[mythtv-users] looks like ananova pulled the plug on tv_grab_uk

[Paul Woodward]

It's provided by digiguide, so has ramifications discussed earlier, but it does seem very complete (even has categories). It also goes up till 5th Feb which is about 2 weeks. I've never written a parser, but the page looks clean enough, e.g.:

<td width="95%" valign="top" align="left"><p class="wbl"><span class="bold">Gardens Unplugged</span><span class="catname"> (Gardening)</span><br>Simon Harrison-Knibbs and Ryan Durrant have advice on how to create the perfect garden. The duo build a spacious patio in the back garden of a house in Wandsworth.</p></td></tr>

I think it has potential unless they:
a) mess with the feeds to reformat it at random (like yahoo do with stocks pages)
b) detect if you are trawling their site (i.e. multiple hits in quick succession from same ip/browser, use of cookies etc.). We might be able to mitigate this by sending different headers, spacing out the requests, only getting one day's listings at a time etc.

Anyone know enough to give it a try?

Paul

> Hi all,
> 
> I don't know if anyones mentioned this but IMDB has a pretty clean web based TV guide at http://uk.imdb.com/uktv. I'm not a programmer so I don't know how hard it would be but it certainly looks alot easier to navigate than the Radio Times site. Seems to have most channels too.
> 
> Kevin.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Joshua Pollak [mailto:pardsbane at offthehill.org]
> Sent: 23 January 2004 16:12
> To: Discussion about mythtv
> Subject: Re: [mythtv-users] looks like ananova pulled the plug on
> tv_grab_uk
> 
> 
> Here's an idea no one has mentioned yet: What about a project to
> manually collect and keep this data up to date? The data could be
> maintained by volunteers, who perhaps volunteer to handle manually
> enter one day of one channel each time its their turn. A website could
> be setup to assign users to days/channels, and email them a week in
> advance. If enough volunteers sign up, you might not have enter the
> data very often at all.
> 
> The advantage of this is that people could get the data from any source
> they want, the paper, TV Guide, whatever. It also has the possibility
> of letting people add more detail than would normally appear, say user
> ratings, reviews, etc.
> 
> Once a show/episode is entered in the database, it wouldn't be hard to
> just select it from a pull down, so future showings wouldn't require
> duplicate typing.
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> 
> On Jan 23, 2004, at 3:25 AM, Malc wrote:
> 
> > I also bumped into http://www.onthebox.com/ seems to html only, but
> > has a wider range of channels than beeb.
> >
> > Happy to help test (My perl is not that strong)  any listings sites we  > choose to use
> >
> > -malc-
> >
> >
> > Mark Cooper wrote:
> >
> >> Just come across http://www.bleb.org/tv2/ which seems to be providing  >> UK listings in XML format...
> >>
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> --
> Bush/Cheney '04:
> Compassionate Colonialism.
> 
> 
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