[mythtv] New TV Listings Service

Carmelo carmelo at ctpvr.com
Sun Sep 23 21:56:46 UTC 2007


Hi Bruce,

Thanks for your very detailed reply. I plan on reading it again just in case
I missed something they requires a reply. If you wanted to look at the
supplied xml data, this can all be done via a web browser. Just visit
http://cttvlistings.com where you can setup an account and download the
actual data. To try the different plans offered requires a license key since
that is what controls what data you get(i.e. Cast & Crew vs. No Cast & Crew
or Lite plan). If you want to try the different plans, let me know and I'll
send you the tree different types of keys.

Our service does not authenticates through tmsdatadirect.com since we run
our own server. We get the data from them and deliver it ourselves. The
authentication process is very similar to the Labs.Zap2it DD service. It
should be really simple to code for if you already have code that work with
Zap2it DD.

I think once you look at the data, We can help each other further.

Best Regards,
Carmelo


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Bruce Markey" <bjm at lvcm.com>
To: "Carmelo" <carmelo at ctpvr.com>; "Development of mythtv"
<mythtv-dev at mythtv.org>
Sent: Sunday, September 23, 2007 5:08 PM
Subject: Re: [mythtv] New TV Listings Service


> Carmelo wrote:
> ...
> > I am the developer of CTpvr and we have created a new service that
> > allows access to TV Listings similar to the Labs.Zap2it DD data. Now
> > that we have finalizing our agreement with TMS, we felt the timing is
> > right to reach out to software products that could benefit from this
> > service. Outside of high quality data and fast delivery, Our prices
> > should make your U.S. users quite happy. The data will be available with
> > Cast/Crew or without and Listings Lite.
> >
> > We are communicating with many projects to ask about adding direct
> > download support to our service. Please let us know if you're interested
> > in including support for CT TV Listings in to MythTV?.
>
> Thank you for your efforts in creating your service. I have
> been working on MythTV for several years now and as I'm sure
> you can imagine, the issue of acquiring TV listings has always
> been a much misunderstood issue hotly debated with very loud
> opinion of those who misunderstand.
>
> I'm sure you also know that users of MythTV, like users of other
> applications, recently experienced first hand the perils of
> relying on a single source with unknown motives and shifting
> management and policies. One might have thought that the common
> wisdom would be to avoid a recurrence of this same sort of single
> point of failure but there are many who seem to welcome jumping
> out of the pan and into the fire. I would hope that you and
> others can supply a reliable service for users of MythTV.
>
> From what little I know about your service, it appears that you
> offer windows software for configuration and can deliver data in
> XMLTV format. I would have tested this by now but I cannot. I
> have no windows machines and do not intend to set one up to test
> your service. As MythTV is linux based, there would either need
> to be a linux client or web based client in order to make the
> largest number of MythTV users available to you as potential
> customers.
>
> The myth suite includes an app "mythfilldatabase" to import listings
> data into our MySQL database to be used by other myth* programs.
> This can already accept an XMLTV file as an arg or even a file
> in the native DataDirect format so properly formatted data from
> your service could be used right away. If your service authenticates
> through tmsdatadirect.com to grab native DataDirect bundles then
> we should be able to add this as a native grabber for mfdb to make
> the grab directly rather than grabbing a file then feeding it to
> mfdb.
>
> Data excluding Cast/Crew should work just as well for MythTV with
> the exception, of course, for "People Search". I'd be curious to
> see what is actually included in Listings Lite. I've worked on
> scheduling features for myth for several years and was recently
> forced to consider the relative value of different pieces of data
> for scheduling purposes in MythTV. I can send this breakdown to
> you in a separate message. However, one field is particularly
> important for myth scheduling and can make or break the usefulness
> of your service to myth users. This is the TMS per episode row
> identifier "programid". The current XMLTV format stores this in
> "episode-num" as the attribute "dd_progid". If this is not provided
> we can still match episodes based on the subtitles and descriptions
> but this is less accurate and would put listings from a source
> without this data at a distinct disadvantage.
>
> --  bjm
>
>
>



More information about the mythtv-dev mailing list