[mythtv-users] Telly's Free Program Guide

Dwight Hubbard (dhubbard) dhubbard at dwightandamy.com
Thu Jul 17 18:36:10 EDT 2003


I don't know, I've had my PPP start script OCRing an image of my secureid
card before and the resolution of the camera is nowhere near 150dpi.

Not to mention the resulting image captured should have no rotation and
the positioning should be close enough to actually grab individual letters
off the capture.  I'm thinking a variation of the OCR used for handwriting
recognition by handhelds like the zaurus could OCR the characters then.

BTW, I'm not talking about using a digital cable card, I'm talking about
doing a video capture of the TV guide screen of my Dishnetwork 301 sat-tv
box connected to my bttv card.  I will have to check how far out the
listings on it go, but I think it does normally have more than a days
listings.  But then even a days listings would be plenty if you primarily
use the mythtv box to record all showings of a particular program.

It would be really nice if the listing data was sent as VBI but as far as
I can tell that doesn't happen where I am :-(

>> I'm thinking something along the lines of mythtv releasing the video
>> device and running an external script when it is not recording.  The
>> external script could tune to the channel with the listings, grab a
>> video
>> capture of the guide screen, ocr, parse the information, insert into
>> database, have the cable box move to the next page, repeat.
>
> Other than the absurdity of this (have you ever actually USED an ocr?
> the good ones need 150+ dpi scans, and are marginal at best for
> recognizing text.  Or the fact that you can't decode a digital cable
> signal on any computer tv card yet), this sort of defeats the purpose of
> having weeks-in-advance program listings.  Program listings would be
> kind of silly if you only got them a few hours (or even a day) in
> advance.



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