TVxb downloads TV schedules and writes out a customized TV guide in XMLTV format. The XMLTV file can be used as an Electronic Program Guide in Vista Media Center, and other PVR systems.
Main features:
- Provides a toolkit for reading a wide range of on-line guides
- Reads “vertical-list” and “weekly grid” style guides
- Automatically works out (in many cases) the page structure and extracts start times, titles and descriptions without assistance
- Adjusts to minor changes in page format
- Can read and combine schedules from multiple web-sites encoded in a mixture of ISO-8859-xx, Windows-125x, UTF-8, and East Asian character sets
- Supports conversion of text to UTF-8 encoding
- Can read, validate, and merge externally-generated xmltv files
- Provides rudimentary support for the conversion of logical and visual encoding for bi-directional text such as Hebrew
- Follows html links to fetch detailed program descriptions
- Will adjust (to some extent) for daylight saving (although summer start and end dates must be manually provided once each year)
- TV station friendly:
- downloaded schedules are cached to reduce the load on TV station listing servers and to reduce network traffic
- downloads during prime evening hours are throttled back
- downloads of large numbers of channels are throttled back
- descriptions downloaded by following links off the schedule page are now capped
- xmltv files are watermarked to allow identification of the original source and to deter distribution or other non-personal use of grabbed listing data
- Allows shows and series to be manually defined for channels that have no on-line guide
- Outputs in a XMLTV DTD V1.30 compatible format which is compatible with Home Theater packages such as Media Portal
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