Zap2it going bye-bye

[jpoveda]

Hello,

I can't understand. Will or won't Zap2it be providing new tv listings info after September 1?. If not, you will have to look for another one..... You can get the info from different web sites (abc site, bbc site, cnn site ....you need not get all the info from just one site). If you can choose, get the web sites with one page, one channel by day. But if not, you will see some examples about getting info from a horizontal tv grid.

[ahamilto]

Hello,

I can't understand. Will or won't Zap2it be providing new tv listings info after September 1?. If not, you will have to look for another one..... You can get the info from different web sites (abc site, bbc site, cnn site ....you need not get all the info from just one site). If you can choose, get the web sites with one page, one channel by day. But if not, you will see some examples about getting info from a horizontal tv grid.

Zap2it will NOT be provding xml data after September 1.
There might be an alternate source of listing data in xml format by then. Maybe not.
If you have used TVxb, you would know that the page to be scraped has to resemble a certain format. And if you want data for, say, DirecTV, you would need to identify a couple hundred web sites to get complete listings if you use your approach of "abc site, bbc site, cnn site ....".
There are one or two sites in a TVxb parsable format that have listings for DirecTV's complete lineup. But my main point was that none have AFN listings. Service members of your armed forces overseas may not have a way of populating the databases of the EPGs of their PVRs after 1 September. OK. I know that is not true, because I have written an ini file for TVxb that can grab listings off the AFN page, but the AFN page does not contain the same quality and quantity of data as the Zap2it web data. So I was hoping someone had a working TVxb ini file for Zap2it, since I have so far been unable to get TVxb to work with the Zap2it web site.

[jpoveda]

Hello,

Have a look on this post:

http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/zap2i ... 531p4.html

This is a piece

Ok, it worked!!!
Here is what I did step by step:
1. Download Yahoo! Go for TV http://sites.mobile.yahoo.com/go/tv/index
2. Download latest YahooXMLTv utility from http://forums.gbpvr.com/showthread.php?t=27546
3. Ran Yahoo Go for TV Install
4. From command line, navigated to the Yahoo Go for TV Install directory and keyed "ygtvwizardhost.exe {11534277-7823-4E49-AFE6-587805632302}" without quotes. This allows you to choose and setup your lineup without going through the hassle of selecting a tuner and such. If the number above doesn't work, try browsing to the \plugins\wizard\tvlineups directory and open the TVLinups.plugin file with notepad and copy the plugin id and use that in place of the numbers in brackets above.
5. Once I selected the lineup, I unzipped the YahooXMLTv download to c:\yahooxmltv.
6. From commandline, I ran C:\yahooxmltv\YahooXMLtv.exe days=5
This tells the program to only get 5 days of data. The default is 14 days.
7. Once the xml file was created, I manually renamed it to "tvguide.xml" and copied to MediaPortal\XMLTV

Maybe it could help you. I have to read it carefully.

[fletch]

Some good news from http://easytvdata.org/ :
EDIT: They changed name and site to http://schedulesdirect.org/ /EDIT

Greetings from the newly-formed team at Easy TV Data,
This organization was formed by members of various software projects in response to the announcement from Zap2it Labs that they will be discontinuing the free TV listings service that they have been providing to the non-commercial free and open source communities for the last 3+ years.

We know that many of you are waiting on the edge of your seats to find out what's going on behind the scenes here, and we're just as excited to tell you, but we can't give you many details while we are still involved in negotiations. We can, however, let you know that we are actively working on a solution that will provide what we hope will be a smooth transition away from Zap2it Labs by the September 1 deadline. We will release more details as soon as we are able to do so, so please keep an eye on http://easytvdata.org/ for updates.

In the mean time, we are in need of a good lawyer who is familiar with business contracts and federal nonprofit law (preferably someone willing to work pro bono, at least initially). We are also looking for a good CPA (we are registered in Washington State) to help with any eventual financial/tax paperwork. If you are qualified and willing to help, please contact us.

Thanks for sticking with us,

The Easy TV Data Board:

Isaac Richards, Chairman (MythTV)
Robert Eden (XMLTV)
Daniel Kristjansson (MythTV)
Kevin Odorczyk (MacProgGuide)
Chris Petersen (Mythtv)

They have announced pricing. See http://www.schedulesdirect.org/

[fletch]

Well looking at this some more it seems xlobby will be precluded from using this source of EPG data. A quote from the home page states;

We need to point out you may not use our listing data in commercial applications, even if provided through an Open Source plugin (XMLTV) or proxy server.

So I assume this rules out using this source in the future. I wonder if Calrad has any plans to provide the data from another source?

Aaron

[Marbles_00]

To whom it may concern...this may be a valid option...I've yet to try it:

http://zap2xml.110mb.com/

Only for the non-commercial world I'm afraid, so poeple with the freelobby can use it. Should replace xltv.xml...have to check the format.

*EDIT*
Did a quick check, and the .xml seems to work fine.

[Marbles_00]

Well, as of 12:00am 5/21/08, zap2xml seems to have gone, or are going through a transformation. Their xmltv.xml file is currently not compatible with xlobby's xml schema. When loading up after updating, xlobby errors at the loading of the guide. Anyone else notice this? Zap2xml no longer uses a .dtd file either. Also looking at the downloaded xml file, they no longer identify channel names...only appears to be channel numbers. This appears to be a very early stage, so when said and done, it may still work...but it isn't right now.

[Marbles_00]

zap2xml has been corrected. New version offered at website. Channel names are back in xml file.