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No More TV Listings For MythTV Users
Ryan Brown writes "As of September 1, the free XML TV guide service at zap2it labs has shut its doors due to misuse issues, as well as internal business issues. Now that Linux users, and most PVR users for that matter, are nearing the end of their last fetched TV guide, what free alternatives exist that can replace this much-needed service?"
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http://www.schedulesdirect.org/
It's subscription, run by the mythtv dev's. Right now it's $15 for 3mos, but they are hoping to change that to $20/yr if they get enough sign-ups.
The service is available for a quarterly charge of $15...
http://www.schedulesdirect.org/
One option is Titan TV listings. They are free (add supported) via a Web interface and are designed to work with PVR devices.
As long as there are TV listings in the world, there is the means to rip them. One example is XMLTV. This rips listings from certain sites and produces an XML schedule file that you can feed into MythTV. I assume that once a free service disappears that you'll see scripts for XMLTV that do pretty much the same.
Exactly the attitude that forced Zap2It to stop offering the free service.
In the case of Zap2It there were people reselling the free listings. In your case you want to provide multiple subscriptions and only pay for one. I hope your friends (both of them) appreciate your theft.
Some of what I say is fact, some is conjecture, the rest I'm just blowing out my ass...you guess.
There are Mythtv users outside of the US. In the UK the listings are carrying on as normal.
For local broadcasters, we can collect our own. Many broadcasters may be willing to provide their schedules for free. Someone in each city would have to be the "point person" to encourage the stations to provide them in a usable form with no distribution restriction. Then they would be submit them to central databases (can be more than one) where they would be merged and others can then download in bulk. The national networks might be harder to get them from.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
zap2it is a subsidiary of Tribune Media Services, a subsidiary of the Tribune Corporation. Tribune owns the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and New York Newsday among many other print outlets. In TV they own 23 major market stations including KTLA Los Angeles and WGN Chicago. Fourteen of their 23 stations are CW affiliates.
TMS is a syndicator of news and information feeds, such as TV listings, which they supply to many, many clients who don't want to spend the time and energy to try and compile reasonably correct information for the hundreds and hundreds of different channels, as well as the hundreds of different cable and satellite line-ups around the country.
Start a happiness pandemic
yeah, you can get the listing directly from the stream. A friend of mine wrote a whole load of scripts to parse the data out into an xml based TV guide. It didn't take him long to do so I guess it s pretty trivial.
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
People have been paying for TV listings (TV Guide) for decades. Having to do it for PVRs doesn't seem that outrageous to me.
...even though it's their commercial, for profit arm: http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/
Actually, the first thing I thought of was to just write a script to parse the data from any of a million web listings services like http://tvlistings.zap2it.com/tvlistings or http://www.tvguide.com/Listings or any of the others...I think it's so easy that even _I_ could do it.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
I am glad people have mentioned SchedulesDirect. But, you know, free doesn't mean "costs money", so I'm surprised so many people CONTINUE to post yet more threads on schedulesdirect.
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/i msxml6.msi". For GZIP compression to work (which you do want, so MSN doesn't get cheesed and start changing the format...), I had to install wininet.dll into /root/.wine/drive_c/windows/system32/ and run regedit, adding in HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Int ernet Settings/EnableHttp1_1=0x00000001 . This is equivalent to checking "Enable HTTP1.1" in the Internet Options with Internet Explorer I guess. More or less, run the app once to set it up, then put in a cron job that runs "wine MSN_XMLTV_scraper_v54.exe /d" and feeds the XMLTV data into mythtv (I have a shell script that does all that.)
Found at http://forums.schedulesdirect.org/viewtopic.php?f
zap2xml
http://zap2xml.110mb.com/
YahooXMLTv
http://forums.gbpvr.com/showthread.php?t=27546
MSN_XMLTV_scraper
http://planetreplay.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=14
I am using MSN_XMLTV_scraper, running under Wine personally. To run under Wine, you need msxml6.msi, install that with "msiexec
The first run is very slow, but it caches the detailed program info so after the first run it's pretty fast.
Or you can scrape their free tv listings service, which is not going away.
See http://zap2xml.110mb.com/ for a perl-based tvlistings.zap2it.com to xmltv scraper which is a drop-in replacement for the labs scraper.
I use a program which scrapes the Yahoo TV listings. It dumps 2 weeks worth of data into a xmltv compatible file. Then just tweak your MythTV settings (I had to adjust the GMT offset), and run `mythfilldatabase --file ...`
/. crowd who don't RTFA but are quick to shoot off "Just buy it" or "Your stealing"
Not hard - just search, dont rely on the
I cant remember the name of the VB program I use, but it was made for GB-PVR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB-PVR). Hope that helps.
The more people that sign up for Schedules Direct, the lower their costs will be in the future (or something along those lines). They've already stated that their intention is to have a much lower fee for listings after the first quarter, but that the $15 cost for the first three months was necessary since their organization is just starting up.
Personally, I find the listings useful enough that I'd (just barely) pay the $5 a month, but I would hold them to a much higher QoS if I had to keep paying that much.
BTW, one of the SD guys mentioned that they found out that Tribune Media Services, and other TV schedule aggregators, do a lot more than just put together already-available data. They have to cross-reference syndication feeds with local schedules, they have to come up with episode descriptions, and in general, there's work and some original content arising from that. Even local stations have no idea what episode they're showing on a particular day - they just get the episodes from the distributor, possibly with promos, and then run them. TMS already knows how to do this stuff, and they had the infrastructure to distribute it already, but they weren't interested in managing the business of selling the listings. SD acts as a broker in that sense, paying TMS for the listings and collecting the individual fees from the users.
You don't need to.
I found this while searching for an alternative to Schedules Direct. It's not perfect (there's some minor glitches in the episode numbers) but it does work.
As a user of SageTV PVR, I enjoyed not having to pay for my subscription services. I've known about Zap2It going to subscription for sometime, but have failed to do the research on how Sage is handling this... does anyone else know? I haven't had my HTPC up and running all summer.
Here.... http://www.schedulesdirect.org/
DVB-T broadcasts include an 8 day EPG in the transmissions, and MythTV picks it up just fine, thanks. (In the UK/Europe of course)
get modded informative for mentioning http://www.schedulesdirect.org/ like everyone else has?
That is no different than paying health insurance in any other country. If you don't need it, it seems like a waste. If you need it (or should I say WHEN you need it), you WILL be glad it is there. Truly, the system is heavily subsidized (from what you pay, and the services provided for the monies paid), it does not have a limit (as opposed to some insurance companies who impose lifetime maximums on certain items in their policies), and currently it is a right to every citizen and resident of the country. I fail to see how this is a bad thing.
I guess you missed the part about other countries' "health care system where the lives of citizens are but a minor consideration in a money-making enterprise." I think not many countries have the balls to stand up to those corporate bullies nor the wealth to absorb the costs of such heavy subsidies if a switch to public health care were to take place.
You also neglect to mention the benefits of Canada's Health Care System: how about life expectancy? how about infant mortality rates?
"In 2001 Canadians paid $2,163 per capita versus $4,887 U.S., according to the Los Angeles Times[...] According to Dr. Stephen Bezruchka, a senior lecturer in the School of Public Health at the University of Washington in Seattle, Canadians do better by every health care measure. According to a World Health Organization report published in 2003, life expectancy at birth in Canada is 79.8 years, versus 77.3 in the U.S[18]." *But more relevant to the topic, I will say: "yes, fuck profits by the big corporations preying on the ill, the person in need, or even the average person when they are down to their last resource (their health)"
*source
will work for Karma
doesn't that depend upon copyright law.
If the site is saying that the TV listings are facts then there not covered by copyright.
All you have to do is transform the layout into your layout and then give them to your friends.
thank God the internet isn't a human right.
Because last I looked, zap2it wasn't selling subscriptions to individuals, they were talking to companies to bundle their services to many subscribers.
That's basically what schedules direct has done; they're an interface to tmsdatadirect for free software users.
I signed up on Sept 1. Their goal is $20/year. Right now they're higher so they can get started, and I didn't have any problem paying that little extra to help them get going.
That's not quite correct. They have stated that they will refund your money if you don't agree with the Privacy Policy.
Quick update...everything seems to work now. The season passes weren't an issue. Once I got the channel names and callsigns corrected (using mythfilldatabase with the --manual option) and then eliminated the conflict with the old channels (I could probably delete them from the DB, but I didn't want to do that just in case, so I just updated their callsigns to prefix with OLD-). All the season passes resolved automatically, so they must be tracking based on channel number and call sign rather than the internal id.