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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?"
Not only MythTV users, but people like me using a Replay TV in countries such as Canada are now SOL as well. This sucks, I hope a alternative I can pay for shows up soon.
:wq
Suck it up and use Schedules Direct just like everyone else. It isn't free. The opening cost is $15/3 month (with a 7 day trial). However, compiling schedules is not free. SD purchases them Tribune Media Services. But SD is a nonprofit company & they are free/open source friendly, having been formed by people involved with MythTV, XMLTV, and MacProgramGuide. I can think of worse places to send my money.
Free/open source PVRs are more functional than most proprietary competitors & the software itself will always be not only gratis, but free as in speech. If you want the cheapest possible service, you'll do better to get something with a lifetime subscription to guide content. But I prefer my freedom to a full pocketbook.
It'd be nice if the guide data would eventually become free/open. But who's going to provide it?
If you don't like SD, I guess you can try their competitor (if they ever release something for Linux). Or screen scrape for no cost.
TitanTV, as far as I know, doesn't support downloads from the likes of MythTV. Does MythTV support .tvvi files?
Here goes some karma...
Reading through the comments, I'm struck by one thing, really.. The utter deviation of the posters, versus the "normal" mode of Slashdot.
Why is it an utter crime to want to get free tv listings? Why is it considered mandated that you must pay money to get them, where before they were free? Is it because it is the ScheduleDirect people? Or is it because it's "only" 5 dollars? Or is it because the word "Free" is bad? Seriously, tell me. I can download Linux for free, but I guess that's bad? I can read Slashdot for free, but I guess that's bad?
The ScheduleDirect people are offering a paid service. More power to them. I have a little nagging doubt in my head that they will degrade other methods of program acquisition (EIT, direct inserts into the database from a scraper, etc), to "facilitate" SD (otherwise known as rope people into using their paid-for service, and nothing else). Those fears may or may not be unfounded, but why shouldn't I be worried and looking for alternatives?
Why shouldn't people want to find out about any free listings that are out there, just like has been offered for years from the Zap2It people?
If it becomes necessary, yes it will.
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
The Schedules Direct site is setup as a Non Profit. They are running it like a co op. The more people sign up, the lower the price for everyone. There express purpose is to get the price down to $20 a year for the service. They have to pay for the schedules from Zap2It, just like everyone else. It is a set fee, and Schedules Direct doesn't know yet exactly how much it is going to cost to provide the service.
I actually "Appreciated" what Zap2It did, and stated several times on their survey they should be charging a little to offset the cost.
I now have my Schedules Direct service setup, with NO loss of schedule. Very seemless. I don't use MythTV because it is Free as in beer, I use it because it is a pretty damn good system for what I want it for. Paying a small amount for something that would take me awhile to program myself, or scrap from a site, makes sense to me.
Scott Carr
I use GBPVR under XP, and I am extremely satisfied with Yapi2xml, which uses Yahoo TV's API to get listings and outputs them as XMLTV. http://gbpvr.com/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Utility/YApi2XM L
I have a non-Windows Media Center box that is the hub of my media. It really sucked when Zap2It went down. So, I spent an evening looking for a free alternative. I have a laptop that has Media Center 2005 on it (where it automagically downlaods its EPG data) and found a nifty application that will parse it into XMLTV format. I then drop that in a share on my media server where it picks it up and installs the latest data. Rinse, lather, and repeat. It bites that I have to manually do this every so often, but it sure beats manually parsing or screen scraping a website.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
Couldn't agree more.
I'm the news director of a small tv station in upstate New York, and I can back what some other posters have noted.
There is significant (well, as significant as tv gets...) work at the tv station end in compiling and - most of all - updating schedules. I'm guessing it's half of our program director's work week.
There are only a couple of big companies in the schedule game at this point, and my impression is that their money is in keeping everything compiled, updated and orderly - the 'writ large' version of what we do.
So the schedules direct service (which I immediately signed up for, btw) strikes me as a good community solution for keeping a superior dvr, MythTV, from suffering a big setback.
So it's not free as in beer - it does strengthen something that is, and free in other important ways as well.
Scott Atkinson
WWNY TV
Watertown NY
edit - In some part of the threads on this topic, someone opines that broadcasters don't want this because MythTV lets you easily skip commercials and - evil people that we are - we want to head that off at the pass.
Fergit' it. The issue of commercial skipping is too far removed from what we deal with day to day to influence our decisions, (in other words, we don't see the consequences in the bottom line in any way we can measure)and besides, it's not clear that dvrs lead to large scale commercial skipping.