Zap2it Closing Down

[pbb]

Whurlston, 3 words for you - YOU DA MAN! Your Yahoo EPG plugin works great. Taking out the duplicated channel fixed my problem. Thanks for all your hard work.

[pcostanza]

Thanks for the info but it does seem like a canned response but a positive one as well. I don't see any place on the site to sign up yet but based on your email and the info on the site, I guess we can expect something at any moment. I'm all eyes!

[UncleJohnsBand]

Which reminds me, I need to send you info on some extra data that I include that is not actually part of the XMLTv specs. Look for a PM in the next day or two.

Great...sounds good.

[laserfan]

As for supporting SchedulesDirect. I'll most likely be using them personally and highly recommend others to do the same. Every other "solution" will really be just a patch/hack job with no guarantee that they won't break tomorrow, even my own.

Yeah I agree with this; even the Yahoo! solutions concern me as Yahoo! is having its own difficulties and who knows what tomorrow will bring for them.

AFAICT Zap2it underlies many, many EPG providers (do they provide for Tivo as well?) so schedulesdirect looks like a winner, provided the membership fee/monthly fees are reasonable. I haven't decided myself yet what "reasonable" is but I already pay $7.50/month for Tivo service and dunno that I want to double that... :confused:

[pcostanza]

Yeah I agree with this; even the Yahoo! solutions concern me as Yahoo! is having its own difficulties and who knows what tomorrow will bring for them.

AFAICT Zap2it underlies many, many EPG providers (do they provide for Tivo as well?) so schedulesdirect looks like a winner, provided the membership fee/monthly fees are reasonable. I haven't decided myself yet what "reasonable" is but I already pay $7.50/month for Tivo service and dunno that I want to double that... :confused:

Yeah, not sure what I want to pay as going from free to not free is something most don't want to do. However, GBVPR is free and I try to send money at least once a year.
I do know that I work with many people that have had PayPal troubles when paying via them and that may not play in their favor. Doesn't bother me but just another thought about it.

[bdgbill]

Yeah, not sure what I want to pay as going from free to not free is something most don't want to do. However, GBVPR is free and I try to send money at least once a year.
I do know that I work with many people that have had PayPal troubles when paying via them and that may not play in their favor. Doesn't bother me but just another thought about it.

Reliable EPG data is very valuable to me. After having a PVR for 2 years it has become a very neccesary piece of equipment. I rely on GBPVR too much to be futzing with downloading and installing new web scrapers everytime yahoo changes a font.

I hope this new service gets the support it needs to stay in business. Personally I hope they offer a "premium" service that goes beyond what Zap2it offered and includes cast, original air dates, repeats etc.

As far as Paypal security goes, the safest thing to do is pay for a year in advance rather than month to month and make sure your password is very complex! I have made hundreds of transactions with them over the years and never had an issue. When you read horror stories about paypal you have to remember that they have something like 30 miliion registered users.

[dinki]

I OWN a full copy of BeyondTv and am not using it now...

I own one too. I bought it way back when the program was known as Snapstream. I still have access to my program guide information at snapstream.net . Does anyone have a screen scraper or know of a way that I can download this guide data and use it with GBPvr?

[TomH]

I am getting the following URL (without "headend") when getting the Yahoo Listings

http://tv.yahoo.com/listings?starttime=1...der=818300

Does anyone recognize what I'm doing that's incorrect?

TIA,

[wtg]

I rely on GBPVR too much to be futzing with downloading and installing new web scrapers everytime yahoo changes a font.

Same thoughts here. Once the sites the web scrapers are hitting started getting the traffic of a full, no-other-free-service-available PVR community, they'd make changes to thwart the efforts because the traffic hit would just be too much.

$5/month is a small price to pay compared to the amount of time we'd spend trying to keep the hack-n-scrape solutions going.

[86atc250r]

The new schedules direct service sounds good to me. $15/3 months up front with a goal to lower it to $20/year sounds like a very small price to pay to not have to deal with screen scrapers, etc.