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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?
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.
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.
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
Just which sides of the fences are you on mister?
--- Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity
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/
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
...and offer PVR friendly listing feeds for something along the lines of $2 or $3 a month or so.
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....
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 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
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
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.
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.