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...  and I think most people would agree that if I've spent a lot of effort doing the work to make the list, I should have ownership of it.

Well I don't agree! There's little innovation in scouring the web and compiling a list of public facts. So any simple list I compile should be copy-rightable? It's easy to come up with silly list examples but what delineates a list worthy of copy-right from one that's not?

It's clearly un-enforceable and any law so vague should not be a law. Just because a precedent has been set (e.g. the Telstra case) does not mean it is sensible or right.

The way the system works is that the client on your PVR (whether this be IceTV Interactive or EyeTV) requests the data from our server a minimum of once every 15 minutes.

Daniel, why does the user have to configure the device type on the server side? If the device is contacting the server, then why doesn't the device-side software indicate what it is?

It's a great feature which I love and a feature which discriminates ICE from the standard guide. It is very useful for your eye to visually "tag" movies immediately amongst other content. Otherwise, if only the title was listed, you have to read the title and description and try to infer yourself whether it is a movie or not.

I also like this feature.

However if you want to get rid of it, just use ftp to the Icebox and rename the files. Namewiz is one handy renaming utility.

Actually, I do find the upper case tag "MOVIE:" to be a bit obtrusive so my personal iceguide grabber script converts all upper case tags to title-case. E.g. "MOVIE:" becomes "Movie:", etc. Then the tags don't yell as loudly.  ;)

Well, I can't complain about that response!  :)

Thanks very much Daniel. I'll be waiting keenly to see what comes out.

I sent an email to ICE support asking for this but got little response so I thought I'd bring it up here for discussion.

I'd like ICE to consider adding a "generic xmltv" device to their ICE remote service which would merely save the recorded schedule to an XML file which could be downloaded explicitly by the user (or ideally the recording flag could be merged as an explicit new XML tag into the user's base XMLTV file although this may not be as easy for ICE to do?)

I would think this would not be difficult for ICE to do (at least compared to supporting a new actual device) but could then be exploited by the community solutions like TEDS etc? E.g. I use my own home grown script to pull down the ICE xml data and do favourites searching etc for my toppy 5000. There are other similar community solutions available. If I/we could programmatically get at the remote data then we could exploit the wonderful web/phone interface provided by ICE to set timers/favourites/series etc.

C'mon ICE, can't be that hard to add this? Failing that, can somebody from ICE please explain how I can set my remote preference to one of the existing devices and get the data programmatically?

It's a great feature which I love and a feature which discriminates ICE from the standard guide. It is very useful for your eye to visually "tag" movies immediately amongst other content. Otherwise, if only the title was listed, you have to read the title and description and try to infer yourself whether it is a movie or not.

The repeat ("previously-shown") flag is not set correctly on Australian Story. E.g. todays episode on ABC was a repeat of the same episode shown last week on ABC but was not indicated as a repeat.

or am I going to have to copy the file to a usb disk once a week, because ill be honest I cant be bothered doing that.

Is that what Topfield expect you to do? That's rubbish. What are Topfield thinking?

It's on the ICETV support pages, e.g. http://www.icetv.com.au/support/setup/setupxml.shtml

Since you haven't had a response I'll give you a related comment. The slug (NSLU2) has 2 USB ports and e.g, you can connect the second one (via a usb to serial adaptor) to the toppy serial port for TAP diagnostics etc.

... definitely the LCN should be an accurate reflection of what LCN the channel is on.

Agreed.

At the moment the only thing that I can see to filter on would be that all HD channels would have "HD" in the display-name field. But I will see what the dev guys say.

Yes of course. For other reasons that is actually a better way for me to filter so I have changed my parser to do it this way. So please ignore my request above.

Upon checking this out it looks like its only the XMLTV feed that is affected, I have had a bug added to our system to have it resolved.

It's always been like that Daniel. I have my own script which pulls down and parses the ICE xml file and at present I filter on HD channels by the fact that their LCN=0. Possibly other parsers do this as well? So can you please at least keep some identifier/attribute on the channel element to discriminate HD channels? Thanks.

Hi, my name's Simon and I'm an alcoholic...  Oops, wrong forum!  Sorry, pinched that off someone else  ;)

May not be an original Simon but you got a chuckle out of me  :)

Although I guess they are technically repeats, I'm not sure multiple airings of new shows is what most people will think of as a repeat.

I can't understand your thinking?

The first airing of a program is the original and of course the others are a repeat! Simple as that. Dateline is repeated multiple times each week on SBS.
Surely this is a pristine example of what the repeat flag is intended for?

Dateline is repeated multiple times on SBS but the repeats are not flagged. Any chance we can have this flagged? I think there are other examples, E.g. Media Watch is repeated on ABC2 but not flagged.