[mythtv-users] how could I provide program guide for users in China

[Clark Lee]

Hi, All,

I am not sure whether I should ask this question in user list or dev list.

I am living in Beijing, China, where XMLTV or any other program guide information is not directly available. Even the channel information need to be setup manually.
I managed to get the EPG of my digital cable TV weekly, i.e. every Monday morning. The information include:

program Title; subtitle; starttime; endtime; 

Now I use a perl script to fill these information into local mythconverg database directly. Not using the mythdatabasefill at all. This works for me. However, I would like to share the EPG to other mythTV users (title/subtitles in UTF-8 chinese, sorry if you can not read it). I am considering to set up a web host so that people can download EPG from there and get their program guide up to date.

My question: 
1) what's the best way to provide EPG; should I use XMLTV format (which I am not fimiliar); or just plain text files and perl script to insert them into database directly?
2) what's the definination of all the columns in program table? There are quite some that I guess should be useful but I don't know how to fill it. 

Thanks very much,

Clark