tv_grab_uk_tvguide - Grab TV listings for UK from the TVGuide website.
Contents
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 programme listings in XML format for the
channels you chose, for available days including today.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Name
tv_grab_uk_tvguide - Grab TV listings for UK from the TVGuide website.
Options
--configure Prompt for which channels to fetch the schedule for, and write the configuration file.
--config-fileFILE Set the name of the configuration file, the default is
~/.xmltv/tv_grab_uk_tvguide.conf. This is the file written by --configure and read when grabbing.
--guiOPTION Use this option to enable a graphical interface to be used. OPTION may be 'Tk'. Additional
allowed values of OPTION are 'Term' for normal terminal output (default)
and 'TermNoProgressBar' to disable the use of Term::ProgressBar. (May not work on Windows OS.)
--daysN Grab N days. The default is 5 days.
--offsetN Start N days in the future. The default is to start from today.
--nodetailspage Only fetch summary information for each programme.
(May be useful if you have problems accessing the tvguide website.) The details page has a better list
of actors, as well as director's names, and film classifications. NOTE: As at January 2022 it seems this
extra info is no longer present in the website, although it may be there for some channels(?). Therefore
you may find this option useful to significantly reduce your run time.
--legacychannels 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).
--outputFILE Write to FILE rather than standard output.
--quiet Suppress the progress messages normally written to the console.
--debug Provide more information on progress to standard error to help in debugging.
--list-channels Output a list (in xmltv format) of all channels that can be fetched.
--version Show the version of the grabber.
--usage Print a help message and exit.
See Also
xmltv(5). perl v5.34.0 2022-02-19 TV_GRAB_UK_TVGUIDE(1p)
Supported Channels
For information on supported channels, see http://tvguide.co.uk/Synopsis
tv_grab_uk_tvguide --usage
tv_grab_uk_tvguide --version
tv_grab_uk_tvguide --configure [--config-file FILE] [--gui OPTION]
tv_grab_uk_tvguide [--config-file FILE] [--output FILE] [--days N]
[--offset N] [--nodetailspage] [--legacychannels]
[--quiet] [--debug]
tv_grab_uk_tvguide --list-channels [--output FILE] [--debug]
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.
