[mythtv-users] Supporting schedulesdirect.org
Don Smith
dcsmith at gmail.com
Wed Aug 8 18:02:28 UTC 2007
Why has nobody looked at getting the data out of the vbi? Also why
doesn't mythtv set system time with the rds data?
Don Smith
On Wed, 2007-08-08 at 10:52 -0700, Chris Petersen wrote:
> Kai Holthaus wrote:
> > The *data* IS free.
>
> Some is. But good luck getting it.
>
> When this whole thing started, I figured I would try to get a data feed
> from a couple of my local TV stations, since I thought it would be nice
> to augment (and eventually replace) the TMS data. Only one replied to
> me, and they sent me their "feed" which consisted of an xls file that
> was hand-entered by someone each week. There were no multi-line cells
> (e.g, "Morning News" was broken up into two cells so it could fit on two
> lines). There was no episode name info, just the show title.
>
> When I wrote back asking about how I'd get the full info for what's on
> the website, they said that they had no control over that and subscribed
> to a service (surprise, it's provided by TitanTV). When I asked about
> the data they send out in the EDI feed, they told me that the station's
> parent company paid some other service to put it into the broadcast
> stream (who I assume gets it from TMS/GemStar). In the end, I was told
> to go to TMS if I wanted the data, because the station couldn't give it
> to me themselves (because they didn't have it).
>
> The end result of this loop is basically:
>
> * Some department at the local affiliate has the original data, and
> sends it to TMS/GemStar (but no one seems to know who these people
> are)
> * Every other department at the TV station seems to get *their* version
> of the data from TMS and/or GemStar, usually in a roundabout way,
> rather from the station itself.
>
> TMS also provides some extra info that really helps MythTV scheduling,
> particularly the programid/seriesid fields. You will never get unique
> identifier fields like these from screen scraping. With TMS data,
> you're paying for the value-add, which (like Kai said) is all of the
> work that they've gone through to collect, organize, standardize and
> enhance the "factual" data that they collect from the TV stations
> themselves.
>
> -Chris
>
> P.S. I still have hopes of working directly with TV networks for data
> feeds, but I doubt it will ever happen (there are just too many of them).
>
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