My EPG-setting

[dero]

Hi folks,

I'd like to post how I get my EPG-data. This may be interesting or not to someone. But, when I was looking how to get EPG-data, I was searching and searching... So, I thought that I should share my way to get it.

At first, I tried the website-grabbers. But, I was rather unsatisfied with the result. So, I decided to buy a TV-Movie-ClickFinder abo.

I've got two TV-cards: One analog with cable tv and one DVB-T (Berlin). So, I had to solve the following problems:

1. Timesharing. Some channels (broadcaster) share the same service (frequency). Moreover, a channel may occur in more than one service, e.g. Ki.Ka appears in KI.KA / HSE24 and KI.KA / ZDFdokukanal.

2. One big XMLTV-import-file is bad for TVGuideScheduler since it blows up the entire XML-tree instead of parsing thru the file resulting in large memory demand.

I wrote a little JAVA-programme that does the following:

1. Run tvuptodate (TV-Movie-Clickfinder updater)
2. Run tvm2xml (Extract data from TV-Movie database to one large XMLTV-file)
3. Parse the XMLTV-file
3.1. Remap channels and consider timesharing and multiple occurrence
3.2. After each 1000 programmes, the data is flushed to an XMLTV-file which is imported using "TVGuideScheduler /FILE tvdatachunk.xml"

For parsing, I use the SAX-parser which does not blow up the entire XML-tree. So, it does not need much memory.

Open problems:

1. Setup the script to run overnight using PVR-scheduler.
2. Grab some channels that TV-Movie does not have from DVB-T EPG.
3. I have to investigate a little bit in this timezone thingy. Let's see what happens if we switch to summer time...

Regards

dero