zen.org Communal Weblog

After some crazy effort, I can now visit the URL

	http://p/program_listing.php

and it correctly lists the shows on tonight on both RTE1 and TV3, the two channels I’ve added. It turns out all attempts to use ‘tv_grab_uk_rt’ as included in the KnoppMyth R4V4 that I installed are going to fail. I came upon notes both on the MythTV Users list and the XMLTV site. It turns out radiotimes.com, the site used by the perl script to get airing information, started to block the User-Agent that the script was using to identifying itself. But they were really cool—instead, the’ve put the information for the next two weeks available in raw XML format.

So I had to download the newer XML 0.5.35 from the XMLTV SourceForge page. I built it by doing

	  tar jxf xmltv-0.5.35.tar.bz2
	  make Makefile.PL
	  make
	  make test          (this does tons of them)
	  make install

Following the examples on those mailing list sites, I ran

	tv_grab_uk_rt --configure

and then invoked

	tv_grab_uk_rt

That seemed to be getting useful information finally, so I invoked my old friend

	mythfilldatabase

but it gave me errors of the form

	Updating icons for sourceid: 1
	Unknown xmltv channel identifier: rte-1.rte.ie
	Skipping channel.
	Unknown xmltv channel identifier: tv3.ie
	Skipping channel.

How odd. Some more reading, and I discovered my mistake—if you look at the channels.dat file that radiotimes.com gives the script, you can see that they’ve changed the format from what it used to offer. Instead of just “231:RTE-1” it now says

	rte-1.rte.ie:231:RTE-1

In the mythtv-setup Channel Editor, I’d thought I was so clever figuring out that I had to put 231 in the ‘XMLTV ID’ field for RTE1. Those identifier errors above helped me realize that it was searching based on the first field in that file, so now the ‘XMLTV ID’ should be the server name, like rte-1.rte.ie for RTE1. Fine, I fixed both RTE1 and TV3.

Some more swimming with Google and I found a discussion talking about exactly this problem. I went into the Channel Editor, and for both RTE1 and TV3 I changed the “Channel Number” and “Frequency ID” entries to be A11 for RTE1 and A9 for TV3 (based on what was in the pal-ireland file I mentioned earlier). The fundamental change being made with this was that my channel number of “1” for RTE1 and “3” for TV3 seem really wrong after reading all of these sites, including this most recent discussion page.

Having the frequency entry in both fields may be correct, but there’s no obvious change yet. I just tried looking at either channel, and they’re both snowy and hard to see. Though I’ll admit the RTE1 channel has more color and movement on it compared to the grey/white mess that was there before. TV3 looks the same as it did.

Wonder what I’m missing? That’s all right—the fact that it’s getting the show information is a big positive step for only a little amount of effort today.