Re: [TV] basic qusetion - ireland, listings, howto?

[Andrew Flegg <andrew@xxxxxxxx>]

In list.comp.tv, Ed wrote:
>
> Overengineered.  By this do you mean: "overengineered", or "doesn't work 
> for my needs"?

Slightly both, but the latter is why I'm not using it.

> I have no issue with the latter, but it's not really the same as 
> overengineered?
>
> XMLTV usually provides a whole ton of info that I don't think is 
> available from Bleb (stuff like actor info?)  I personally use all this 
> extra info in my web tv guide and hence prefer the radio times website 
> grabber.  The xmltv format tries to accomodate a wide variety of 
> formats, and not just stuff for UK channels, so I guess it's more flexible.

Agreed.

> But at the end of the day, it's XML based, and so it should in general 
> be easy-ish to to translate one format to another if the info is 
> actually there.

One of the things I think is wrong in the XMLTV format is trying to
contain several dimensions in one XML file - yes storing several days
and several channels is possible via XML, but it's not flexible. Given
there's no relationship between disparate channels, why combine them in
to one file?

> Also, I fail to see why the exact format makes a difference to you 
> generating your main pages?  Since it's basically static, surely you 
> just generate them once and store them?

No, for both storage reasons and flexibility reasons pages like:

    http://www.bleb.org/tv/channel.html?ch=bbc1&day=0

...are directly generated using a (customised) fast XML parser from:

    http://www.bleb.org/tv/data/listings/0/bbc1.xml

The biggest problem with XMLTV is, I think, it's success - mainly
because it's not stable yet. At only v0.6 with a new file format under
discussion, it's difficult to develop stable applications to an unstable
API.

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew@xxxxxxxx  |  http://www.bleb.org/