I’m still having a good time with MythTV here… The Knoppmyth box I’ve been running has been pretty-much rock-solid. My plan to consolidate MythTV onto the Asterisk server just got a healthy kick-along too, with an announcement that the bogus DViCO card I bought last year finally has Linux driver support. Bad news came a couple of days ago when the grabber I used for program guide info failed.
Firstly, a rant. Why the #@&*%$ should it be so hard to get TV guide data in electronic form? The holders of this info charge money for it, and have clamped-down in the past on those that distribute it freely (I daresay that the reason the grabber failed is that the mob that was making it available, who were doing so as their contribution to the Open Source community in return for basing their commercial product on FOSS, were told to stop). As far as I am concerned, Free-To-Air Television should be exactly that, free — I should not have to pay to find out what’s on and when. All that they are doing is forcing folks on to Bittorrent; by making it more inconvenient and less reliable for viewers to watch when they want (restricted guide data, shows that run over-time and push the schedule out), they ensure that viewers NEVER see their advertisers’ content.
Right, rant off.
So I noticed that I was getting errors from the nightly mythfilldatabase run. mythfilldatabase was running, but not adding any guide data. After the problems I’d had in the past with the tv_grab_au script and D1’s data (mysterious timezone shifts, missing data), I immediately thought the worst and renewed my search for an alternate grabber.
One of my work colleagues mentioned Shepherd a while ago, and Google regarded it highly, so I gave it a run. It seems to be an agreggator of a number of different grabber scripts that each pull data from a different resource, by the looks of things, it tries different grabbers (with a kind-of internal quality rating) and keeps going until it’s filled all the gaps in your guide data. Neat.
Of course migrating from D1’s data to the Shepherd data was painful, because they use different XMLTV IDs for the stations. Took me a number of channel scan/configure/mythfilldatabase cycles to get things straight, but it all seems to be good now.
Update: MythTV users at work mentioned that they lost some data for a few days, but it seems to be back. Oh well. 🙂
Crossed Wires 