Grabbing listings

Configure xmltv via the xmltv documented installation instructions.

Quickstart: run 'tv_grab_your_local --configure' Enter the channels you require. Run 'tv_grab_your_local --days=1 > /tmp/TV.xml'

Run the xml tv guide grabber periodically to have it pull the XML files describing your television programming.

For automatic downloading, you can add a line like this to your crontab:

0 3 * * * /usr/bin/tv_grab_your_local --gui TermNoProgressBar --days=2 > /tmp/TV.xml 2>/tmp/TV.xml.error &

The "2>/tmp/TV.xml.error" bit saves the grabber's stderr output to a file. The "&" backgrounds the grabbing process. Without the "&", XMLTV will run in the foreground and if the process takes more than a minute, cron will kill it, leaving you with a partial XML file that Freevo can't use. The "--gui TermNoProgressBar" option solves an issue with the stderr output redirection.

The Freevo module "epg_xmltv.py" can be run standalone to generate a translated version of the TV guide that makes the first startup a lot quicker. NOTE Add better instructions

For information on how to add this to your crontab: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/CronHowto

Another way to do it is to have this in your crontab:

/path/to/freevo tv_grab > /tmp/TV.log 2>&1

You will need to define XMLTV_GRABBER in your local_conf.py

Here's another shell script that you can cron that may help you out.

/usr/bin/tv_grab_na --listings "$HOME/freevo/xmltv/listings_%d%m%Y.xml" --days 1
rm /tmp/TV.xml
ln -s `date +'$HOME/freevo/xmltv/listings_%d%m%Y.xml'` /tmp/TV.xml