[mythtv-users] Import and Export of Program Listing Data

Dean Harding dean.harding at dload.com.au
Thu Sep 6 06:33:59 UTC 2007


> Hi Dean from Down Under!  I hope you don't mind to much, I hijacked
> your comment and re-titled it with the discussion that might be more
> on topic now?

Not at all!

> > The other is http://minnie.tuhs.org/twiki/bin/view/TVGuide/ which is a
> > community-run source of data. Basically, people collect the data
manually
> > and upload it. You need to sign up for an account, but it's free. The
data
> > is free of copyright because people are entering it manually
(presumably...)
> 
> Presumably.  Hehehehe, ok.  I'll by that for a dime if you throw in
> two nickels for the price.
> 
> But more importantly, it works, and hasn't been hit with legal action?

It does work (and it works quite well, in my opinion). There has been no
legal action against this site in particular, and from my understanding of
the law (in Australia) there is nothing *inherently* illegal with it. But
the laws may be different in the U.S.

>  I thought I read about some data source in Australia recently beating
> some legal action, but I didn't pay much attention then, did that have
> to do with this project?

I believe that legal action may have been to do with the commercial IceTV
project. Channel Nine (one of the "big three" media companies here) tried to
sue them for redistributing their EPG. I believe IceTV won that one in the
end. See: http://www.icetv.com.au/news/?p=44

> Now, all those scripts your talking about, did that have to do with
> this Sheppard project?  Or is that something else?

Mostly they were just collections of scripts, developed in a relatively
adhoc manner. However, I just don't see how web scrapers could be made to
scale. It takes only a little bit of effort on the part of the website to
change the HTML it spits out and your scraper has to be modified to fix it
-- it's an arms race.

> And, my final question is, how do you use this data in Myth?  

The minnie.tuhs.org site is designed specifically for PVRs and so they
provide an XMLTV data source. I just have a simple python script in
/usr/local/bin/tv_grab_au and mythfilldatabase works automatically. Because
it's community run, they've "only" got data a few days in advance, but
that's perfect for MythTV -- it can do all it's fancy scheduling with no
problems.

Dean.




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