XMLTV TV_GRAB_UK_RT - Has something changed these days?

[Lucas]

I noticed that last night and this morning the tv_grab_uk_rt grabber was returning no programme info.
Each page request was returning no data....

Has something changed on the RT site?

[bmadgett]

Yep, the grabber's broken at present. Take a look at the threads on the XMLTV-devel list at :

http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tv.xmltv.devel

Looks like the RT site is blocking requests from grabbers, whether intentionally or not noone is quite sure yet. Whether it'll be fixed or not, again, noone seems sure.

I'm attempting to switch to getting XMLTV from bleb.org, but that's less than ideal as there's loads of channels missing.

I wish there was somewhere we could PAY to get decent reliable TV listings in the UK (other than DigiGuide, which is no use to us Sage users)

Barnaby

[srcurtis]

If anyone comes up with a resolution for this, please let me know.

Steve

[Lucas]

Looks like Neil has found a workaround.

Has he posted a link to the recompiled win32 executables?

PS. I wouldn't mind paying for the feed either!!!

Andrew

[bmadgett]

Neil's "workaround" (getting the User Agent set correctly) doesn't actually fix the problem for me - the grabber gets further but still fails to download any program details. So there's something else still going on. Unless I patched my local perl wrongly - I'm no perl expert! (or even a novice...)

Fingers crossed someone gets a solution working before the 21st - that's the day my currently downloaded schedules run out, after that I'll be relying on Bleb and there's lots of channels missing there.

I wish there was a Digiguide->XMLTV converter, that's the best source of UK schedule info, I can see why they don't want to provide one though (the copyright laws, their business model, etc). Even so, a shame...

Barnaby

[bmadgett]

Actually, seems like I was wrong - Neil's fix DOES allow the grabber to work. What was looking like failures to me was just that the RT site doesn't seem to have listings for the 22nd & onwards, which is where my grabber is trying to fetch from (I already have up to the 21st cached on disk).

If you try thro' a browser to search for progs on the 22nd on the RT site it fails, too, so it's a problem at their end, not with the grabber.

If I reset it so that it tries to fetch from tomorrow instead, it seems like it's correctly getting programmes again.

Wonder why listings aren't available for next week?

Barnaby

[nielm]

my workaround was not a workaround -- it was a fix for a bug (tv_grab_uk_rt was not using the correct HTTP user agent).

It is unlikely to make it to a released XMLTV version because the reasons for the RT web site to start blocking the grabber are equally valid whatever user-agent string it uses, and constantly changing the user-agent to get around RT's blocking will only upset them and make them start to use more aggressive (possibly legal) measures against the grabber, or worse the publisher and users of the grabber.

Our only hope is though contacting the RT folks and hoping that they are nice...

[bmadgett]

Yeah - fingers crossed they're reasonable. Looking at the T&Cs on the RT site, this is the relevant portion :

...quote...
Personal Non-commercial Use Limitation.
Any material found within the pages of www.radiotimes.com, including text or images may not be copied, reproduced, republished, downloaded, posted, broadcast or transmitted in any way except for your own personal non-commercial use. You will not edit, adapt, alter or create any derivative work from any of the material contained in this site.

Permission for any other use must be obtained by contacting BBC Worldwide Limited. For further information please email us at radio.times@bbc.co.uk.
...end quote...

So I would say that running a grabber to produce XMLTV files for personal PVR use is within those conditions (ie we wouldn't be republishing the data anywhere). However some of the plans mentioned for providing mirrors etc would definitely seem to infringe on these conditions.

It all depends what their REAL objection to the grabber is. If it's purely a technical too-many-hits problem, then maybe they could be convinced to provide a location where the raw text could be downloaded in one big lump for a day (ala Bleb) - thus eliminating most of the thrashing on their webserver due to the many hits the grabber has to do.

If it's more of a "well we might possibly want to start charging for this sort of thing sometime in the future so we don't want you to be able to get it for free", then we'd be stuck.

My suspicion is that it'll be being blocked for technical reasons (the webmaster has spotted 1000s of hits from the grabber agent), and that inertia / lack of motivation / lack of resources will mean the route of least resistance ie blocking the grabber will be taken. It's less work for a sysadmin to block a grabber than to provide an alternative, more-efficient mechanism. Plus the sysadmin would have to get it cleared with the legal dept etc etc...

Hey ho! It's Sunday evening, tomorrow is Monday & work again, never puts me in a very positive frame of mind :-)

Barnaby

[Lucas]

Hi all,

unfortunately my UK_RT data run out yesterday so ..........
Tried using the o2grabber and got a "Connection with webserver failed" msg.

Is this server only available at certain times during the day or night?

Any other o2grabber users out there with a working setup?

Any help will be much appreciated......

[nielm]

Just to let you know that there is now an alternative UK grabber in XMLTV... Nothing to do with me!

It does not grab as much detail as uk_rt, nor as many channels, but it is a start.

Data comes from www.bleb.org

Installation:
Download the latest alpha xmltv executable (http://alpha-exe.xmltv.org)
Save it in the same directory as the old XMLTV exe.

Download the icon_urls file (http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/xmltv/xmltv/grab/uk_bleb/icon_urls?rev=HEAD) (right-click the link and select save-as
Save this as: <xmltv-dir>\share\xmltv\tv_grab_uk_bleb\icon_urls
AFTER SAVING MAKE SURE THAT IT HAS NO .TXT EXTENSION

start a command prompt and cd to the XMLTV dir
run:
xmltv tv_grab_uk_bleb --configure
and set up the channels as you did with uk_rt
then run
xmltv tv_grab_uk_bleb --days n > epgdata.xml

You may have different channel IDs in the XML to the channel IDs produced by the RT grabber. If this is the case you may need to remap the new channels in Sage

Good luck.

[bmadgett]

Not only does the RT site block XMLTV now, but they seem to have changed what days are available on their website. I can't get it to give me program listings any further ahead than the 19th, even though before the grabber stopped working I'd downloaded up to the 21st...

Can anyone else (using a browser) get the RT site to give them details past the 19th, for any channel?

Looks like more has changed than just blocking XMLTV.

I'll be investigating the bleb thing come the weekend, I suspect. It's a real pain bleb doesn't have the various extra Discovery channels, and doesn't have the +1 channels, as if it had those then I wouldn't be missing much from the lack of the RT one. Perhaps it'll be possible to cobble together a script that could take e.g. a "Discovery" listing and produce a "Discovery +1" listing just by going through adding 1hr to all the times? Anyone here whizzy enough with perl?

Alternatively, has anyone investigated the format for the program listing downloads that's used for the RT PDA application? It struck me that since the listings get downloaded via your PC & then get synced onto your PDA, it should be possible to grab the downloaded listings & parse into XMLTV format. Are they encrypted? I can't see this could annoy them since a) it'd still be for personal use with no redistribution, b) you'd still be paying your subscription of £15/yr to them, and c) you would be downloading in just the same way as any other PDA user, thus not generating any extra strain on their servers. Thoughts?

Barnaby

[Beefcake]

Originally posted by nielm
Download the latest alpha xmltv executable (http://alpha-exe.xmltv.org)



http://alpha-exe.xmltv.org/

Site seems to be down, amyone have a copy of the file they can host please?

Scrap that site is back up :)

[Lucas]

The tv_grab_uk_bleb grabber works very well. It is also much faster.

Thanks for the tip Niel!!!!

PS. OK so the program info is less than RT and some channels are missing, the important ones are there BTW.

Credit should go to all those who put their time in developing something that we can also use. I personnally don't have the time to write something like this so I use whatever people are kind enough to make available and since I can't pay for an EPG service right now, I don't think I can complain.

I think some people complained that the +1 channels were not there....... Well who needs that anyway? That's why we have invested in a PVR... We record shows whenever they are on and watch them whenever we want. The +1 channels are for people who don't have this setup. Or maybe there is some other use that I haven't thought about.

[bmadgett]

The +1 channels are handy to have available to Sage so that it can resolve conflicts more easily e.g. say you have something on BBC1 and something on Discovery, both running 8-9pm. If you also have Discovery+1 then Sage can just record from that at 9-10pm, thus avoiding the clash with the program on BBC1. A minor point, but helpful nonetheless.

I ought to be able to cobble something together to generate +1 channels from the "base" channel coming out of bleb, if a tool doesn't already exist. Won't be for a week or two though - very busy just now.

I agree with the sentiment about thanking people who put time & effort into all this - without them, us PVR users in the UK would be well & truly stuffed. I've still got my fingers crossed that one day we'll be able to get decent EPG in the UK, even on subscription. If there was one thing that might cause me to think about switching to another PVR software app, it'd be them having an agreement with UK EPG suppliers...

Barnaby

[nielm]

As the XMLTV exe has all the code for parsing XML and adding dates in it, how about this:

create an epgdata.xml file from bleb as normal

Create a discplus1channel.xml file to define the new channel containing<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE tv SYSTEM "xmltv.dtd">
<tv source-info-url="http://www.bleb.org/tv/data/listings" generator-info-name="bleb2xmltv">
<channel id="plus1.discoveryeurope.com">
<display-name>Discovery+1</display-name>
<icon src="http://discoverychannel.co.uk/_includes/sitewide_images/logo.jpg" />
</channel>
</tv>


Run the following commands:
xmltv tv_grep --channel-id discoveryeurope.com epgdata.xml > discovery.xml
xmltv tv_grep --eval "use XMLTV::DST qw(utc_offset); ${$_}{start}=utc_offset(DateCalc(${$_}{start}, '+1 hour') . ' UTC', '+0000'); if ( ${$_}{stop} ) { ${$_}{stop}=utc_offset(DateCalc(${$_}{stop}, '+1 hour') . ' UTC', '+0000'); } ${$_}{channel}='plus1.discoveryeurope.com'; 1 " discovery.xml > discplus1.xml
xmltv tv_sort discplus1.xml discplus1channel.xml epgdata.xml > epgdata_new.xml

The 3 command lines do: extract programs from discovery channel into a separate file
Add 1hr to start and stop times, and update the channel ID for these program
Combine the new programs with the new channel definition and the old epgdata to get a new epgdata file with all programs.
(output untested in Sage, but it looks OK...)

(zip file attached containing above command lines as a bat file and the discchannel.xml)

[bmadgett]

Cripes! I should've guessed that XMLTV would have something builtin. And I've just spent a happy couple of hours this morning cobbling together a bit of Java code to do the same thing. D'oh!

My Java thing was going to parse an input XML file (which you would have grabbed to only contain channels you want to make +1), let you add a number of hours to every programme start & stop, prefix something you want to the channel URL (eg 'plus-1.', suffix something to the channel description (eg 'Plus-1'), and put a timezone specifier after every time (eg '+0100'). This would all be output to a new file, which you could then merge with all the rest of the non-plus-1 channels from a separately fetched XML file.

The timezone specifier thing was just because the bleb data doesn't have those in it, whereas the RT XMLTV did, so I was trying to make it look the same to avoid any possible hiccups.

Seems to work ok, but obviously if the functionality is already there in XMLTV then it's all a bit redundant!

Cheers

Barnaby

[ukmgranger]

Is this really the only way to get EPG data now? Bleb just doesn't have the freeview channels that I am using (well about 4 or 5 anyway).

I am with everyone else that is saying that they would pay for a reliable EPG service.

[Kryton]

Originally posted by nielm
[B]Just to let you know that there is now an alternative UK grabber in XMLTV... Nothing to do with me!

It does not grab as much detail as uk_rt, nor as many channels, but it is a start.

Data comes from www.bleb.org

bleb.org can actually outputs the info as an xmltv file rather than having to parse it using xmltv.exe. Just specify &format=XMLTV in the URL
See here for Syntax
http://www.bleb.org/tv/data/listings?

You can download your weeks listings as a zip file in under a minute like this, I use it as such:
my example (http://www.bleb.org/tv/data/listings?days=0..6&format=XMLTV&channels=bbc1,bbc2,itv1,ch4,five,bbc3,bbc4,bravo,e4,itv2,living_tv,paramount,paramount2,scifi,sky_movies1,sky_movies2,sky_movies3,sky_movies4,sky_movies5,sky_movies6,sky_movies7,sky_movies8,sky_movies9,sky_movies_cinema,sky_movies_cinema2,sky_one,sky_one_mix,uk_gold) (copy and edit the url here, this forum added <BR />'s to it)

[nielm]

Latest news on the RT grabber front...

The RT technical guys have got into contact with the XMLTV project admin...

Hi Ed,

I run the technical side of the Radio Times website for BBC
Worldwide. Could you please contact me to discuss XMLTV. As you know
we have blocked the use of XMLTV, but we are willing to work
with you to find a more efficient and less harmfull way for you
to keep this product working.

Looks promising...
(Xmltv development mailing list:
http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tv.xmltv.devel
news://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tv.xmltv.devel )

[eldingo]

Thats good news. I wonder how they could solve the problem of it stretching the RT's servers though ?

Unless they are going to look at providing an XML formatted output for XMLTV to pick up, which would save all those requests to the different pages.

[bmadgett]

It really _does_ stretch their servers too, I suspect - for example my channel lineup with --slow --categories says it downloads ~80Mb per day! Which is ridiculous when the resulting XMLTV output is ~1Mb.

What would help a lot is if there was a single plaintext (or marked-up somehow) page which contained all the program details for a channel for a day. You'd only then need to have a limited number of fetches. It's the fetch-per-program to get the details that really causes problems from what I've seen.

Whether they'll be prepared to put that sort of easily accessible info up is another matter. I'm sure it would be very easy technically for them (they've got all the info there, after all) - it's more a case of whether they really want to allow end users to grab all the detail. After all they're charging for the same sort of thing for their PDA app.

The noises coming from this RT technical contact do sound positive, though...

It'll all take time to arrange, if at all - hence we may need to switch to Bleb in the meantime.

Cheers

Barnaby

[eldingo]

The bleb listings work ok for me, however I had to set up all my tv channels again when I first put them on :(

[ron.smythe]

I've just come across the RT problem now my EPG data has run out. I like the idea that the Tech at the RT wants to enable us to carry on working, I can understand there concerns, with all of us hitting there links there would have been a few problems arising. I wonder if we can get Sage involved at this stage, as the RT may want there epg data protected, and if Sage can make assurances to them that this is what is going on at the moment in the US, the I'm sure the RT would be happy to supply data for a cost, like there PDA stuff.

And yes I know there is opposition to epg data being a cost for item, but wouldn't it be better to have a data service then not, remember every time Digiguide are approached they tell us it's not possible because of licensing, at the moment the Tech at RT wants to help, if we offer an olive branch maybe, just maybe we can get TV recorded in an organised manor so that all of us can start recommending Sage to anyone and everyone in the UK, not just the people that have time to fix XMLTV issues. And I am not saying the problems are normally caused by the XMLTV, but with bad data, slow links, and a large amount of data downloaded each day it can takes it's toll.

I would also like to take this opportunity, whilst I stand on my virtual soap box, to thanking everyone in the XMLTV project, as although not perfect because of data restrictions, it is a brilliant tool.

[nielm]

Originally posted by Kryton
bleb.org can actually outputs the info as an xmltv file rather than having to parse it using xmltv.exe. Just specify &format=XMLTV in the URL
See here for Syntax
http://www.bleb.org/tv/data/listings?

You can download your weeks listings as a zip file in under a minute like this, I use it as such:
my example (http://www.bleb.org/tv/data/listings?days=0..6&format=XMLTV&channels=bbc1,bbc2,itv1,ch4,five,bbc3,bbc4,bravo,e4,itv2,living_tv,paramount,paramount2,scifi,sky_movies1,sky_movies2,sky_movies3,sky_movies4,sky_movies5,sky_movies6,sky_movies7,sky_movies8,sky_movies9,sky_movies_cinema,sky_movies_cinema2,sky_one,sky_one_mix,uk_gold) (copy and edit the url here, this forum added <BR />'s to it)
The bleb grabber uses this interface... and appears cleans up the resulting XML, addign TZ, removing overlaps etc.

[Lucas]

Yes, I also tried to use the "XMLTV" data straight from bleb but the sage plug in did not like it very much.

Only by doing processing using grep before the XMLTV bleb grabber appeared did I manage to get it to work.

The alpha XMLTV uk_bleb grabber seems to format the data correctly and works relatively well.

[ukmgranger]

Originally posted by ron.smythe
And yes I know there is opposition to epg data being a cost for item, but wouldn't it be better to have a data service then not, remember every time Digiguide are approached they tell us it's not possible because of licensing, at the moment the Tech at RT wants to help, if we offer an olive branch maybe, just maybe we can get TV recorded in an organised manor so that all of us can start recommending Sage to anyone and everyone in the UK, not just the people that have time to fix XMLTV issues.

I am in total agreement with this!

The one and only reason that I DO NOT recommend Sage to my friends/colleagues is the whole EPG thing in the UK. Although XMLTV is great and I am now starting to get the hang of it, most people I know just wouldn't get on with it. If there was a solid, reliable way to get the data I feel Sage would be so much more accessible to people in the UK.

[bmadgett]

Absolutely. The only way I got XMLTV and the RT grabber even halfway stable for me was by running it on my linux server with a shellscript that does various things like retrieving daily portions, detecting "failed" downloads (if the filesize was less than expected), merging portions together, declumping etc. I'm happy hacking about doing this sort of thing myself (I hack code for a living after all), but e.g. there's no chance I could recommend it to my parents.

Until a Sage user can just select "Telewest Supreme Package" or "Sky" or whatever and get the EPG downloads automatically every day for the appropriate channels (or at least manually select the channels), it's going to remain a tech-savvy-only thing in the UK.

The data also needs to be a lot more reliable than the stuff we get from XMLTV - it's not "bad" as such, just it has inconsistencies where some episodes have good details, others have none so you end up with duplicate recordings, etc. We need proper episode tagging and the like in order for Sage to do its thing to best effect, which you can't get from webpage scraping.

Barnaby

[ukmgranger]

Anyone heard any news on the UK_RT thang?

[robertpoll]

Good news...

Date: 2004-09-20 11:43
Sender: alanbirtles
Logged In: YES
user_id=1120910

my grabber is now working again
http://www.alanbirtles.dsl.pipex.com/xmltv/xmltv.htm and ed
has said that xmltv will include the required changes some
time in the next week

This was from http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1025864&group_id=39046&atid=424136

I've tried the grabber and it is very fast and has more detail than the old one (actors, categories etc.)..

..only problem is that xmltv seems not to work with the xmltv plugin. I haven't looked in detail yet and have had problems in the past (I could never get it to work with --slow) so would be keen to hear if anyone else can make it work (and if so which version of the plugin they are using).

[nielm]

Originally posted by robertpoll
..only problem is that xmltv seems not to work with the xmltv plugin. I haven't looked in detail yet and have had problems in the past (I could never get it to work with --slow) so would be keen to hear if anyone else can make it work (and if so which version of the plugin they are using). It does not generate the correct format of xml (the xmltv tools raise a ton of errors on the generated data), and the timestamps are missing seconds.
On the plus side, someone is writing a new RT grabber for the xmltv project that will use the new offical RT data source (which gives access to the pure data and is damn fast)...

[edit]the xmltv grabber has already been written, and a new release will be available soon --- see http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tv.xmltv.devel/4117

[Lucas]

Tried the alanbirtles grabber.
Yes the XMLTV tools generate a lot of errors but so does the bleb_grabber even if it is to a lesser extent.

The new UK_RT data looks good though.

It has some fields like subtitles, aspect, rating, star-rating.....

Any idea how these would be translated in the SageTV EPG?

Also under what conditions RT made this data available?

It seems too good to be true.

[nielm]

...subtitles, aspect, rating, star-rating.....
They were always there in --slow mode.. and were ignored by the XMLTV plugin...

I had the intention a long time ago to update the xmltv plugin to add this extra data to the description, but got distracted :)

The RT conditions seem to be the same as the webpage--personal use only, no redist, and the alanbirtles grabber webpage suggest that it may become a subscription service in the future (I guess RT are going to evaluate the number of users and decide whether it would be worth setting up a subscription scheme).

[birty]

my grabber should no longer produce errors in the xmltv tools, i didn't know that the attributes in the xml had to be in the exact order as in the xmltv specification

[Lucas]

Hmmm, yes. I know about distractions!:)

Maybe its time to do my bit of sharing the burden....
Nielm, can you please point me to or provide the plugin's(the multi-input source) source code?

[nielm]

birty; there are several XML validators around that check XML against the corresponding DTD... one is nsgmls, mentioned here (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.tv.xmltv.devel/914/)

Lucas... There are several that need to be merged... My multi-source one is here: http://forums.freytechnologies.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=39299#post39299 (apologies for the code -- but at least I can say hardly any was mine!)

My plan was to combine the debugging features of TallyHo's grabber (http://forums.freytechnologies.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=51607#post51607) -- which otherwise is less fully featured, and Demideus' category translation (which can translate Film->Movie and get EPG highlighting working), and find out from Sage the difference between EPXX episode ID's and SHXXX show Id's...

Good luck!

[ukmgranger]

Sorry for being a dumb-ass, but is this new RT grabber available yet?
Also, has RT now given permission for people to grab the data? Thats a pretty cool way of thinking from them if they have - letting loads of people suck data from their site!! :)

[nielm]

Originally posted by ukmgranger
Sorry for being a dumb-ass, but is this ne grabber available yet?
Also, has RT now given permission for people to grab the data? Thats a pretty cool way of thinking from them if they have - letting loads of people suck data from their site!! :) The new XMLTV project grabber has been written and is currently under test...

RT have been very cool and have actually set up special pages to download the raw data from. eg for BBC1: http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/92.dat

[Lucas]

Alan's grabber - rel 2.2.2 works very well with SageTV now as well.

[ukmgranger]

Whats this 'Alan's grabber' and where can I get it to check it out? ;)

[birty]

http://www.birtles.org.uk/xmltv/xmltv.htm

[ron.smythe]

Okay I'm sorry but I have to say this.

1) RadioTimes You rock the world!!!
2) XMLTV RT (2.3) You rock the world too!!!!
3) My Sage server rocks the world!!!!!

So to sum up, my world is rocking to the visulations of RadioTimes XMLTV data downloading in under 4 minutes, importing in less the 2 minutes, and with out me saying naughty words!

Time to start the recomendations of Sage to others.

BTW: I'm happy. As droopy once said.

[ukmgranger]

I can only agree with ron. The new grabber is the don! It really is superb, and fast. Happy happy, joy joy! :)

[ron.smythe]

All,

I would like to draw to your attention, something that I class as an important addition to the already excellent tool XMLTV RT, this is the ability to inform you via email of the out come of your epg download.

Well done Alan for a brillant tool that is so usful that I can be entertained by my Sage Servers contents, rather then rant at the failed recordings and lack of notification.


:D :clap: :D :clap: :D :clap: :D :clap:

Please see here for the XMLTVRT tool: http://www.alanbirtles.dsl.pipex.com/xmltv/xmltv.htm

[nblackbu]

I'm new to this so please excuse me for asking what is probable as simple question. I've have downloaded the XMLTV grabber from the link shown in the quote and I have run it and it has produced the XML output, how do I now go about getting it into Sage TV???
:confused:


All,

I would like to draw to your attention, something that I class as an important addition to the already excellent tool XMLTV RT, this is the ability to inform you via email of the out come of your epg download.

Well done Alan for a brillant tool that is so usful that I can be entertained by my Sage Servers contents, rather then rant at the failed recordings and lack of notification.


:D :clap: :D :clap: :D :clap: :D :clap:

Please see here for the XMLTVRT tool: http://www.alanbirtles.dsl.pipex.com/xmltv/xmltv.htm

[ukmgranger]

You now have to create a .bat file that will copy the newly downloaded epgdata.xml file over into your Sage folder. then you set up a scheduled task to run this bat once a day.

[eldingo]

The only problem that I have found with the xml files that this program produces are that there are carriage returns in the channel names and in the programmes titles. I can get rid of the carriage returns dead easy for the channel names, but its a bit more of a problem for the titles.

Apart from that, its an excellent way to get the RT tv listings. Thanks for creating the program :)

[birty]

this should be fixed now in 2.5.2

[eldingo]

I thought that was the version that I downloaded from your webpage earlier today. I'll try it again and let you know.

[eldingo]

I downloaded the newer version and it worked fine. The channel names are now correct and the episode titles are all on one line again :)

Because the RT doesn't provide the Radio listings at the moment, I had to combine Bleb's xml file with the one that this program produces to get all the radio channels too.

[birty]

debugger and i are working on an automated process for this and it is almost ready (it just needs more testing)

[eldingo]

Thats cool. It will save me having to work out a seperate method of combining the files.

[birty]

its done now http://www.de-bugger.com/Misc/DGUK.htm

[maxheadroom]

Following on from Nblackbu's newbie post I'd like to ask a followup newbie question:

Exactly how do i generate (or write) the batchfile for Sage TV? The built in batch file generator is looking for a file called hmnxmltv.exe, which i guess is a showshifter thing (given that the button was called 'generate showshifter batch' :D ).

What's the sagetv version of this?

[birty]

if a sage user puts the deatails here i can add that to the program

[maxheadroom]

I might not be the best person for the job given that I'm new to all this but if you can talk me through what details you need I'll be happy to supply them.

Drop me an email to save spamming up the thread if you like

[edgley]

There was I, all in a panic as I couldnt grab.

quick look to see if anyone else was having this problem, only to find this wonderful tool. THANKS!

As there are far more clever people here than me, I am going to ask:

Is it possible to remove bits of the channel names? It would be so nice to get them all on one line in the EPG

Simon.

[birty]

you could edit channels.txt

[newschapmj1]

Thank you to all those got the Radio Times listings working so well again.
Great work!

[falvious]

just playing with sage to see if it suits my needs. Im trying to get the epg data into it without success using the grabber from here http://www.alanbirtles.dsl.pipex.com/xmltv/xmltv.htm
have all the data, and in an xml file. moved the xml file to the sagetv dir but when i try to get the dtat into sage im having problems./ How exactly do you do this. I select configure my tv card, no to to tuning option then for the programming guide screen im not sure which option. selecting use programming guide with this source takes me to select either cable/sat or local source. I select cable then asked for zip code which i enter as 00000 and all i get are a list of several US cable companies. Where do i configure sage to use xmltv ?

thanks

fal

ps UK user

[edgley]

Have you added the java extensions to the java ext directory?

If you have, try setting up the card a few times, you might well find, like I did, that it magically starts working again.

[falvious]

yup done that and finally the xmltv appeared, however trying to import the data it seems to just sit there doing nothing ............

[ukmgranger]

Make sure that you give Sage plenty of time to import the new data. I thought my system was hanging at this point, but I was just being impatient. I think it can take a good few minutes for it to import on my system. I always keep my eye on the hard drive light on the case.

[maxheadroom]

Also, make sure that the xml produced is called epgdata.xml and not just data.xml and that it's in the root of your sage directory

[ukmgranger]

Also, make sure that the xml produced is called epgdata.xml and not just data.xml and that it's in the root of your sage directory

this is actually dependent on which xml import plugin you use with Sage. I use the multi tuner plugin by nielm. for this plugin you have to have the xml data in the root of the Sage directory, however the data must be named '1.xml' and '2.xml' to correspond with the import settings in Sage.

[leejsmith]

I have used alans RT grabber for some time and it's fantastic. He even added some features i asked for very quickley.

Radio times are good sports for providing the information but it's still not as good as digiguide. This is ok on the main channles but once you get to things like toonami any program details go you just get the same old description every time. Even thinks like sky 1 stargate no episode details or even what are repeats. This is nothing to do with alans grabber as i checked the RT website too.

I just renewed my subscription to digiguide again just to see what episodes of stargate are showing and yugioh , dragonball z ect.

It's a shame as the RT grabber works very well.

[Lucas]

You are right, I notice 2-3 times a week that the same episode aired at different days and times may have slightly different titles or description, triggering SageTV to think it is a new episode and recording it.

The best example that comes to mind is 24 on Sky one where the latest episof is both titled 11am to 12pm and 11am to 12noon.

But hey, before this arrangement with RT there was chaos!

[leejsmith]

yes the RT deal is great but sage tv is needs a good epg to work well.
Your example of 24. If the epg was as it should be all you need to do is set 24 as a fav with new episodes only and it will record the series with a single touch. My experiance of stargate Series 8 was i didnt no it was series 8 and missed half of the series. Then when i came to record the new episodes i had to search and select when i wanted to record as RT did not tell me what series was showing and which episodes are repeats/new episodes. This is easy enough as new episodes are show at the same time/day of each week but i still have to search every week for every series i want to record instead of sagetv just recording for me.

[leejsmith]

Also yu-gi-oh on sky one had several multipart episodes with the same title nothing told me that is was part 1 ect so i missed a couple thinking they are the same program.

[Lucas]

Same trouble here.... so I let Sage TV record everything (Favourites) unless I am 100% that it is something I watch in the past and the go and preview them after they were recorded.....

But as I said comparatively to how it was....

You know there is a parametric grabber TVxb (www.tvxb.com) that I use for some other channels. This is very configurable and if one has time, I am sure it can be configured to grab data for Sky from other sites.....

Just a thought.....

Honestly, at the moment I can't justify spending the time.