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[DocLotus]

Now that DigiGuide USA is out of business (for now) does anyone have any ideas for a replacement?

I tried both of the TV listing in MC9.  Both can not print out the list without bringing it up in a browser like IE or Opera.

* I tried the TV Guide in MC9... loads fairly fast but does not list all the channels for my digital cable TV.

* Tried the Yahoo Guide in MC9... loads very slowly but it does list all the channels for my digital cable.

Don't like either one.

Any ideas?

[rocketsauce]

I've been searching for a couple of months since GIST went down and haven't found anything good. GIST is sending their former users over to http://tv.zap2it.com/.

Rob

[DocLotus]

Have you tried zap2it?

Is it web based of hard drive based like DigiGuide?

I'm looking for a hard drive based program with unattended automatic web updates like DigiGuide.

[rocketsauce]

zap2it is web-based, but it's slighty more customizable than any of the other offerings (like Yahoo TV, etc).

I have yet to come across anything similar to DigiGuide.

Rob

[DocLotus]

Thanks

[Paul Webster]

On the day that DigiGuide announced the suspension of the USA listing service ... work started on making a module to allows XMLTV grabbed listings to be loaded into DigiGuide (as DigiGuide User Channels).
it works really well - once the users get their head around how it hangs together.
The author is Russ Freeman - who is the principle author of DigiGuide.
See http://www.fatbird.com/stuff/DigiGuide

PS: If any of you are using, struggling or failed trying to get my DABDig working with J River ... please send me an email to let me know.  I am happy to do more on it, but there are a few too many forums around hte place to keep up!

[DocLotus]

Thanks.

Think I will wait a while longer to see where this is going.

Looks like it currently only downloads one day at a time & is not automatic like DigiGuide used to be.

Maybe it will progress into a workable solution in the future.

[Paul Webster]

The number of days that it grabs is configurable.
It is set to 1 as default in the sample script - just so that you can prove that it is all working without spending a huge amount of time downloading data.

At the top of the batch file you should see something like ...
REM This is the number of days listings you'd like to get
SET DAYS=1


It is very easy to automate ... just requires a batch file to be run ...

[DocLotus]

Hi Paul;

I finally tried the XMLTV2DG with the XMLTV downloader.

You were right, it takes a little work to get it all working correctly.

After some trail & error I finally got it working with 7 days of downloads with only the channels I want.

It is very slow to download at 56K modem speed.  Each channel downloads 7 times (once for each day) times about 100 channels.  Each channel takes about 5-6 seconds so it really takes a long time but is worth it. Now would be a great time for me to get DSL, huh ?

Wonderful, simply wonderful  

My TV viewing was down by 75% as I could not find any program or download that came even close to DigiGuide.

Thanks so much for the info

[DocLotus]

Have been reading about something called IMdB which I think is supposed to add movie actors & movie ratings to the DigiGuide downloads.  My XML2TV downloads are missing this information on all movies.

Does anyone know...

* What the IMdB is?
* Where do I get it?
* How do I use it?
* Is it already part of the XMLTV?  I have seen some remarks in the XMLTV BAT file referring to it.

Thanks

[Swordsman]

http://www.imdb.com
Internet Movie Database

So far, I don't see that it does TV listings.  I think it was just going to give you more details about the show or actor that you found in the guide.  That's what it was used for on Gist.com anyway.  You would go to the guide and find a show and you could click on the IMDB link and it would take you to the IMDB listing of that show - which usually has a ton of info.  They have things like user ratings, reviews, trivia, guest appearances, locations - all sorts of details.  I have yet to find a show or actor it did not have a reference for.  I love looking up old stars to see what they're doing now, or I look for forgotten shows and movies to see if I really was the only one who liked it....  :-)

[Paul Webster]

Have been reading about something called IMdB which I think is supposed to add movie actors & movie ratings to the DigiGuide downloads.  My XML2TV downloads are missing this information on all movies.

Does anyone know...

* What the IMdB is?
* Where do I get it?
* How do I use it?
* Is it already part of the XMLTV?  I have seen some remarks in the XMLTV BAT file referring to it.

IMdB = Internet Movie Database
It also makes its data available for use under various Ts&Cs but it seems that this osrt of use is fine.
You can download their data by following the links from http://www.imdb.com/interfaces#plain.
I copied mine from the Germany site.
The files are huge ...
XMLTV2DG supports some of them ... you can download whichever of the set that you want.
actors.list.gz
actresses.list.gz
directors.list.gz
genres.list.gz
ratings.list.gz

(just save them as they are - do not try to open them)

You also need to check that xmltv is being run with a -i parameter ... e.g. if you downloaded the files above into c:\imdb then you would put
-i=c:\imdb
somewhere in your xmltv2dg command line ... I think that there is a comment about it in the shared.bat

It will make XMLTV2DG run very slowly as it prepares to process the data and will use a lot of disk space.

[DocLotus]

Thanks for the info guys