[mythtv-users] Schedules Direct change - everyone please take a deep breath.

[Robert Kulagowski]

There's been a lot of speculation regarding the migration from the old
XML service to the JSON service, primarily around the actual mechanics
of the new grabber.

- The existing grabber is beta and is written in PHP because that's
what I'm comfortable with. I don't have C++ experience and didn't want
to write it in perl. As I understand it, the MythTV developers don't
want specific code that is only used by DataDirect in mythfilldatabase
anyway.
- A lot of the "Delete all of your sources" panic may not be
necessary. During the beta process it's much easier for me to debug
things if I don't have to deal with an existing database, which is why
I've been asking the testers to "start from scratch". Some beta users
have dedicated dev systems, some do not. By creating new videosources
it offers a way to continue to run classic mythfilldatabase. This
probably won't be required in the future.
- ProgramIDs will stay the same.
- Call signs will stay the same, so if you have a rule that looks for
a particular station, you'll be OK.
- A lot of the code in the "sd-utility.php" script is just glue to
make the grabber work. Yes, it has a lot of overlap with what's done
in mythtv-setup, but as I said earlier, I don't have C++ experience
and don't have the cycles to update mythtv-setup, and I'm not sure if
the web-based mythtv-setup replacement is functionally complete yet.
- The sd-utility program asks you to manually add the lineups that
you're interested in. This is so that the beta testers can load
lineups outside of the U.S. and Canada for testing and
troubleshooting.
- The API version that's under development is API 20140530. I have
updated the README in master to point to the README for 20140530; if
you'd like to participate then that's the version to use.

So, if you're a developer, please go to
http://forums.schedulesdirect.org/viewforum.php?f=8

If you're a user and would like to participate in the beta, please
send an email to grabber at schedulesdirect.org

If you're a user and would like to discuss this further, please go to
http://forums.schedulesdirect.org/viewforum.php?f=7

so that we keep the noise down this mailing list.

Thanks.