[thetan]

In Australia, getting TV guide data is a constant struggle due to our odd copyright laws. Since it's possible to claim copyright on a collection of facts, the TV companies banded together, assigned their copyright to one company and then milk it for monopoly profits. Another company, IceTV, started offering subscriptions (around US$12/month) but has been taken to court by the first one. While IceTV claims to have independently built their listings - and even offered to show this to the cartel's lawyers - this matter is still wending its way through court.

The response from the "underground" has been to build scrapers. Lots of scrapers. The guide publishers repond with increasingly complex obfuscation of the listings. Eg have a look at the source for this TV guide.

Yes, there are a number of working scrapers and XMLTV files are accessed - but only by people with a fair amount of technical skills. The rest either pay or go without.

Another approach - also suggested here - has been to set up a wiki with user-populated data, released under Creative Commons. This is operational and useful, but is obviously threatened by the above court action.

In light of Australia's Free Trade Agreement with the US, we can expect "copyright harmonisation". How would Americans feel about getting our bizarre law regarding copyrighting of facts?

What about Titan TV?

[genaldar]

http://www.titantv.com/quickguide/quickguide.aspx

So what is the open format for TV listings?

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuse my ignorance. I have only seen MythTV demo.

I work for a TV station. I have access to the listing of programs that we are going to air. What format do I publish? I will talk to management.

Sorry for anonymous, but I don't post much.

Cable/Satellite is obsolete

[sadler121]

Meh, the time is rapidly coming where Cable/Satellite will be obsolete. Just look at http://revision3.com/ and see where we are headed. Hell, if you want shows from broadcast tv, most of the stations offer their shows online (I know ABC does). Just embed a browser that can handle a flash plugin and bingo, you can watch any show you want, directly from the networks.

no alternatives (so far)

[proudhawk]

*sigh*

I've been hunting down alternatives to Zap2it for the last month or so
(I've been hearing rumors that the new management have some disdane for
the Open Source community).

so far, I have found not one website with any similar functionality.
I happen to be a MythTV user (and with some help from a good friend,
even had it setup and operating when my previous attempts had failed).

The point is this: unless someone can come up with a "reasonable"
alternative (even if its a "pay service"), I'd jump on it!

Right now though, I just don't see that happening.

anyone else around here have any clues? I'm fresh out.

Re: how to prevent data "stealing"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then they'd happily decrypt the data and share it with the world. You're not very informed about cryptography are you? That little module has to have the mechanism (the key and decryption algorithm) to decrypt the data. It's sitting on your computer. You OWN that little module. Source code or not, an intelligent hacker could easily automate the reverse engineering of the module, stealing of the key, decryption of the data, and redistribution of the data. Sorry pal, your plan is full of holes you can't fill. Much larger entities have tried to keep content encrypted (see...oh...THE ENTIRE MOVIE INDUSTRY), but ultimately the consumer has to be able to see the data you're stashed away and thus there's always a hook for an intelligent hacker to subvert your data security model.

Your argument then relies only on the idea that the hacker's effort wouldn't be worth it. That's quite debatable, but flip it around. Where is the incentive for zap2it to sell this data to you and me? Well they'd have to hire some programmers to interface it with their new database system (which is probably the main reason for discontinuation, they refuse to spend money to keep a free service running), programmers to create the subscription payment and distribution framework, programmers for the encryption and mythtv modules. All for what? To have someone within a few days subvert their hard work? Not going to happen. It's obvious the new management over at zap2it (TMS) wants nothing to do with the community or it's free use of their data. They see no incentive to create a paid service for individuals when they obviously already fear piracy of their data. They wish to continue making money from businesses and businesses alone.

The real reason why TMS is killing Zap2It

[Anaerin]

Taken from a post above:

Some reasons and other comments given for the scheduled discontinuence, copied from the forum, copied from the mailing list:

• Continued use of the service to support commercial products, in violation of the agreement.
• Commercial products continued to grow despite previous appeals that this activity stop.
• There are significant changes to the supporting data structure forthcoming and we could not devote resources to the continued upkeep and enhancements of the service.
• Maintenance of the service is impacting our resource pool for other projects.
• We sought alternative options but were unable to find a solution.
• We recognize the hardship this creates for the user community. We are open to alternative solutions and would consider proposals that met the needs of the user community and our company.
• We looked into options to turn this into a paid service however we do not have the infrastructure at this time.

(NB: Emphasis mine)

Basically, what they're saying is that they will be changing their database structure, and can't be bothered to re-code the Labs.Zap2It part. They'd rather spend the time on other things, like increasing ad revenue.

Bear in mind that TMS charges each station (Somewhere in the region of $75/day) to collect their data, and charges their commercial end-users (somewhere in the region of $500/market/month) to provide the data. Quite a lucrative trade, wouldn't you say? Add to that advertising revenue from their site, and subtract bandwidth fees, and they still make a tidy profit.

It has been theorised that the main reason labs.zap2it was set up was to save bandwidth costs after XMLTV scrapers started hitting their public site. As the data was served up in chunks in the midst of a sea of other information (Links, advertisements, commentary, navigation etc) it cost considerably more in bandwidth, so it made more fiscal sense to offer the data for free, so they could track who was using it and where, along with only having to serve the data itself, with compression and selectivity. This is only a theory, mind, but considering how the Myth community (On it's own, without any of the other projects that were/are using Zap2It feeds) has grown, I think removing this option will drastically increase Zap2It's bandwidth bills without adding any ad revenue back into the pot (A scraper doesn't see ads, and doesn't care about them).

In other words, this could be a costly mistake for TMS. Here's hoping they see sense, and work out a way to work with MythTV and others.

Crazy

[Rythie]

Does anyone else just think this whole situation is crazy? With YouTube and iTunes coming up to make broadcast TV irrelevant the TV companies are still charging or at least restricting the information about what is on TV. Why don't they just have the listings on their websites in XML (XMLTV or TV anytime). They surely the money the make is insignificant compared to the potential of iGoogle plugins, facebook applications and other mashups which make the information more useful.

I note that the BBC offer it's data: http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/data/TvChannelFeeds?v=x eg

tvpi spec

[airdrummer]

the xml spec is tvpi
3rd party dvrs can access it, or u can roll ur own;-)

Digital SDTV

[tepples]

But what about the bazillion of us who don't have HD, and don't have enough money or time to upgrade to HD? Digital SDTV has many of the same features that people attribute to HDTV.

Re:Digital SDTV

[TinheadNed]

Yeah, mine is digital SD.

Re:Digital SDTV

[Kichigai Mentat]

OK, but pray tell when will I get my digital SD over the cable lines from my cable company without them crippling my available channels? Or without having to shell out more money for an ASTC tuner, or for an HD cable box/Firewire card combo?

Besides, the amount of data in EIT is insufficient for the kind of advanced planning Myth users (such as I) are accustomed to, or is required for best operation. I mean, if I wanted to make sure I got my episode of Battlestar Galactica recorded, I would have to check my listings the day it airs. This would be a problem if I was out of town that day (like, oh, say, at my friend's, staying the weekend). That aside, let's say it's between the new BSG and a South Park I haven't seen, and desperately want to see. Well, I'd cancel the SP recording in favor of BSG. What's that? Two days later the BSG episode is replayed, but the SP episode isn't. What's worse is that MythTV is programmed to make those kinds of decisions itself, and without a lot of future data to look at, it can't make those kinds of automated decisions.

That reduces users to checking their weekly TV listings and manually programming their Myth boxes with priorities for each individual episode, and for recordings it doesn't have a clue about. I remember doing that with a different kind of device. It was called a VCR. Essentially it kills the entire concept of a PVR, which is supposed to be an intelligent system that acquires schedule information and then figures out which shows to record, when, on what channel, and in the event of a conflict, resolve it (preferably with a resolution that records both shows, but if not, the show of higher priority).

I don't mean to sound crass or mean or anything, but until you've used a MythTV system, you don't realize how important it is to have data that goes out a week or two weeks in advance. 24 hours just isn't going to cut it.

Figures. Just when I thought I'd be able to return from summer vacation, and plug in my Myth box at my home for school, tweak the network configuration and let the machine go on its automated little way, I'm going to have to upgrade it (this means a whole new version of MythTV for my back-end AND my front-end) and reconfigure it. :\

I don't get it

[strikeleader]

Ok,I may me a bit ignorant since I do not own or operate a PVR or DVR, but what did everyone do in the days of VCR's. Has the world become so depended on electronics that it has completely forgotten about print media? Can you not schedule your recordings using a printed TV listing that you can purchase at your local store or the one that comes in your Sunday paper?

just use titantv

[Anonymous Coward]

www.titantv.com

Looks like SageTV will survive

[jbarr]

According to a thread over at the SageTV Community forum:

It doesn't affect SageTV's built in EPG data at all because SageTV pays for the US & Canadian data it receives & redistributes to customers.

That announcement is talking about shutting down the free Zap2It Labs Data Direct service, which is not what SageTV uses for the built-in data.

So, it's just the "free" service they are discontinuing, so it apparently does not affect applications that use a paid-for service, only those applications that rely on the free service (which obviously, affects quite a few.)

FiOS uses IPTV

[tbuskey]

At least internally. The set top boxes take up an IP address too.

Re:What happened to Mythtv's paid service, TechnoV

[Anonymous Coward]

Data came from Tribune, but they were licensing it for commercial use, or they were supposed to. Tribune is not shutting down, it's just shutting down the free service directly to consumers, but they continue their paid services to businesses.

TV Listings, p. B-9

[White Yeti]

I guess I'm stuck in the past... On Fridays I slog my way through the Zap2It pages, print (on the back of scratch paper) the weekend and next week's evening listings, staple, and drop on top of the TV. It sounds like this method will still be available.

Another guide source

[mjrsting]

I work for a television station, and we enter our PSIP information into ProximityTV, which I believe owns TitanTV. To access Proximity, you have to be an employee of a station, but I'm pretty sure it's only so we can enter the info. Anyone can create an account at http://www.titantv.com/ and enter a zip to get your local guide. I have a Hauppauge TV tuner in my pc at work (running Winblows) and I can schedule recordings through Titan. I'm not sure how we could get a data file from Titan to replace Zap2It's. Someone may need to write a program to strip out all the pertinent info that is displayed on a webpage when you enter a zip code and feed it into a file format just like Zap2It's. Create a cron job to run it as often as necesary and hopefully we would all be back in business. Hope this helps! sting

Re:Another guide source

[russotto]

I could use PSIP information from the ATSC stream directly, but I've found it's often wildly inaccurate compared to Zap2It. If TitanTV relies on that, I worry about its accuracy. And again, Titan would have to be scraped since they don't provide a reasonably-formatted feed.

Re:Another guide source

[russ1337]

Hey cool. Thanks for the link.

As I understand it, the Zap2-it xml feed was set up due to 'scrapers' reading feed of their website. I believe the most likely resolution to the zap2-it problem will be web-scrapers once again. But, as someone else put it: will likely create an 'arms race' of scrapers vs anti-scraping defenses.

It would be great if someone like TitanTv released their EPG data in XML format, even for a small fee - and the polls on the Zap2-it labs show users appear to be willing to part with average of $5 a month for reliable accurate data.

The big question remaining: If someone *cough* big-media *cough* put pressure on zap2it labs to close their xml service, then getting the information from another reliable source might be rather difficult.

You're ignorant

[dharbee]

"1. unlimited storage (burn to DVD or copy across LAN to additional fixed drives)
2. customize the scheduler - [where] program.title like '%4400%' and program.originalairdate > '2007-05-01'
3. upgradeable - to go from the 80hr tier to the 160hr tier, (120GB HD about $80)
4. extensible - to go from dual channel to quad channel recording add hauppage 150, about $70
5. portable - backup MySQL data, lift tv card, place new box underneath, restore data
5a. skip data operations if mysql runs on some other machine
6. phone-line free operation
7. ad-free operation
8. schedule online from your own webserver
9. watch online from your own webserver"

Some of the things you listed, a TiVo is quite capable of. Why comment on something you're ignorant about?

You know exactly why you're wrong already

[dharbee]

"( Series 2 )"

You assumed I was talking about the series 2. You were wrong.

The rest of your post is mooted as a result.

Why do you think using an obsolete product as a comparison made sense?

Here you go, don't choke on that crow little guy

[dharbee]

http://www.google.com/products?q=Pioneer+DVR-810H& hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:offic ial&hs=Vm0&um=1&sa=X&oi=froogle&ct=title [google.com]
http://www.google.com/products?q=Pioneer+DVR-57H&b tnG=Search&hl=en&show=dd [google.com]
http://www.google.com/products?btnG=Search&hl=en&s how=dd&q=Toshiba+SDH400 [google.com]

Totally ripped off from another poster. I patiently await your Mea Culpa (I suspect I'll be waiting indefinitely, your kind rarely admits they fucked up).

What ads?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never seen any ads when I fast-forward through commercials on my Series2 DT, nor have I seen any ads on the menus. The only thing on the service that could possibly pass for an ad are those listings for commercials that appear in the main menu with a TiVo logo or a yellow star, and even those are dependant on whether or not you can receive the commercial in question on your program lineup (It seems that TiVo doesn't receive those video clips from the service directly, but rather receives specific recording times for the ads when they appear on a certain network. I found this out when I had a period of bad reception and noticed that the clips had this same bad reception in them).

Then again, I have the Lifetime Service, and TiVo might be skipping placing ads on Lifetime machines to avoid losing loyal customers.

Why yes I DO and here are the link for you

[dharbee]

http://www.google.com/search?q=TiVo+basic&ie=utf-8 &oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&clie nt=firefox-a

In the future, don't assume your snarkiness can be used as a replacement for factual accuracy.

You are wrong

[dharbee]

http://www.google.com/search?q=TiVo+basic&ie=utf-8 &oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&clie nt=firefox-a

Free TiVo basic. FREE. NO COST. GRATIS.

I am REALLY REALLY tired of people posting what they think is fact but is actually only proof of ignorance.

Re:You are wrong

[sfbiker]

I think you missed the parent thread, where we were talking about a $100 Tivo. Tivo Basic doens't apply:

http://customersupport.tivo.com/LaunchContent.aspx ?CID=EFB60828-EE03-4971-958B-E8EA9FDFC592

TiVo Basic service is a complimentary version of the TiVo service available only on DVD integrated models from Toshiba and Pioneer. TiVo Basic service is not available on standalone TiVo DVRs.

I couldn't find any for sale after a quick search, I think list price on these units was between $450 and $1200.

Besides, Tivo basic has some annoying limitations -- only 3 days of program guide, no title search, no "season pass" where you can tell it to play all instances or your program regardless of time or channel.

Re:You ARE wrong

[sfbiker]

I already did show you which Tivo I was referring to. Or at least told you where to look -- I said "I think you missed the parent thread" so if you go look at the parent to my thread it says:

Great! Where can I get a MythTV box preconfigured for $100? [compusa.com] I will patiently await your link. Thanks ahead of time!

If you read my first post again, I even broke down the math to make it clear that I was using $100 as the baseline price for the Tivo, then added the service fees to that to come up with a total. Not sure how I could have made it more clear other than reposting the parent, but that shouldn't be neccesary since slashdot already groups threads together. Try using the Nested view when reading articles and threads become more clear.

And while I appreciate your link to a USED unit (which costs almost as much as the brand new $100 unit + 2 years of service), I assumed it was clear that I was talking about new hardware. If you want to open the "scrounge up used hardware" can of worms, then we'll get a dozen postings that claim "I built a MythTV box out of hardware I found in my basement for free!!"

Oh, and I don't own a Tivo, I own a ReplayTV (from back when they still had automatic commercial skip) and diligently pay my $10/mo. After it finally dies, I'll look into building a MythTV box.

Re:You ARE wrong

[Gr8Apes]

"I couldn't find any for sale after a quick search"

Uh, WHAT?

http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-SD-H400-Combination- Progressive-Scan-Digital/dp/B0000AA9E8

There's one right there. If you'll check your link again, you'll note that it's an informational listing only. There's no item for sale there.

No, what really happens is that you thought TiVo didn't have a free service, and when shown to be wrong, you rushed to find qualifiers to discount what you had overlooked.

You were wrong. Be a fucking man and admit it, instead of making up silly caveats to try and weasel out. I think the real issue is the TCO for 'x' year(s) of service vs MythTV. You can't get a Tivo and service for $100. Per the above math, by the time you factor in everything, you'll have a very nice MythTV box for less than running a Tivo box for 2 years, no matter how you slice and dice it.

Here's your pie.

Re:You ARE wrong

[dharbee]

"If you'll check your link again, you'll note that it's an informational listing only. There's no item for sale there."

There was when I posted it. The rest of your post is more useless garbage.

"Per the above math, by the time you factor in everything, you'll have a very nice MythTV box for less than running a Tivo box for 2 years, no matter how you slice and dice it."

Which, as usual, discounts the labor involved in setting it up and maintaining it.

You're an imbecile.

"Here's your pie."

Here's my finger. Stop lying.

Re:You ARE wrong

[sfbiker]

It's clear that you're just trolling, but really - is that the only way you could find to tear apart my post? Seems silly to try to redirect the discussion by accusing me of lying to you when all I did was clearly point out where my originally quoted numbers came from.

Could you at least make a token effort to respond to the points I made?

You may be a troll, but you're not a very good one.

Re:You ARE wrong

[Gr8Apes]

The rest of your post is more useless garbage.

You're an imbecile.

Here's my finger. Stop lying. Evidently ID and maturity correlate well in your case. When you're done with puberty, maybe you'll be rational. Then again, you could always have a terminal case of assholitis. At least it gives you a place to keep your finger.

Re: how to prevent data "stealing"?

[King_TJ]

I never, for a minute, said my plan didn't have "potential holes" in it. There *are* encryption schemes nobody has been able to break yet (look at the currently used Dish Network and DirecTV satellite cards, for example) - but even those will be "broken" someday. If nothing else, a disgruntled employee could eventually leak out the secrets - since the decryption info has to be kept somewhere.

It *always* comes down to using encryption or password protection as a deterrence. Just like the lock on your front door, it can easily be picked in seconds by a skilled professional. But it does keep many amateurs out, who would otherwise walk in and take something of value if they knew no lock was in place at all.

I'm at a loss to see why zap2it considers this data so "secret", though? They're pedaling publicly available information that's published *all the time*. They simply add some value by sending it out efficiently, in a standardized format your computer can easily download and work with. The "incentive" for them to at least try to sell it inexpensively to you and me? Simply the fact that either they take their $2 a month or whatever from whoever will pay, or they don't - and someone ELSE takes that same money. They've already got the infrastructure in place, so it's an easier $2/month for them to collect than for anyone else starting from scratch. But it will happen.

Zipper....

[BLKMGK]

Actually a hacked DTIVO will do MORE than a standard S2 TIVO will! Suggest Googling Zipper and TIVO. Actually, I did it for you -> http://www.mastersav.com/tivo_zipper.html

Extraction, sharing among TIVO units, and more!

Re:Zipper....

[jedidiah]

Why bother hacking with Linux to tweak a Tivo when I can just hack with Linux and get anything I like?

Even a hacked Tivo won't be able to do anything with dvix or h.264. It just doesn't have the muscle.

Re:Zipper....

[BLKMGK]

In this case I did it because it was EASY. Scripted and pretty well documented overall. Once done the box is back to being a toaster - as in easy to use with ZERO maintenance by me or the woman. I've attempted to setup Myth more than once - toaster it was NOT! For other video formats I use XBMC which is again, much like a toaster with no maintenance other than added features that require updating the code. That code updating BTW is an FTP of binaries. XBMC is being ported to Linux, when that is done perhaps I'll be on a
"true" Linux box but only if it's *easy* as I'm NOT the only person in the household that wishes to watch the TV. If Myth were done for a dedicated platform ala XBOX and were that dirt simple to install then IMO it would be adopted bigtime, alas that's not the case. I don't mind tinkering with my desktop box, tinkering with the entertainment for the whole family is NOT an option. I take down the TIVO only when everyone is away for a day or two. (lol) Maybe the LinuxMCE project will get "there" one day...

You ARE wrong

[dharbee]

"I think you missed the parent thread, where we were talking about a $100 Tivo."

No, I didn't miss the thread, but you WERE NOT talking about a $100 TiVo, you were throwing estimates around and 100 was the number you used. Please show me the quote where you clearly specify that the only TiVo you were discussing was the 100 dollar one.

"I couldn't find any for sale after a quick search"

Uh, WHAT?

http://www.amazon.com/Toshiba-SD-H400-Combination- Progressive-Scan-Digital/dp/B0000AA9E8

There's one right there.

No, what really happens is that you thought TiVo didn't have a free service, and when shown to be wrong, you rushed to find qualifiers to discount what you had overlooked.

You were wrong. Be a fucking man and admit it, instead of making up silly caveats to try and weasel out.

Non-disclosure can apply to facts too

[tepples]

and we can't scrape it as its copyrighted information. Law and Order comes on at 1am, 2am, 3am, 4am, 5am, etc. This is a fact. How can that fact be copyrighted? But the entire set of information that Tribune has is now provided only to parties to a contract, and this contract forbids disclosing substantial portions of this set to non-parties.

Re:Non-disclosure can apply to facts too

[Danse]

But the entire set of information that Tribune has is now provided only to parties to a contract, and this contract forbids disclosing substantial portions of this set to non-parties.

Yes, but the information can be gathered without becoming a party to the contract. The times are advertised in a number of places, which is sort of necessary if you want people to actually watch the shows. So they could legitimately get the data from any combination of several sources and then distribute that information to MythTV users. That way they are not bound by any contract, and do not have to violate any contract. Unfortunately, as another poster pointed out, the Australian copyright laws apparently allow them to copyright facts. Not just a specific collection of facts, like a phonebook, but the facts themselves, such that it would be illegal to compile your own list of the same facts. If that's true, then the Aussies are well and truly fucked.

Re:Non-disclosure can apply to facts too

[tepples]

Yes, but the information can be gathered without becoming a party to the contract. The times are advertised in a number of places, which is sort of necessary if you want people to actually watch the shows. So they could legitimately get the data from any combination of several sources and then distribute that information to MythTV users. But who would collect the data and put it in one place?

Re:Non-disclosure can apply to facts too

[Danse]

But who would collect the data and put it in one place?

I don't know, but given that it's a pretty critical element of DVR functionality, I'm sure someone could make some money doing so. I think that a small monthly fee could be charged, even to users of MythTV for the service. It would still be cheaper than Tivo, and would have the features that MythTV users want. Yeah, it's not ideal and not completely free, but as long as the information is being guarded like it is, it may be the best possible solution.

Home Shopping x 150?

[tepples]

your comment spurred the thought that advertising seems to be reverting to what it consisted of originally. Take "The Office" for example. That show purposely incorporates ads for their sponsor directly into their programming...

it's really not that bad though. Personally, if all shows went that route, then I wouldn't mind.

Welcome to 2017. Digital cable is now 150 channels of infomercials.

Re:You're lazy

[rhendershot]

you marked one item only. if you meant more, pls advise

note I said "unlimited". Tivo storage on the network hardly qualifies. Besides which you need the ToGo bagware. Doesn't run on my platform so there's another limitation.

"1. unlimited storage (burn to DVD or copy across LAN to additional fixed drives)

Re:Here you go, don't choke on that crow little gu

[Anonymous Coward]

nope he didn't "fucked up" as your bad english puts it.

that is NOT free tivo service. that is tivo running as a glorified vcr. no guide data, no commercial skip.

Try again fuckup.

It's about time.

[Anonymous Coward]

TV Guide offers a service but I don't know if it is associated with the same third party provider.

http://visionandpsychosis.net/

Ads?!?

[rockhome]

Who looks at ads?

I remember a time when the Internet was free of advertising. Now, I just ignore them.

Tying

[tepples]

I do love the hypocrisy. You refuse to pay 5$/month for clearly useful information, but you're already paying over 50$/month for hours of content you won't ever care to watch. Satellite doesn't have a cheaper on-demand option that allows a subscriber to pay for only what he or she watches. What you see isn't hypocrisy; it's tying.

Rewritten by whom?

[tepples]

No, not necessarily. With an auto-update system, even a complete site change would only require someone to rewrite the Perl script for scraping the site. So would most users have the knowledge and inclination to rewrite the Perl script for a given channel and submit it to the maintainer?

That site would only be unusable for the Myth users while the script was under development, which shouldn't be very long. Under development by whom? Try this exercise: Can you rewrite your entire post without the verb "to be"?

Each user would only download the same HTML pages as if he was looking at the listings in person. And because of this, there's no way for the website to tell if it's a real human or just a script. "Solve this visual letter segmentation puzzle or this audio letter recognition puzzle to gain access to this site."

Re:Rewritten by whom?

[Grishnakh]

So would most users have the knowledge and inclination to rewrite the Perl script for a given channel and submit it to the maintainer?

It would only take one person, just like it only took DVD-Jon to break the CSS encryption on DVDs.

"for a given channel"? What do you mean by this? Any given site (meetv.com, tvguide.com, zap2it.com, etc.) should require only one script.

Obviously, this assumes someone or a few people will step up and volunteer to write and update these scripts, but with all the MythTV and FreeVo users, I imagine that shouldn't be a problem.

Under development by whom? Try this exercise: Can you rewrite your entire post without the verb "to be"?

By one of the volunteers above, obviously. Any why the hell would I want to not use the word "was"? How about you try this exercise: can you rewrite your entire post without the words "and", "the", "this", "or", and "to"? Why would you want to do something so stupid? I don't know, to explore some stupid linguist's crazy idea about trying to force people to change the way they write I guess.

"Solve this visual letter segmentation puzzle or this audio letter recognition puzzle to gain access to this site."

As I've said before, this is indeed a possibility. However, I think it very unlikely, because it would piss off users too much. If I had to go through a stupid captcha every time I wanted to read the news on cnn.com, I'd just go to abcnews.com or bbc.com or (heaven forbid) msnbc.com instead. It's not like there's only one website with TV listings out there. I can see one site shooting themselves in the foot like that, but not all of them.

Re:Rewritten by whom?

[tepples]

It would only take one person It would take one person per station. Did you volunteer to act as this person?

just like it only took DVD-Jon to break the CSS encryption on DVDs. Given that each station can have its own HTML format, and humans can piece together images better than a DVD player can piece together an unknown crypto layer, screen scraping attacks don't have the break once break everywhere weakness nearly as much as CSS did.

"for a given channel"? What do you mean by this? Any given site (meetv.com, tvguide.com, zap2it.com, etc.) should require only one script. Good luck having your script break the CAPTCHA and descramble the schedules in image form, sent through an HTTPS connection to a protected SWF, that are explicitly designed to foil scripts.

Any why the hell would I want to not use the word "was"? Dropping "to be" encourages more use of the active voice. A lot of people tend to overuse the active voice in an attempt to avoid the issue of who exactly should do something.

It's not like there's only one website with TV listings out there. I can see one site shooting themselves in the foot [with CAPTCHA], but not all of them. If screen scrapers attack all sites at once, then the sites will all take measures against scrapers at once.

24-hour marathon of "Upgrade Flash Player"

[tepples]

Flash is a published standard, just like PDF. That's how Gnash is able to write their application. Which version of SWF has Adobe published? Imagine a 24-hour marathon of the television series "Upgrade to Flash Player 9" on the "Adobe Systems" channel.

So it would still be possible to write a program to download the .swf file, read it, and automate the responses necessary to get the listing data. Unless the image data is encoded as a scrambled image which Flash Player's compositor reassembles. And that produces not text but a screenshot of a distorted image. Blind people can go listen to radio instead of downloading tele-vision listings.

CAPTCHA

[tepples]

There's no way to only provide access to human browser users, and to exclude automated scripts. O RLY? Blind people can just listen to radio instead of watching tele-vision.

Why people still subscribe to paper TV listings

[tepples]

I have had a hard time figuring out why anyone buys the TV Guide for the last few years since they post the listings for free on their site.

1. Not everybody who owns a TV owns a computer.
2. Not everybody who owns a TV and a computer subscribes to Internet access.
3. Not everybody who owns a TV and a computer and subscribes to Internet access reads TV listings in front of his or her home computer. Some people prefer a queue, toilet, bus, or train.
4. Not everybody who owns a TV and a computer, subscribes to Internet access, and can read TV listings on a home computer, is willing to wait 2 minutes for the computer to dial the Internet every time he or she wants to look up a TV listing, to move to where always-on Internet access is made available to residential customers, or to pay the difference between dial-up and broadband.

This is Microsoft's doing...

[bshellenberg]

Someone on the zap2it forums wrote this: >I suspect part of the situation is due to an agreement with a commercial customer trying to maximize their profit by forcing zap2it to agree not to provide for free what the customer is selling. I replied: It's Microsoft (stating the obvious) Funny that my message was deleted by the mods. The original poster's message remained. I'm not the type of guy that sees Microsoft as the big evil, but they are up to no good these days due to slow Vista sales (MCE, of course, uses zap2it). They want all computer based DVRs to be gone. They want linux gone. They want anything that competes with any of their products to be gone (it's always been this way). I'd start worrying if I was a user of any of the linux distributions that Ms has done a deal with. They won't last very long or will be moulded to crap so nobody will want them anyways.

It's worse than that!

[BLKMGK]

Read some of the discussions the TIVO folks have on this! Multiple cable sources, OTA, and multiple SAT can all be had in a single spot. Different cable and SAT packages just make this worse. It's a nightmare to keep up with for a general purpose box and it's no wonder to me that services charge for this. A P2P solution might work to lower load on a single source, which seems to have been the issues here, but coming up with a way for everyone to describe exactly what data they ened for their specific geo area and offerings would certainly be a challenge! Me, I just use a DTIVO :-)

You ARE wrong

[dharbee]

"I already did show you which Tivo I was referring to."

No, you're a liar.

"Or at least..."

OH SO the truth comes out. You did, then didn't. Like I said, a liar.

Re:Here you go, don't choke on that crow little gu

[dharbee]

"nope he didn't "fucked up" as your bad english puts it."

Hmm, I fucked up, we fucked up, she fucked up, they fucked up, it fucked up, sorry little guy, even though you posted AC, I know it's you. And there's nothing wrong with the english, are you really that stupid?

"that is NOT free tivo service."

FIne, it's a TiVo service for which you pay nothing. OH WAIT THAT MEANS FUCKING FREE! Are you really that fucking stupid?

"Try again fuckup."

At least you were nice enough to sign you post AC. Thanks!

No liar

[dharbee]

"It's clear that you're just trolling, but really - is that the only way you could find to tear apart my post?"

No, of course not. Just the most glaring and obvious. Is this the only way you could think of to draw attention away from your lies?

"Seems silly to try to redirect the discussion by accusing me of lying to you when all I did was clearly point out where my originally quoted numbers came from."

Not to me. You lied, why pretend that anything else in your post matters after that?

"Could you at least make a token effort to respond to the points I made?"

No, you're a liar. You'll just lie when you're wrong like you did before.

"You may be a troll, but you're not a very good one."

SOP for people like you, get caught lying, get caught being wrong, accuse the other guy of being a troll because you are a liar and were wrong so your only hope is to draw attention away from your lies.

Stop lying and I might pay attention to you. But probably not.