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<h2 class="center">Configuring tvtime for displaying XMLTV listings</h2>
<h4 class="center"><a href="http://www.billybiggs.com/">Billy Biggs</a> and
<a href="mailto:jforman_at_austin.rr.com">Jeffrey Forman</a>, 21 Sep 2003</h4>
<p><a href="http://membled.com/work/apps/xmltv/">XMLTV</a> is an
excellent application for downloading episode guide information and
storing it in a standardized file format. As of tvtime version 0.9.10,
we support display of show title, sub-title, times and description on
the OSD. This document describes how to configure and run XMLTV for
use with tvtime.</p>
<div class="center">
<img src="xmltvshot.jpg" alt="XMLTV listings screenshot">
</div>
<h3>1. Run XMLTV</h3>
<p>XMLTV is a collection of scripts which download TV listings to a
local XML file. The scripts are named by location, for example,
<tt>tv_grab_na</tt> for North America, or <tt>tv_grab_de</tt> for
Germany. With the North American script, you first configure it for
your provider by running:</p>
<pre>
tv_grab_na --configure
</pre>
<p>This runs an interactive setup to determine your cable provider.
Listings are then downloaded by running:</p>
<pre>
tv_grab_na | tv_sort > ~/listings.xml
</pre>
<p>This will grab the listings for the next week and store it in the
file <tt>listings.xml</tt> in your home directory. The
<tt>tv_grab_na</tt> command has many options to control its behavior.
<tt>tv_sort</tt> is a utility shipped with xmltv that will perform
sanity checks on the data, and add end times for many programs.
It will take some time to grab the listings, on Jeffrey's system, a
week of shows was over 4MB.</p>
<h3>2. Tell tvtime where the listings are</h3>
<p>Telling tvtime where to find the XMLTV listings is easy. Simply
run:</p>
<pre>
tvtime-configure --xmltv=~/listings.xml
</pre>
<p>This will write to the tvtime config file the location of your
downloaded listings file.</p>
<h3>3. Manually configure channels</h3>
<p>Each channel in an XMLTV file is given a unique identifier and a
list of names for that channel. tvtime maps XMLTV channels to
tvtime channels as follows:</p>
<ol>
<li>If the station entry in the <tt>stationlist.xml</tt> file contains
an <b>xmltvid</b> parameter, use that.
<li>Otherwise, search the channel list in the xmltv file for a channel
entry that matches the <b>name</b> of the current channel.
</ol>
<p>For example, the following is the entry for <b>CNN</b> in Billy's
XMLTV listings file:</p>
<pre>
<channel id="C18cnn.zap2it.com">
<display-name>18 CNN</display-name>
<display-name>18</display-name>
</channel>
</pre>
<p>And here is the default stationlist entry in tvtime:</p>
<pre>
<station name="18" active="1" position="18" band="US Cable"
channel="18" finetune="0" norm="NTSC"/>
</pre>
<p>In this stationlist entry, the name "18" matches the second display
name of in the XMLTV entry.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, many XMLTV sources do not contain enough information
to automatically perform this mapping. Here is the output on Jeffrey's
provider:</p>
<pre>
<channel id="4 KXAN">
<display-name>Channel 4 KXAN</display-name>
</channel>
</pre>
<p>The display name "Channel 4 KXAN" does not match the default name
in tvtime, nor could it. To get around this, you can manually specify
an <b>xmltvid</b> parameter in the stationlist entry, as follows:</p>
<pre>
<station name="4" active="1" position="4" band="US Cable"
channel="4" finetune="0" norm="NTSC" xmltvid="4 KXAN"/>
</pre>
<p>The <tt>xmltvid="4 KXAN"</tt> matches the id="4 KXAN" in the
XMLTV <channel> tag, and this lets tvtime know which channel
information to use.</p>
<h3>4. Configure xmltv to run weekly</h3>
<p>It's easy to use <tt>cron</tt> to have your XMLTV listings
downloaded weekly. Since everyone forgets the syntax, here is an
example of a crontab entry:</p>
<pre>
0 2 * * 0 /usr/bin/tv_grab_na | /usr/bin/tv_sort > ~/listings.xml
</pre>
<p>This will download the listings every Sunday at 2am.</p>
<h3>5. Bugs and suggestions</h3>
<p>If you have any suggestions on how we can simplify or better
automate the setup process of using tvtime and XMLTV, please
send an email to
<a href="mailto:vektor@dumbterm.net">vektor@dumbterm.net</a>.</p>
<h3>6. Changelog</h3>
<ul>
<li>Oct 13, 2003: Update example to use <tt>tv_sort</tt>.
</ul>
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