Custom Parsing of EPG Data (dvb, xmltv, etc.) (1 Viewer)

[orencha]

Hi,

My EPG providers (both XMLTV and DVB-T EPG) put additional metadata in the program name, such as: classification, re-run, subtitle languages etc. They also put some other information, such as the episode name & number, inside the description.

Is there a way to customize parsing of the EPG data, to put the information in the right place, and strip unneeded information from the title?

I can think of several ways:

1. External script, that recieves the EPG data for a single program (name, description etc) and returns organized data in either XML or Key-Value-Pair format. This can be very customizable, but very low on performance (an external script instance should run for each program).
2. External script, that receives DVB-EPG information for all programs from tv-server, in XML-TV format. An external script can then be used to parse the entire file and put every piece of information in the right place. The script can then output another XMLTV file, that will be grabbed by the XMLTV plugin.
3. Use an SQL stored procedure (SP) to insert the program into the EPG. The SP will receive the program title and description as input parameters, and will insert the information into the "Programs" table. A default SP can simply insert the program "AS IS", but users can customize this SP for their needs. This should be easy in MS-SQL and have good performance, but I'm not sure if it's possible with MySQL as I've not used it before (I did however notice that SPs are not used in TV-Server at all).
4. Write a generic, customizable EPG parser inside TV-SERVER. Users may be able to parse the EPG data using "Search and Replace" Regular Expressions.

What do you think?
Are other users having problems with the input format of the EPG data?
I beleive XMLTV input is more customizable, but what about DVB-EPG?