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MythTV Scheduling Service Reveals Pricing
An anonymous reader writes "A group of open source developers have been working behind the scenes to create a new service known as Schedules Direct to provide affordable scheduling data for North American users of MythTV. Today, they've announced an initial pricing plan of $15 for a 3 month block, non-recurring. Details are still fairly light at the moment, but there's a mailing list and a FAQ available on the site — one notable tidbit is that the developers 'expect pricing to drop by the end of the initial term. Our goal is $20/year.' This comes weeks before the planned shutdown of Zap2it Labs' Data Direct service mentioned previously."
Australia, as far as I know, only has one major cable provider (Foxtel) but that is only available in the capital cities. Outside capital cities there is one major commercial satellite television provider (Austar) a bunch of smaller commercial satellite providers (SelectTV etc.). There is also free to air satellite television (Aurora) that services all areas that are too remote to have proper over the air FTA, this map here shows some areas where it is possible to get service, however there are in actual fact many more areas that are transmitted on Aurora for people who live in places that make it impossible to get the over the air broadcasts they would otherwise be able to. That about covers the bulk of the sat services available to most Australians. Next there are the FTA stations, these are basically broken up into capital city zones and regional zones, so there is a Melbourne schedule and a Regional Victoria schedule for example. This doesn't fully reflect the situation though because many regional broadcasters deviate slightly from the major network schedules, especially in the larger states such as Queensland or Western Australia. An example of this is that the Townsville/Mackay/Cairns television schedule differs slightly from the Rockhampton Schedule. So yes we have many many different providers and it is all a very complex system, and it is indeed possible to drive 20 minutes in one direction and have your television schedule ever so slightly screwed. Screen scraping will always be a game of cat and mouse, however a bunch of scripts like Shepherd will always work faster then the television sites can change their designs, and they would all have to make their script breaking changes simultaneously to even take down a persons data for even a day.
The situation is quite a bit better now, as I said my above post Shepherd combines a number of scrapers together and as such is very resilient. It gets data from multiple sources so even if one or two change the way they do things you still get data, some scripts are even starting to use TOR now to get around sites refresh limits.
Here in the UK we don't have any of these problems of TV listing availability and complicated html parsing scripts which break every week. The BBC have a special web page just for XMLTV downloads, and it doesn't just cover BBC channels, but practically every channel you can receive in the UK (check the channels.dat file for a full list). The only restriction is that the data can only be used for private non-commercial purposes.
Of course, most of this is probably being paid for from our TV license fees which I know many Americans regard as being a terrible communist plot (some funding may come from the cover price of the Radio Times magazine).
I thought that MythTV basically zaps all the commercials, except sometimes at the beginning and the end, I was told that all the ads in the middle of the video are effectively gone.
Getting the timing of the commercials is not very likely, I don't see it as an acceptably foolproof means of blocking the ads.
Myth uses a series of tests to try to flag commercials (spikes in audio volume, the presence of all-black frames, logo detection, scene-change detection, etc), then skips the flagged portions during playback. On some shows, it flags the commercials perfectly. For instance, on Iron Chef, commercial breaks start with the iron chef logo shrinking to nothing on a black screen and breaks return with the logo growing from nothing to full screen. Myth nails this, so it just looks like the logo goes out and then comes in :)
On Law and Order, the black screen "481st trial part" screen can sometimes set it off and a chunk of show is flagged. If that happens, you have to turn off autoskip and just fast-forward through the commercials.
Use the Firehose to mod down Second Life stories!
Keep in mind that Zap2It (and I presume Schedulesdirect) provides more than just the name of a show and the broadcast time. There is a program summary and a program ID sufficient for myth to know which episodes it has recorded. My understanding is that the summary at least is added by the commercial schedule providers.
You're right of course that OTA broadcasters could and should provide free program listings in some common format. However as things have evolved there is so little demand for such a service that there's been no incentive for them to do so.