[mythtv-users] Zap2It Labs, Google, Write them!

David Brodbeck gull at gull.us
Fri Jun 22 19:35:04 UTC 2007


On Jun 22, 2007, at 12:27 PM, jedi at mishnet.org wrote:
>> The problem is that (apparently) there is no longer a public listings
>> source online that provides show descriptions in an easily-accessible
>> format.  You'd be pulling down web pages for days.
>
>     The nice thing about doing it myself is I can account for that
> in a manner that meets my own requirements and reflects the tradeoffs
> that I am personally willing to make.

Just to put in my $0.02:

I don't particularly care about the episode descriptions.  As often  
as not they're boilerplate anyway, in the Zap2It feed.  I care about  
the title, the start and stop time, and in an ideal world the episode  
number (for duplicate detection).  I suspect a lot of users feel the  
same way.  I wouldn't get hung up too much on whether descriptions or  
summaries are available.

Even broken duplicate detection would be only a minor annoyance at  
this point.  The quality of Zap2It's data in this area has declined a  
lot lately, so I'm used to deleting the duplicates manually.  For  
example, every rerun of The Daily Show now has the same description  
and no episode number data.



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