suggestion for including channel tuning info

[ben_gb]

Hi,

I have a suggestion for adding tuning information to the output of the XMLTV Radio Times grabber.

At the moment, there is no tuning information included (i.e. which Sky or Freeview channel should be tuned to get the channel in question).

Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any way to get the tuning data included in what comes from the Radio Times site, so the only way to do this seems to be by a manually generated list.

My suggestion is that an extra tuner field is added to the AltChIds.txt (though see ** below) file for the tuner channel. This tuner field (numeric only) is then added into the XML definition of the channel as a second 'display name' attribute.

This second 'display-name' attribute can then be used by one of the XMLTV plugins to import the tuner channel into Sage or whatever.

For example:

If you had this line in AltChIds.txt:

94 london.bbc1.bbc.co.uk 101

The output in the XML file would be:

<channel id="london.bbc1.bbc.co.uk">
<display-name>BBC1 London & South East</display-name>
<display-name>101</display-name>
</channel>

The XMLTV plugin for Sage that I'm using (the multi-tuner one) uses the numeric-only display-name to define the tuner channel.

As an extension, to avoid confusion for channels which don't have an entry in AltChIds (and therefore have a numeric channel ID), the new 'display-name' attribute could have a text prefix, such as

<channel id="london.bbc1.bbc.co.uk">
<display-name>BBC1 London & South East</display-name>
<display-name>TunerChannel: 101</display-name>
</channel>

but this would mean the XMLTV plugin would need to be modified to deal with this.

(** Perhaps it would in some ways be neater and easier to have the extra tuning field in channels.txt, but this file is generated automatically from the Radio Time site, so if the information was stored in this file it would be too easy for it to be accidentally/invisibly overwritten at a later date. Maybe someone has a suggestion for avoiding this problem? )

Any comments?

Regards,
Ben

[alanbirtles]

i have no time to look at this at the moment, this may be something i consider adding to version 3 (which i am in the process of writing but again i hvae no time to finish at the moment)