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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
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http://www.schedulesdirect.org/
Television?
It's not big, but it's clever!
TV Guide Channel? ;)
What's wrong with paying a couple bucks to get the listing data? Someone somewhere had to pay to provide the service. I don't see why everything, everywhere has to be free, free, free.
Oh damnit - I forgot. This is slashdot. Paying for stuff = bad.
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.
Why wouldnt the TV stations provide this for free - it is the ultimate free advertising pushed straight to the customer.
Instead they treat the listings like corporate bloody secrets - would you PAY to get junk mail posted to your letterbox?
1. Locate each TV channel's listings webpage,
2. Write up a bash script full of wget calls and parse all that incoming HTML with awk,
3. ????
4. Profit!!
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.
None of which are schedule providers. Try again.
from where was zap2it getting its guide information? Isn't it possible to fetch it directly from, say, the tv networks themselves? If not, why?
<rant>
As far as I see it, digital tv has been a trojan horse for anti-consumer abuse: broadcast flag, encryption now this? How long until they completely forbid recording (or make it a "premium service" - read paid, DRM'd privilege?)
</rant>
^[:q!
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.
So you're saying Zap2It stopped offering their free service because not enough people were using it?
There are Mythtv users outside of the US. In the UK the listings are carrying on as normal.
Can't you just get the tv listings off the air/cable/whatever? Perhaps things are set up differently in the US but in the UK listings are broadcast with digital tv (I haven't checked tuner card compatibility but I've never seen a set top box that doesn't support them).
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
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
what free alternatives exist that can replace this much-needed service?"
Easy. Get up and walk off some of those calories.
You mean there's a free listing service he can sign up with that's within walking distance!?!? Cool!
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Just which sides of the fences are you on mister?
--- Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity
People have been paying for TV listings (TV Guide) for decades. Having to do it for PVRs doesn't seem that outrageous to me.
have you ever used a DVR ? do you have any idea how fscking awesome they are ? imagine watching just the content you want, when you want. NGC and DSC channels are loaded with educational TV shows. Do you know how powerful this is when you have a child ? Its the perfect "filter" . My kids dont watch unsupervised trash tv. They watch educational shows when I want them to, without trashy commericals. you really have no clue WTF you are talking about. a home built PVR is a responsible parents godsend. and dont tell me you are here today on slashdot during the one day out of the year you come in from wandering the desert. give me a fscking break already.
...even though it's their commercial, for profit arm: http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/
Does this really surprise anyone?
I dabbled with MythTV a few years ago. I was quite surprised then that the Zap2It service was free, and I'm quite amazed it lasted as long as it did. At a certain point, if MythTV got bigger, they would have HAD to do this.
Now other posters have pointed out that ReplayTV in some countries used this, and some companies were taking these listings and reselling them for profit.
If you want to be open source, this data has to come from somewhere. Maybe someone will write scripts to scrape Yahoo TV or TV Guide or something else. If you just move to another guide service, they will end up dong the same thing. Maybe they'll put ads in it (and we all know how well putting ads all though things fares with /.ers).
So I say... ha. I've been expecting this. It was inevitable. Meanwhile I've had a TiVo for maybe 3 years now. I love it. I now have a Series 3. And I've said that I love it in /. discussions and there are always those people who say "But MythTV is free!" I realize there are benefits to the MythTV way (multiple front ends, multiple media formats, etc). But now the free guide data is gone. You could pay someone for it (or Zap2It). But if your setup isn't that complex, wouldn't a TiVo fit the bill? It may cost a hair more, but they won't pull guide data on you. Plus for that small monthly fee you get software updates and suggestions (which is very valuable to me).
Free ride, in this small case, is over. I hope people enjoyed it, but at some level people had to see this would happen.
Too bad though. As I remember, they had excellent quality data.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
You start with random recording schedules and breed them off one another based on user provided success metrics.
In about 15 to 20 years you should have developed a sufficiently agile show selection expert system that you won't need any steeekin' TV guides.
Or something.
Many of these people seldom watch 'real time' television. Their PVR 'looks up' the schedule and automatically grabs the show at that time. It's waiting for them on disk when _they_ want to view it.
It isn't like the old days of rotating the 13 position channel knob round and round anymore.
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?
Once I install the new version of MythTV. Knowing that the price should come down in the next couple of months only gives me more reason to do so.
aren't there mythtv users in europe and elsewhere?
This is one of the reasons why I opted to go Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) 2005 when I built out my PVR earlier this month.
No, it's a convenience. Convenience often comes at a cost, especially when somebody else has to do work or pay to bring you that convenience.
So I don't have to check the paper tv listings every day/week to schedule my Myth box to record the few shows a week that I watch. I tell it which shows I want it to record and it does all the work of finding out what time they play and recording them accordingly. While I enjoy tinkering with my computers, my time is valuable enough to me to not have to spend it on repetitive tasks such as telling my myth box exactly which channels and what times to record.
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.
= 7&t=43&start=10:
3 14
/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.
I watch tv shows...
Added Pressly: "Oh, and by the way, milk is nothing but liquid meat."
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.
Hostile much?
I'm amazed how you can discount the entire business model of TV Guide. Yes, if you want to know what time and what channel a show comes on, you need TV listings.
Unless you're advocating people sit in front of their TVs mindlessly clicking around looking for something to watch.
Unlike when I was growing up, there's actually a lot of high quality passive entertainment these days. You might want to check it out.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
...my subscription pays not only for the basic schedule, but also for tthe digested/categorized version that is organized into 'zones' by show type and/or subject matter.
Makes it easy to find all hockey games or all horror movies cross all channels.
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
But the $80 (don't know where the $100 came from) is easily worth it when you consider you don't have to go through the trouble of getting MythTV to work. Myth TV will probably give you more functionality. But SageTV will give you ease of use, with everything included in one nice package. I probably sound like some kind of fanboi, or someone who works for the company, but I'm really just a happy customer. After trying to days to get MythTV working, I just downloaded the trial version of SageTV, and it was up and running in 1/2 an hour. At that point, I was sold. So if you are having trouble getting MythTV to work. Just give SageTV a try, if you don't like it, don't use it. But don't discount it because you think $80 is too much, because once you count the time to get MythTV up and running, and the cost of Listings. $15 for 3 months = $60 a year = almost the cost of Sage. Then SageTV is well worth the money.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
It must be an american thing. Here in australia every station broadcasts it's guide for free. It just seems crazy you should need to pay for it, because you watching is what keeps tv/cable companys alive.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
...and offer PVR friendly listing feeds for something along the lines of $2 or $3 a month or so.
Does anyone know the nature of the alleged "misuse"?
Share and Enjoy: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I understand you believe the GP's suggestion to be unethical, but there's no need to misuse the word "theft" for this. What the GP is talking about may be freeloading, or copyright violation, or breach of contract, but to call this "theft" belittles the victims of actual theft.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
don't forget...MythTV is good for other things than just watching TV.
Max.
If you are paying for TV content to be delivered to you, then maybe that provider should offer it as an extra fee service. But for free terrestrial and free satellite TV programming, at least those listings should be free if the source providers are willing to make their piece of it free, as long as there are people willing to do the distributing for free.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Yes. It's walking over to the neighbor's mailbox and stealing their TV Guide.
All comments are properties and trademarks of the voices in my head. Not like I'm gonna claim them.
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
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)
Until a new distribution model for the listing is devised, services like labs.zap2it.com are going to spring up, then close down due to the cost of running a bunch of servers. It's hard to monetize the data with adds, since the data in interpreted by MythTV/ReplayTV/whatever.
Several posters have mentioned that they have programs that scrape data off of web pages. IIRC, this is the original method used by MythTV. When the load becomes great on the pages that are being scraped, those pages will change or go away.
We need to agree on a standard (ala Bittorent) for distributing this type of static content among the users. Each MythTV user can spare some bandwidth late at night to seed others. Assuming that the cable and television companies allow it to succeed....
I'm a big fan of socialized health care, but Canada's health care is not free nor almost free. Taxpayers pay for it.
Uh, I would take issue with "insanely easy" wrt intalling MythTV, there, Jobs. If you already have the best-supported hardware, of course it's easy. Most of us don't buy new PCs just to run Myth, at least not at first. Tweaking your Linux distro of choice to perform DVR duties with Myth is a chore, and while it could *possibly* be very easy, in practice it is a several-dozen-hours affair to get things Wife-approved, know what I mean?
I ... walk in with a cold, get a ... 3 week antibiotic prescription ...
So, your doctor was a moron, eh? Prescribing antibiotics for a cold is dangerous and stupid. Firstly, a cold is viral, meaning antibiotics won't touch your sniffles. Second, antibiotics overuse directly creates so-called super-bacteria. So when the incurable staph infection is eating your leg 30 years from now in the hospital, remember that cold from last year. It's probably your fault.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
In germany virtually all the stations carry EPG information with their DVB signal. Those stations who don't simply appear blank in the "What's on now" listings. This creates a certain pressure to implement EPG.
And in fact even in analog days there was and still is Teletext. A digital text servie allowing the station to carry information on 40x24 character pages. Those nearly almoust also carried complete programm guides. In fact some VCRs from Grundig even tried to parse those pages for "point and click" programming.
Why is it that in the US the user experience always has to be destroyed by people who want to maximize their profit?
Well duh. Who the hell do you think pays for it, health-care fairies? By free I mean you don't have to pay a few thousand on your way out of the hospital. I figured I wouldn't need to explain that, because anyone with a dose of sense knows SOMEONE pays for it. Guess I was mistaken. Who did you figure I meant paid for it?
http://watching-eyes.blogspot.com/
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
In that case, I rescind my insult. Strep throat is no joke...I've had it twice and wanted to die both times.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
|Paid prog|Paid Prog|Paid Programming|Paid Prog...
Nah, not worth the time. Has anyone actually timed how long it takes for the TV Guide channel to loop?
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
get modded informative for mentioning http://www.schedulesdirect.org/ like everyone else has?
AC: a home built PVR is a responsible parents godsend
Responsible parents keep their little monsters away from the TV as much as possible.
TV sucks. It rots your brain and robs your imagination.
(Yes, I am a parent. My little monster (daughter) is 8 and watches little TV. It probably helps that neither of her parents are big TV people either -- I watch perhaps 2 hours per month.)
Some people are like slinkies--basically useless but they bring a smile to your face when pushed down the stairs.
I do, on MY schedule.
I'd love to watch several shows in prime time, but my boss would be pissed at me sitting in the breakroom all evening...
Hmm. I'm thinking of a standardized P2P protocol for such things...
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
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
getting TV stations to stick to their schedules (*COUGH*BIG BROTHER*COUGH*) - that's the hard part.
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
In Australia , only the ABC broadcasts an EPG - free or otherwise. The commercials (including SBS) only broadcast the absolute minimum required by the DTV specs, "Now & Next" - and that's more often wrong than right.
They have recently announced an EPG service - available only to those PVRs "blessed" (i.e. crippled by having skip functions removed) by broadcasters.
Or do you mean the bandwidth-sucking, unusably-low bitrate, wait 5 minutes to see what's on tonight "Video Program Guide"? It's useless, and about as accurate as the now-and-next info they grudgingly provide...
Or maybe you mean the Foxtel guide? Damned right; if I was paying > $70/Mo I'd want an accurate program guide too. Pity theirs isn't particularly accurate either - or stable, for that matter; ever since they introduced the IQ it tends to flake out non-IQ boxes...
But, in the end, an EPG is only worthwhile if it's accurate. I don't really expect the TV networks to update their guides when they deliberately run their schedule up to 55 minutes late; do you?
What part of "a well regulated militia" do you not understand?
I installed myth when my kid was 3 and set it up to record shows that he would like to see. Now, when he wants to watch TV we sit down together, watch the specific program and then switch it off....seems a much healthier way to watch TV (and to get it's undoubted benefits of horizon expansion etc. etc.) than just sitting down and being fed something at the schedulers whim.
...when he was about 4 and a half we went to the cinema for the first time. Every time a new advert came on he thought it was the start of the film. Damn, we've not educated our kid to understand what adverts are...such a shame.
The lack of support for *free* listings on the myth boards sucks right now. $60/yr is too much for a box that is not maintenance free. At least with Tivo or a cableco box they handle everything Guess what - tons of people picked up WinTVs with encoders and those all came with software for use with a listing service that doesn't charge by the month. SO are you violating TOS if I bought a card for use with that service? MS Media Center doesn't even change for TV listings although myth kicks its ass elsewhere. No QAM support on MCE??? No CableCard support for an upgraded box??? please Maybe Apple can sort this crap out one day
Schedulesdirect charges the same rate that zap2it is planning to charge. so why should peope switch to them?
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.
The problem is that everyone's feed is customized. There are tens of thousands of channels available in the US (OK, generally only a few hundred, but on different services in different places). Everyone sets up their own feed. I've got mine at Dish Network, but have excluded the channels I never watch. So I only have about 40 channels worth of data. That works out to about 50K of XML per day of programming. I don't want to start downloading 10,000 channels worth of data because someone MIGHT want to get it from me 3 hours from now.
I thought that was homework your parents gave you - along with plurality
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Is there a good reason not to use titantv.com? It's integrated with my TV tuner, but a quick glance sugests that it might be useable independently.
Philip Sandifer's academic website
In Denmark we use a more sophisticated system, which parses and merges 6 different online html webguides into one ultimate xmltv file, which is actually of such a good quality that a large number of danish mce users are converting it into the format of Microsoft.
The speed of this grabbing depends heavily on the layout of the webpages, but grabbing somewhat multi-threaded it takes a couple of minutes per channel, which isn't that bad for a tv server running 24x7.
One of the grabbers actually fetch so much data, that we were contacted by the page maintainers asking us if they couldn't just provide the xmltv for free, so we could spare their servers.
Now that Linux users, and most PVR users for that matter, are nearing the end of their last fetched TV guide
Umm...it's only a guess but I don't think that "most PVR users" are using Myth or anything similar. Most PVR users are using Tivo or a cable company provided SciAtlanta box - and we certainly aren't nearing the end of our last fetched TV guide.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Copyright violation is not theft, no matter how much anyone likes that metaphor.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Because most of the people making up the 'board of directors' of SchedulesDirect.org are the people on MythTV. They are going to make the data as complete and as compatible as possible.
Your MythTV never had it so good.
Not only that, they are planning on charging substantially less in the coming months. I can't figure out MythTV for the life of me--but if I could, I'd be using these guys.
I remember looking a few weeks ago at the details of the EPG in Vista Media Center, and noticed that it said the EPG was powered by Zap2it. I'm sure that they will have some type of replacement, but it seems like everyone was dependent on Zap2it.
(I know, I know, I'm an evil person for using the abomination that is Vista, created by Satan himself in the form of Bill Gate$, who is trying to take over the world by adding DRM to everything and getting rid of all that is FOSS)
Stop watching TV.
From: http://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html/
Number of hours of TV watched annually by Americans: 250 billion
That's roughly 800 hours per person per year.
That's not quite correct. They have stated that they will refund your money if you don't agree with the Privacy Policy.
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.
I'm going to post without reading TFA or TFT, but here goes:
I considered MythTV when I was putting together my HTPC, it was a bitch to get working, and I never could get it just right. I was told time and time again by mythTV fanatics that it was worth it in the long run. I see now that they were dead wrong.
I went with BeyondTV on Windows (Even though I hate Windows and it crashes frequently) because it was a snap to set up and I could get it working just the way I like it. Paying $80 for the program doesn't seem like a waste now.
In the end all the community support doesn't get you anywhere without some cash infusion. Sorry MythTV guys, but I think that's the rule here.
God is real unless declared integer.
Yeah thats really a lot more effort then I am willing to go through. I make a very nice salary and can certainly afford the $5.00 a month for reliable listings. I really don't want to have to run Wine and hope that microsoft doesn't change the format of the listings or "update" the service to only work with Windows.
Charles Wyble System Engineer
So they said. But they refused to name names. Personally, I don't believe it. I think they stopped their free service because it was free.
IIRC, Zap2it is terminating the free service because of that exact reason - all they said was that there were many users who were "abusing" the service. They never came out and said exactly what it is, but it must have pissed them off pretty bad. I think if you just used the service the way it was intended to be used, they wouldn't go after you.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see the "not doing anything to piss off anyone at Tribune Media Services, even if you didn't know it would." line in the agreement anyway. I don't think they'd risk their goodwill by going out of their way to sue a random mythtv user anyway.
Many people use MythTV as a PVR and media center. MythTV has hooks into Zap2it's xml listings. Kind of a nice package.
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They're the masters of making a free (to customers) service viable. It's a golden opportunity...they have the bandwidth...they'd just need to create (or purchase) the content, then make it available for free in XML format, and for free (with small paid advertisements) in HTML format, easily accessible from the Google start page. Similar to what Zap2It (and possibly others) have done.
Welcome to economics 101....things COSTS MONEY.
Including the Grammar 101 class you didn't take.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
BTW, you do NOT give them your PayPal information AT ALL. They link to paypal, and paypal takes care of everything from there.
SchedulesDirect has NO KNOWLEDGE of your paypal information. They just know they got a payment on your account through paypal.
ALSO, the legal stuff was due to items from the Zap2It side of things, AFAICT.
Scott Carr
Not paying for the service doesn't hobble the software per se. It simply doesn't provide something that the software can use. I should also note that users who don't want to pay are more than free to do the compilation work themselves and use it and/or distribute it with no effective loss to the capability of the software.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
From: Zap2It Ad-Mail
The spam had the following footer: What a pisser.
I use beyondtv and am very happy with it. Yes, it is windows and costs money for the software, but it works very well for my needs.
"No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai
things COSTS MONEY. Either things cost money or things costs moneys I think he was clear that it was things costs money (even if it should actually be things cost money.
Don't try to tell me about global thermonuclear holocaust. When I was a kid, EVERY NUCLEAR WINTER I had to walk FIVE...
50k/40ch*10,000ch~=12M of download/day
I don't know the propagation math for P2P, but I think a client that keeps itself a couple of days in advance of the listings and self-throttles its total upload rate to 1/50th of the connection's maximum (mine's 3Mb/s, but let's work with 768kb/s for kicks) will still only take 7.5 minutes/programming day (given sufficient seeding) to download and 6:15 to regain a 1:1 share ratio. Keeping in mind that there will be super seeds without the 1/50 bandwidth limitation (the generous), you could resupply the whole 10,000 channels without it hurting your internet connection much at all.
Meanwhile, if you limit your channel downloads to only 40, as you should have the option to do, you still help out the community by resupplying those 50 channels.
Optimization and targeting are key here, of course; the program could split the XML up by channel and compress them individually within a gzip wrap and simply use modified bittorrent for its sharing protocol. Integrated with MythTV, it could even prioritize listings for channels you watch often.
The problem, of course, is freely sourcing the listings; advertising's not an option with something like MythTV - which exists more to skip commercials than anything. Redistribution licenses are expensive enough that dontations probably wouldn't cover it.
Here's an idea, though: A hardware vendor of MythTV boxes can hook it up as a universally free service with the purpose of selling more boxes with this nifty feature built in (rather than having to do all the separated installs). The key here is to write the software up with an incompatible license to MythTV's, so that it has to be sourced from the vendor via apt/yum/whatever rather than simply getting it with MythTV (the result being that the vast majority who prefer ease of use go with buying the prebuilt, fully loaded HTPC rather than rolling their own, while homebrewers can still use it, but we have to jump through another one of those hoops we so love).
Sounds like underhanded manipulation of Open Source licensing, but paying for something with nothing is a business that involves creative and nimble thinking.
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That said, I'd write it myself, but I'm way too busy with the job and with writing a piece of software to automatically download the latest episodes of my favorite shows via BT; I don't own a TV, but there are a couple shows I like.
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I've been using KnoppMyth for about 2-1/2 years now, and the data was free the whole time. Now that a few "bad apples" spoiled the free data-feed, we have to pay. That's too bad, but I don't mind. I'm paying the $2.50/month fee to SchedulesDirect because the freedom that MythTV provides is worth it. I don't care if SchedulesDirect is a non-profit or a for-profit. If they provide the data I need to record/watch the cable shows I want, WHEN I want, that's good enough for me. Thanks, MythTV, KnoppMyth, and SchedulesDirect!