NAME

tv_grab_uk_tvguide - Grab TV listings for UK from the TV Guide UK website.

DESCRIPTION

Output TV listings in XMLTV format for many channels available in UK. The data come from tvguide.co.uk

First you must run tv_grab_uk_tvguide --configure to choose which channels you want to receive.

Then running tv_grab_uk_tvguide with no arguments will get a listings in XML format for the channels you chose for available days including today.

OPTIONS

Please see tv_grab_uk_tvguide --help

Additional options may be specified on the commandline. use --nodetailspage to only fetch the main details of the programme schedule. (May be useful if you have problems accessing the tvguide website.) Channel ids were made compliant with the XMLTV specification in December 2020. Use --legacychannels to output channel ids in the previous format (i.e. number only).

INSTALLATION

The file tv_grab_uk_tvguide.map.conf has two purposes. Firstly you can map the channel ids used by the site into something more meaningful to your PVR. E.g.

      map==74==BBC 1

will change "74" to "BBC 1" in the output XML.

Note: the lines are of the form "map=={channel id}=={my name}".

The second purpose is to likewise translate genre names. So if your PVR doesn"t have a category for "Science Fiction" but uses "Sci-fi" instead, then you can specify

      cat==Science Fiction==Sci-fi

and the output XML will have "Sci-fi".

IMPORTANT: the downloaded "tv_grab_uk_tvguide.map.conf" contains example lines to illustrate the format - you should edit this file to suit your own purposes!

ERROR HANDLING

If the grabber fails to download data for some channel on a specific day, it will print an errormessage to STDERR and then continue with the other channels and days. The grabber will exit with a status code of 1 to indicate that the data is incomplete.

ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

The environment variable HOME can be set to change where configuration files are stored. All configuration is stored in $HOME/.xmltv/. On Windows, it might be necessary to set HOME to a path without spaces in it.

SUPPORTED CHANNELS

For information on supported channels, see http://tvguide.co.uk/

XMLTV VALIDATION

tv_validate_grabber may report an error similar to:

      "Line 5 Invalid channel-id BBC 1"

This is a because ValidateFile.pm insists the channel-id adheres to RFC2838 despite the xmltv.dtd only saying "preferably" not "SHOULD". (Having channel ids of the form "bbc1.bbc.co.uk" will be rejected by many PVRs since they require the data to match their own list.)

It may also report:

      "tv_sort failed on the concatenated data. Probably due to overlapping data between days."

Both these errors can be ignored.

DISCLAIMER

The TV Guide website"s license for these data does not allow non-personal use.

Certainly any commercial use of listings data obtained by using this grabber will breach copyright law, but if you are just using the data for your own personal use then you are probably fine.

By using this grabber you aver you are using the listings data for your own personal use only and you absolve the author(s) from any liability under copyright law or otherwise.

AUTHOR

Geoff Westcott. This documentation and parts of the code based on various other tv_grabbers from the XMLTV-project.