Custom lua script and UK grabbers not working

[Duck]

Hi, I made my own lua script using another as a template. It is for adding "Film: " to the title. Not having the space was starting to bug me so this one includes it...

AddFilm.zip

Updated script, not cleaned up (add changes to official release?)

(1.2 KiB) Downloaded 3168 times

I also had to change it so it also checked that the category is "Movies" for it to work. That's because radio times seems to be down (I had no EPG today, what's up with that?) so I had to use DVBGuide.exe to get a XML EPG off the airwaves. "Movies" seems to be the official category for films that they use when they broadcast it.

Is there any script for cutting down an imported XML file to reduce the number of channels? Just to make loading the EPG into programs a lot faster.

Plus I couldn't get radio times or bleb to download today. Error I get for every single channel available for Radio Times is "Radio Times returned a zero sized reply for channel ..." Do you know if this is a temporary problem? The data seems to be completely empty http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/92.dat

BTW, what does the use cache do? Seems that it stops it working because with it on, the timeline doesn't update with the 1st day being today, and the last day 2 weeks away. But with is off there is only empty EPG if there is a problem like a day missing it's data.

Ok thx and thx for the XMLTV GUI app

[alanbirtles]

radiotimes seems to be down at the moment. The cache setting uses a cached file rather than downloading a new file.
To remove channels write a channel post processor (like ukrt_altchids_rt.lua) and just return XGUI.OK rather than the channel for the channels you want to delete (I'm not sure i've tested this but it should work).

[alanbirtles]

listings are back up now

[onionfx]

Seems to be broken again

Have they changed the format of their listings?

Can get at channels.dat and there seems to be enough data if you visit the page directly.
But my 3.12 grabber is saying zero size list and has been for a day or 2 now

Sam

[onionfx]

Re-ran it there now and its working

[onionfx]

Ran it again from the command line and zero sized replies....

Maybe more investigations my end

[onionfx]

Renamed my RT cache directory and it seems OK now.

Pity I lost my channels in the process of finding it

Never mind this app is great!

[Duck]

A moderator on the media portal forums said that they "have changed the "handshake" that is needed to access the xml feed".

You can refresh the listings for BBC1 in a web browser... http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/92.dat

Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not.

[yyyyyy]

Apparently, it 's not working again.
Cleared the cache (removed the cache folder and subfolders), but still "zero sized reply" for each channel
Are they deliberately doing this to exclude XMLTV grabbers such as this one ?
I guess I could write my own, which would then crawl through all the pages, but that would put a much higher load on their page.

[alanbirtles]

I would suspect technical issues rather than deliberate blocking, the xmltv feed is explicitly provided for xmltv grabbers to prevent people from scraping their web pages. I think the problem is that the xmltv feed generator pulls the listings out of the database for the main site and if that database is changed then the generator breaks and its a low priority to get it fixed. I don't think we can complain too strongly as they are providing the service for free with no advertising

[yyyyyy]

Oh, I wouldn't complain for a free product.
Just thought they were blocking it deliberately, instead of technical issues.
If it 's a technical issue, I suppose it might be fixed soon.

[Duck]

Don't see why you cant complain. Every time I've tried to download radio times data in the last few days, it hasn't been working

Maybe someone should write a program to scrape their web pages for EPG data. Not that I know how to do that...

[alanbirtles]

you can email them and tell them its not working but do so in a calm and polite manner. if they get too many ranting complaints they may just decide turning the service off is less hassle

[wizgnome]

Its been up and down for a few weeks, I am now down to 11 days of listings for my Myth-TV box.
Has anyone made them aware that there is a problem or know what has happened?
I would send them an email - if no one else has, but don't know who to contact.

[Duck]

Only address I could find was radio.times@bbc.co.uk from another forum.