UK listings and XMLTV Issues

[martint123]

Brian, the problem backing up to a second drive is that you only have 1 day to find out something has gone wrong before you backup duff data.
My backup ran at 0800, but the empty EPG was downloaded at 0200, so main and copy was empty.
I use ghost to make a twice monthly full backup and daily incremental ones to a USB drive.

Martin

[gingerneil]

Yep - up and running again for me here. Thank ^&*^&* for that !

[bgowland]

Brian, the problem backing up to a second drive is that you only have 1 day to find out something has gone wrong before you backup duff data.

Aaaah! But that's why my backup batch files all have this sort of construct...

Code:

copy data.bak-7.xml data.bak-8.xml
copy data.bak-6.xml data.bak-7.xml
copy data.bak-5.xml data.bak-6.xml
copy data.bak-4.xml data.bak-5.xml
copy data.bak-3.xml data.bak-4.xml
copy data.bak-2.xml data.bak-3.xml
copy data.bak-1.xml data.bak-2.xml
copy "C:\Program Files\XMLTV GUI\data.xml" data.bak-1.xml

Cheers,
Brian

[stu8080]

Clever, nice and simple.

Nice one Brian

[martint123]

And there was me trying to create zip files with the date embedded in the filename (silly boy!)

[bgowland]

Nice one Brian

Thanks.

I'm not sure why I chose to keep 8 copies - but then again - just because I'm NOT paranoid doesn't mean to say the world ISN'T out to get me.

Cheers,
Brian

[stu8080]

Good point... although it allows for weekends/weeks away from home. And hell, for the sake of a few extra lines in a batch script and a few extra kb's, why not?

[sixgun]

All working here too. Phew.

I did write my own XMLTV (radio times specific) grabber a while back. Turns out i lost the source code, so i loaded up my trusty copy of Reflector and got it all back. Thankfully i hadn't used the obfuscator on it! Anyway, i got it all built and made a few mods to it. It now makes a backup copy of the guide data every time if downloads it and embeds the date/time (down to the second!) into the backup filename. It's also got a days limit feature and the ability to ignore TBA programmes. I actually had a copy of the guide data it downloaded a few days before the radiotimes site problems. It works fine when used by GBPVR. I have it running in parallel to XMLTV, just in case!

If anyone is interested in looking at it, i'd be happy to put it up on the wiki (providing i can remember my username/password!). It's not exactly polished software, and it doesn't have a GUI of any kind. It's all controlled via the .config file. But i don't think it really needs a gui as it's run as a scheduled task.

Here is the config file to give you an idea of the complexity of setting it up.

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?>
<configuration>
    <appSettings>
        <add key="Base URL" value="http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/"/>
        <add key="Channel Filename" value="channels.dat"/>
        <add key="Save Channels File" value="True"/>
        <add key="TBA Text" value="To Be Announced"/>
        <add key="Ignore TBA" value="True"/>
        <add key="Output Filename" value="data.xml"/>
        <add key="Days" value="7"/>
        <add key="Save Backup" value="True"/>
        <add key="Keep Backup Days" value="30"/>
        <add key="Channels" value="BBC1,BBC2,BBC3,BBC4,ITV1 Carlton Central,ITV2,ITV3,ITV4,Channel 4,E4,E4 +1,More4,More4 +1,Five,Five US,UKTV History,ABC1,Sky Three"/>
    </appSettings>
</configuration>

Should be fairly self explanatory.

I do get the odd crash, which i think is guide data related. But if there is enough interest i can put some logging code in and get to the bottom of it.



Anyway, let me know.

[cosmocat]

There may still be a problem here...
I have just checked and my EPG data is down to 6 days left.
I did a manual XMLTV download thismorning and checked the XML data recieved and the file still shows data from 29th March to 11th April, so it looks like the data hasn't been updated by radiotimes.com since it recovered from its outage.
Is anybody else seeing this from RadioTimes or is it just me ?

[tkgafs]

All working here too. Phew.

I did write my own XMLTV (radio times specific) grabber a while back.

If anyone is interested in looking at it, i'd be happy to put it up on the wiki (providing i can remember my username/password!). It's not exactly polished software, and it doesn't have a GUI of any kind. It's all controlled via the .config file. But i don't think it really needs a gui as it's run as a scheduled task.

I'd be interested in trying your code out

please post it to the wiki

thanks

Tkgafs