[mythtv-users] FYI: XMLTV patch for SciFi+1 listings in UK

Nick Morrott knowledgejunkie at gmail.com
Fri Apr 20 00:06:36 UTC 2007


On 19/04/07, David <myth at dgreaves.com> wrote:
> Michael T. Dean wrote:
> > On 04/19/2007 05:06 AM, Robert Longbottom wrote:
> >> I'm assuming that you are just taking the normal listings and adding an
> >> hour - HOWEVER, I think you should be a bit careful with this, because
> >> I've noticed a few times on (eg ITV+1 type channels) a screen saying "we
> >> cannot re-broadcast this program for legal reasons".  It would be quite
> >> annoying if MythTV noticed it was on an hour later on the +1 channel and
> >> rescheduled for some reason, but all you got was a recording of their
> >> legal blurb screen!
> >
> > Negative priority on that channel?
>
> Good point, good answer :)
>
> I wonder about commenting it out in the channel_ids for the rt feed?
> Then people won't assume it's a 'normal' channel.
> But I think it would be better to document it in XMLTV and maybe even suggest
> that fix for Myth.

One obvious way to denote the difference between the 'real' +1
channels provided by the Radio Times uk_rt feed, and the new
timeshifted channel feature that this patch introduces, would be using
a slightly modified XMLTV ID. This way all channels could be left 'as
is' in the channel_ids file, but it would be (hopefully) obvious to
users which is a 'real' Radio Times +1 listing, and which is an n-hour
timeshifted regular listing. The downside is that if, in the future,
the Radio Times start providing data for the manually timeshifted
channels, and the user wants to starting using these listings in
preference, the channel's XMLTV ID would need changing.

I like the idea of using this patch to accommodate +1 channels because
it allows faster listings retrieval and puts less load on the Radio
Times' server, which is clearly a good thing, especially as the number
of timeshifted channels left set to continue increasing.

> PS I did actually check with my wife and she was happy that it would work almost
> all the time.

I think the occasions when a timeshifted channel cannot rebroadcast
content due to legal reasons is in the very small minority (at least
in my experience with ntl/VirginMedia), so a feature that works nearly
all of the time is clearly worthwhile.

There's also the chance that listings change and the early-morning
generated uk_rt data does not reflect this, which will also result in
erroneous recordings when using the regular, untouched data.

Nick
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