[mythtv-users] OT - Making an XMLTV Server

[Mattias Holmlund]

On Thu, 17 Mar 2005 03:49:57 +0800, Nathan Manzi <plasma at synaptik.com.au> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm interested in making a XMLTV server for Australia, that provides
> real TV listings for Australia. I've had troubles with D1's XMLTV
> server, and they also don't have DTV listings for WA (And some other
> states.)
> 
> What programs/info should I look at to get started?

Hi,

I have setup such a service for Sweden together with Oscar Carlsson
and Fredrik Högberg. I didn't find any existing software package to do
this, so I chose to write everything from scratch. We now have a
grabber that is part of the xmltv package (tv_grab_se_swedb) and a
website that provides the data for the grabber.

The most important thing you have to do is to make sure that you have
access to data and permission to redistribute it. Fredrik has secured
permissions by talking directly to each TV-company and asked for
access to their press-services. This has been a lot of work for him,
but he has been successful eventually. We now have data for all major
channels in Sweden (nine different TV-companies right now). I can
imagine that you will have a lot of work to do in Australia...

I have then written import-routines for the data from the
TV-companies. The data comes in various formats, including XML, HTML,
comma-separated text and MS Word-files. The data is sometimes less
than perfect, so getting start-times, end-times, character encodings,
categories etc correct takes a lot of work. I import the data into a
common MySQL database using a set of perl-scripts. I then export the
data into gzipped xml-files, with one file per day and channel and
upload the data to http://tv.swedb.se/xmltv/.

If I haven't scared you off now, feel free to contact me and I will
gladly share my perl-code with you or provide advice. The code is not
available right now, simply because noone has asked for it, but if you
want it I will publish it for you.

Lastly, the xmltv-devel mailing list is a good place to discuss this:

http://membled.com/work/apps/xmltv/

/Mattias
 
> 
> Thanks,
> Nathan Manzi
> 
> 
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