[mythtv-users] Alternatives to DataDirect?

Michael T. Dean mtdean at thirdcontact.com
Mon Feb 13 22:47:33 UTC 2006


On 02/13/2006 05:32 PM, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 13, 2006 at 02:15:29PM -0800, John Biundo wrote:
>   
>> I'm hoping some of the "old timers" around here might take a minute or 
>> two to explain the possibilities.  If zap2it chooses NOT to restore a 
>> full 2 weeks worth of listings, where can we go for alternative sources? 
>>   What's involved?  What are the limitations (i.e., do we lose some 
>> program detail, etc.?)

Yes.  DataDirect has much better descriptions, and provides much more 
data than the old "tv_grab_na" script used to pull from Zap2It's HTML 
pages (because the pages didn't contain all the information).  Also, for 
those who have a couple years of DD data in the database, all previously 
recorded shows would likely be "new again" because the descriptions 
would not match.  Personally, I'm willing to be patient--after all, I've 
gotten great data from DD for about 2 years now and they've said they're 
working on a solution...

>>   In short, now nasty is this alternative?
>>     
very nasty--especially when you factor in XMLTV's promise to stop screen 
scraping TMS's websites in exchange for DataDirect.

> Well, to recap, that usually only affects you if you have an empty
> database; you *customarily* only grab two days of data per run:
> tomorrow, and 2 weeks from now (the first new day you don't have).
>
> So it's really only a problem if you're starting up

Or, for everyone if the temporary scale-back lasts longer than 8-10 days 
or so (we've been getting about 11-13 days total, and you'll notice when 
mfdb tries to pull day @ offset 11 or more, you actually get day @offset 
3.  They didn't scale back the number of days you could pull, but the 
number of days they make available.

Mike


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