[mythtv-users] Australians: can you help me gather some data?

Max Barry mythtv at maxbarry.com
Thu Nov 14 22:36:32 UTC 2013


Hi Xander! I'm a Shepherd dev.

Is this Freeview EPG via DVB exactly the same as this:

http://www.freeview.com.au/tvguide/

... or are there some differences? Does the version available over DVB
offer more up-to-date schedule changes or something?

EIT data seems to be updated more frequently than any web-based data
source at the moment, but, as you say, it still has fairly serious data
quality issues.

Xander wrote:
> Anthony Giggins wrote:
>>You could work the other way and intergrate this EIT Data into shepherd, as they already provide a framework to augment the data they receive
>> from various online sources.
> Perhaps, but as far as I know shepherd will refuse to run again if it has been successful recently.

Shepherd refreshes the current day's data once every four hours, and
everything else daily. It doesn't do it more often because the data
sources don't seem to include last-minute schedule changes anyway. But
it could, if there was a reliable source making that data available.

Xander wrote:
> Yet to do:
> * use EIT to further augment the data
> * add internet db scraping to get better descriptions, etc
> * add config file stuff 

These are kind of enormous TODOs, just FYI. For example, if you want to
blend EIT data and Freeview data, you need to handle the fact that two
sources don't always call a show the exact same name. (In fact, that's
an issue anyway: what if a datasource contains a typo one week? Can you
correct it, or does everyone miss their show?) Scraping the net for
augmented data: that's okay until the data source changes format and
breaks your scraper, which happens from time to time. Also you have to
deal with multiple shows sharing the same name and typos again. Config
file stuff: Almost all reported Shepherd problems are related to
configuration and integration with MythTV, because everyone's setup is
different in subtle ways.

I'm not saying you shouldn't go ahead with these; you can probably
improve on a lot of what we did. But they are areas you can get working
95% right fairly easily and spend the rest of your life working on the
last 5%. So fair warning.

The benefit of working within Shepherd is you wouldn't have to worry
about all the fringe stuff, like dealing with name inconsistencies, how
you push an update to users, augmenting with richer data, what happens
when a data source goes down, configuration & MythTV integration,
regional channel differences, etc. You can just write a component that
does one job.

There has been talk about integrating an EIT grabber into Shepherd for a
while, but the data has never been reliable enough to warrant it. That
is, when EIT says a show is on at time X... well, sometimes it is and
sometimes it isn't. If we're changing a user's EPG at the last moment,
we need to know it's right.

Max.


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