[mythtv-users] Our Only Option is Schedule Direct?

[Larry Sanderson]

Craig Partin wrote:
> On 9/17/07, Larry Sanderson <larry.sanderson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> Is our only option to "Pay/Subscribe" to schedule direct.  If so, it
>> >> looks like switching to comcast's DVR is a "now" worthwhile
>> >>
>> >> Am I the only one who is upset about having to pay a monthly fee now
>> >> to use Myth?  Why is it that every time something worthwhile in the
>> >> opensource community somehow ends up being forced into a commercial
>> >> enterprise.  Maybe we could look into how Jbidwatcher gathers it's
>> >> auction data., by scraping it from the source servers.  It's not
>> >> particularly efficient or elegant, but programming data doesn't need
>> >> to be updated very frequently.  We could still use zap2it, just write
>> >> a scrapper.  Any thoughts?
>>
>> This is a good idea - I'm surprised it hasn't been brought up before.
>>
>
> Searching is free.

As is sarcasm.

Craig: bottom line is that none of the devs want to deal with the mess
(both legal and coding) needed to implement screen scraping, but they are
happy to accept contributions for (legal) alternatives to SD.

If you only have a handful of shows you watch, then a reasonable
alternative is to just look up the times on one of the free sources of
channel data and program MythTV manually.

I personally would like to see something like a peer-to-peer listings
framework set up.  It would rely on volunteers to populate the weekly
shows for the major networks, and then on local volunteers to set up
episode mathups and modifications for local affiliates.  I really haven't
thought it through much, but as someone mentioned in another response,
this is probably best discussed on the XMLTV list.