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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/
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.
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.
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/
I assume it's because they are sick of people asking. Google is GREAT for finding things that exist. The fact that you -can't- find this on Google is a huge hint that it doesn't exist. Let's not forget that the last service to provide this for free closed down because of all the abusers, even after they were asked not to abuse the system. What other service in their right mind would take their place?
I admit, I think $5/mo for TV listings is a lot. TV Guide provided that service, plus interviews and articles, for less. (At least, last I checked.) There's free TV listings in the paper each week. (Again, last I checked.) And you can always look stuff up on tvguide.com and other sites for free, they just don't provide an easy-to-use feed for automated abuse. Err, use. I don't even pay that much for services that do a -lot- more work.
Some day, TV will get on the ball and start providing the service people want, instead of trying to force things down our throats. Europe has tv-via-satellite that seems to work very well, except it's not HD. The HD over-the-air works well, if you aren't stuck in a valley like I am and can't receive any signals without a ton of equipment.
No, some day, someone will see the light and provide TV over the 'net, with an electronic guide that mythtv or other programs can use. (AT&T, ARE YOU LISTENING TO ME?) Maybe they'll even have TV-on-demand and eliminate the need for a DVR altogether... If I could stream TV shows any time I wanted, instead of having to know ahead of time, I'd be willing to pay for that. (More than I already pay for HD & DVR cable, I mean.)
We seem to have hit a phase where companies are trying to force us to want what they want to sell us, instead of trying to sell us what we want. It's backfiring left and right and they're soon going to have to open their eyes.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
There are more pragmatic reasons too--multiple F/OSS projects are collaborating on providing SD & even more will be encouraging their users to get their listings from SD.They can want whatever they wish! But they aren't going to get it soon. Only two companies compile guide data & they sell it to other businesses. Some of these businesses (like SD) charge at least enough to pay for what it costs them to provide the listings. Others put it on the web & use ads to pay for it. Payment must come from somewhere. Z2It was free because they were a subsidary of Tribune.
If the data comes from one of the two "mother" listings, it will cost money. Period. No one will give you a free lunch. (Or you can violate TOS by scraping it.)
If it doesn't come from these "mother" sources, someone would have to form a third listing generation service (but this would cost significant setup & operating $$$ that they'd want to pass on).
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.
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.
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/
Because it costs money to get them, assemble them, and distribute them.
Linux is free because a bunch of volunteers put it together for free. So why aren't you volunteering to call up numerous TV networks, every few days, to get a list of their schedule, and input that into a public database for others to use, for free?
How about calling up every cable network in the country every month, to see if they've made any changes to their channel line-ups? And checking on every FCC action to see if broadcast TV channels have made any changes.
Somebody needs to do it. In absence of a huge and sustained mass of unimaginably dedicated volunteers, somebody needs to get paid for doing the hard and thankless work. Otherwise, you're just being a leech.
Zap2It was being charitable, nothing more. It was costing them money, but they put up with it for quite a while anyhow. No one else has, nor will do so again. There's just no profit in it, and it's not sustainable.
I'm sure you can think of many other examples of some software or service that started out free, but was merely a loss-leader or other marketing ploy, before it went commercial.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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.
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.