[mythtv] Listings concept idea

[Tony Maro]

I've read over the posts regarding grabbing listings, and I understand some
things are "under way" perhaps, however I had an epiphany and wondered if
anyone had thought of this...

Why in the world would we want to download every listing for every channel
available.  What a huge waste of bandwidth that is!  99.9% of those
downloads go completely wasted.  Personally I don't use Myth to watch live
TV though I know some people do.  Even so, I don't care what's on 90% of the
channels, and I don't care what's on any channel 90% of the time.  What I do
want is for my chosen programs to record.

For instance, say I have scheduled 15 series to record on various repeat
cycles.  Why would I not download just the upcoming listings for those
programs automatically?  For someone browsing the listings, the on-screen
listings display would download listings from the Internet as you browse it,
just like your digital cable box does.  It could cache that data as you view
it.  Each night the auto-updates would run a search for each title you've
scheduled to record and update those listings in the database individually.

For a web scraper, it would reduce the number of downloads which would
greatly reduce the impact on the web host.  For an XML service replacement
for Zap2it, it reduces the host bandwidth needs and the worst case scenario
is a slight delay when viewing the scheduler for all channels.

Our current process is like having Google Maps download every street for
every country in the world, instead of just the area you care about.  Okay
that's an exaggeration, but you get my point.
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