Changes to XMLTV feed

Started by lukem, September 06, 2011, 05:48:48 PM

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lukem

Greetings,

We have added Country, Language and Subtitle information to our XMLTV feed as per the XMLTV specification.

As some systems may not be able to use these additional fields directly, we have appended the information to the end of the program description. For example, "(France, French, English subtitles)". The default length of the description field has also been extended to 2047 (previously was cut-off at 511). You may still restrict the length of the description field with the "desc_length=X" parameter in the URL.

Please advise us if you experience any issues with your IceTV guide.

Enjoy!

Gary

#1
Nice to see info added.

Has this caused a problem with Beyonwiz as I am now getting a failed to get channel list message? Still got EPG data in the end though no sign of the extra infol.

lukem

Hi Gary,

No it's completely unrelated. :)

Your Beyonwiz was asking our server if there had been any channel updates. Since channels don't change that often, the error you experienced wont really impact your IceTV service at all. You received the error message because your Beyonwiz contacted our server a little too often so we told it to wait a little longer. We do this so devices don't swamp our servers.

Cheers,
Luke

Gary

Thanks Luke.

Do you know why the new info isn't showing up or am I checking too early for it?

lukem

Hi Gary,

Yep, I do - we've only applied the new info across our XMLTV (typically used for MythTV) and Windows 7 Media Center Guides for now and not our PVRs (Beyonwiz, Topfield, Humax, etc) - they use a different method of communication. I will be adding the new info to the IceTV guide for those products tomorrow.

Hope this makes sense.

Cheers,
Luke


Gary

Thanks Luke and yes it makes perfect sense (other than I presumed they all had the same data source.  :) )

Calvi

Hi,

your xmltv now does not validate against your iceguide.dtd file. I noticed because I use a guide combiner script and it validates all xml files first.

Some of the elements appear out of order and that violates Microsofts xml parser.

Your current .dtd is as follows...
<!ELEMENT programme (title+, sub-title*, desc*, credits?, date?,
                     category*, language?, orig-language?, length?,
                     icon*, url*, country*, episode-num*, video?, audio?,
                     previously-shown?, premiere?, last-chance?, new?,
                     subtitles*, rating*, star-rating?)>

but your xml file has items in the following order...

title, sub-title, desc, country, language, credits, category, episode-num, previously-shown, rating eg...

<title lang="en">Please Sir!</title>
<sub-title lang="en">Out of the Frying Pan</sub-title>
<desc lang="en">The students are hating the school meals and its up to Bernard to figure out how to fix the problem.(United Kingdom, English)</desc>
<country lang="en">United Kingdom</country>
<language lang="en">English</language>
<credits>
<actor>David Barry</actor>
</credits>
<category lang="en">Comedy</category>
<episode-num system="icetv">30611-122827</episode-num>
<previously-shown/>
<rating system="">
<value>PG</value>
</rating>


There is a validator here
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms756015%28v=vs.85%29.aspx

lukem

Calvi,

This has now been corrected, many thanks.

(confirmed using: http://validator.w3.org)


Calvi