Alan Birtles' Home Page

Hi Alan,

after discussion over on the GB-PVR forums I discovered that I never get an aborted .xml file write if the RT grab returns no data. I actually did not know this was possible since xmltvgui v3.11!

I am guessing this is because for a few channels that are not on the RT listings I use the digiguide grabber as well and then combine. Even if RT returns a zero count there are always the few channels that digiguide returns. Would I be right in thinking this is why I never get an abortive .xml write? And that always an .xml file is written?

If so is there a way that if RT returned a zero grab I could stop the .xml being written irrespective of what my digiguide grab did?

I can look to other solutions to check .xml file size etc before updating my EPG but obviously the best place to start would be with the xmltvgui functions.

many thanks (and though I do not post here often always a great time to thank you for such a great program )

Steeb

not easily, you could run the two grabs separately the combine them in a third run by using three different groups of settings eg run:
xmltvgui /grab /cRT
xmltvgui /grab /cDigi
xmltvgui /grab /cCombine
for more details see: http://www.birtles.org.uk/xmltv/wiki/in ... figuration

Hi Alan,

many thanks for such a swift reply.

Unfortunately I can't see how this would resolve my problem as surely I would still end up with an .xml combining both the RT Digiguide data? My problem is that I end up with an .xml ONLY containing the digiguide data.

When this epg.xml is loaded into GB-PVR I therefore only have the digiguide channels.

I am looking for a way to entirely kill a new .xml to be written if the RT has no data.

I apologise in advance if I have mis-understood something

There other ways I can do this but was just checking whether xmltvgui had an 'easy way'

Many thanks

Steeb

if each grab writes to a different file then it would work, you would end up with a radiotimes.xml and a digiguide.xml which you would combine into guide.xml. if the radiotimes grab failed then the radiotimes data would not be updated but would not be lost either, the digiguide data would then download and the combined file would be the new digiguide data combined with the old radio times data

or you could reduce it to two grabs by having one download the radio times data, then the second could download the digiguide data and import the radiotimes file.

Ah ha, now I've got you, was not thinking logically earlier, of course these methods will work

Off to tweak!

Thank you so much again

very best

Steeb

Hi Alan,

to further this thread I had now found a very comfortable solution to combine 2 different grabs, 1 for RT 1 for Digiguide.

However I have now noticed in the past couple of days that RT has returned a 'few' programmes (about 800) compared with a usual 16000 or so. In effect what this has meant is that the .xml gets written and is not aborted as XMLTVGui found programmes, but of course not all of them!

Would it be possible to build some logic into XMLTVGui to recognise beyond an empty grab but not a full grab to abort writing the xml?

Cheers

Steeb

3.14 will now abort grabbing if less than half the channels download successfully. It will also no longer cache empty files

Alan,

once again, thank you! Trying it later

cheers

steeb

I'd just like to add my thanks for this update. I should be able to get back to scheduled runs now rather than manual dummy runs first.

Thanks.