UK TV listings

[jeffcora]

phuturetech,

Thanks, but I do want the summary detail, but not all the other stuff such as the cast etc, which --slow captures. Running it without --slow still takes 6601s and accesses 1744 web pages, which is a bit much to do every day.

Rob

[welshblob]

jeffcora,
Sorry mate I might have been a bit missleading when I said I use xmltv. I had heard of it a while back when I was looking to hack my Tivo, but never got round to doing that. I have used it with GBPVR but only really to play with and then I only had 5 channels configured and grabbed a couple of days worth of listings. I think there are only two options to the detail of data you can grab, relatively quick programme title and timings grab and then the much slower --slow option which gets the details. This very much due to the source of the data, the RT website for the UK, which shows the brief listings as programme titles and timings with the details requiring an extra page grab per programme. I think the original web source for UK tv listings used to be Ananova which would present a complete days worth of listings for a channel including the descriptions. Thus it was much quicker to grab all this which would require 1 web page grab rather than 10 - 15 which is what we have now. But Ananova reduced the number of days in their guide and have now completely removed it unfortunately.

Quote "Is it possible for example to do one large capture to start off, then using the --offset option just capture 1 day and add it to the end of the existing file, so you always have X days of data, but only download 1 day, every day?"

I guess it would be but haven't looked closely at this yet. However when I was trying to write my own listings grabber for my Tivo before xmltv did 14 days I found that I also needed to think about listings that had changed. I was using http://www.onthebox.com which would display brief information for a days worth of listings for 5 channels. I worked out that to keep the time to grab to a minimum for the amount of detail I wanted to the accuracy I needed I would have to do this.
1. Initially start with a large slow capture and build up the original file.
2. On a daily basis
a) Purge data older than the current day from the list.
b) Do a quick basic grab shifting the grab window to include the next day at the end of the listings.
c) Do a comparision between the original data and this new data updating the list where schedules have changed and flag those programmes which need their details grabbing.
d) Then grab the details for those programmes that have been flagged and add that information to the list.

The next complication is how to get this data and the changes into the application you want without losing recording flags.

Oh and my other idea to speed things up was to put it on a box in work where they have a rather large internet pipe :-).

Think I'll have a look at the GrabEPG you mentioned.

Sorry I can't be of more help.

Cheers
Rob

[jeffcora]

Hi Rob,

Thanks for the response. It's a shame you're not using XMLTV, I was hoping that someone knew how to really tweak it to speed it up, but I think it's as good as it's gonna get. It certainly seems to have more information than most, and I had thought about doing comparisions of the data etc to account for changes, but it starts to get more hassle than it's worth. Think I'll stick to using Sky's EPG for the time being for the complete listings.

Yer, check GrabEPG out (url in posting from alancs). It's real easy to set up, and takes probably less than 1 minute to capture all the channels available, for 7 days including all the summary stuff. Shame the number of channels is a bit lacking and the data isn't always complete.

Once it's configured just set up a scheduled task to run every day using:

<Path>\GrabEPG.exe -fetch -log

and point GBPVR configurator to the xml file. That's it.

Cheers, Rob

[welshblob]

Hi Rob,

I've tried the link for GrabEPG but its broken. Not sure if thats something to do the changes sub has made to the forums this week. Do you have a working link anywhere?

Yeah I'm not surprised GrabEPG works alot quicker as the guy that runs bleb has done all the web scraping for us. Shame somebody doesn't do the same for the xml tv data however I expect you'd get into problems with redistributing somebody elses data and not keeping it for private use. Not sure how the bleb guy gets around this although I think he used multiple sources and normally the main providers web sites.

By far the best guide I've seen is digiguide and for only £6 or £7 a year its a bargain. However they keep stating that they provide a service and not data and so you're locked into their interface and can only export a limited subset of it. Think they pay for their data too so you can understand the constraints they're under. Also think they are getting into the PVR market with their own software at some point so expect it to be heaviliy integrated with their tv guide.

If I find any ways of making xml tv quicker then I'll post them back to the forum.

Cheers
Rob

[jeffcora]

Here you go Rob, link for GrabEPG

http://www.rubiconsystems.com/tv/

[Guest]

Hi,

I am trying to use the grabepg software mentioned above, but cannot get it to work,

I always get an error message incomplete zip file

and if I rerun the software after this i get the message i/o error 32

does anyone know what the problem might be

tkgafs

[jeffcora]

Sometimes there are problems with the data from bleb.org that prevent it from running (had to take Paramount out yesterday), but I've just done a grab of all channels, all days and it worked fine.

Take you you are running the GUI (grabepg.exe) and selecting 'Fetch' from there, rather than from a command line? (just incase the switches you are using are wrong) Does it download an xmltv.zip file into the same directory? If so, is there a log.tmp file in there, that may give you an idea.

[tkgafs]

I have tried both the gui and the command line

from the command line I have tried grabepg -fetch -log

it says it is creating a log file but the file is always empty

I am behind a firewall which requires me to set up a proxy to access the internet, is there an option in this product to allow me to configure my proxy server and port number

tkgafs

[Paul Mc]

Hi tkgafs, sorry I've only just picked up on your problem. Please can you send me your email address and I'll send you an updated copy of GrabEPG to test with your proxy.

Regards,
Paul Mc
paul@rubiconsystems.com

[tkgafs]

I'm pretty sure it is a proxy problem as if I bypass my firewall and proxy / content filter everything works perfectly

tkgafs