Slashdot Mirror
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?"
46487 466780 252994 376409 96920 39622 205366 244315 622115 512361 668040 63608 259203 955314 811176 652718 166330 23922
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.
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.
= 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.
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.
And let's face it, nothing will create an erection problem like a panty liner full of crumbs.
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