ATVGuide 0.1 review

A TV Guide program that reads an XMLTV file and presents it in an elegant easy-to-use interface. Requirements: · GTK+ 1.2 or abov

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 16K Developer: Andrew Ayer

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A TV Guide program that reads an XMLTV file and presents it in an elegant easy-to-use interface.

Requirements:
GTK+ 1.2 or above
Glib 1.2 or above
libxml2 2.6.0 or above


Installation

Unpack the source archive.
Run ./configure
Run make
Run make install

Getting the TV Listings

Unfortunately, obtaining the XMLTV files that contain the TV listings is not an easy task. That is the job of the XMLTV program, of which I have no control. For complete documentation, see their web site. I will summarize here.

To use XMLTV you must have Perl and a lot of Perl modules. Before starting, confirm you have Perl. We'll worry about the modules later.

If you use a recent major Linux distro, you can probably install an appropriate XMLTV package and your distro will take care of the modules.

If you don't have a recent major distro, you'll have to download the source and compile yourself. See the XMLTV page for complete documentation. When installing, it will complain about missing Perl modules. Find and install those modules by using CPAN Search.

Once XMLTV is installed, you will have to configure your grabber program. To configure, type: tv_grab_code --configure where code is the (usually) two letter code of your grabber. Once again, see the XMLTV site. A text-based wizard will walk you through the configuration.

If you live in North America, XMLTV will prompt you during the configuration to register with Zap2it. Zap2it only gives you a three month subscription and they spam you with surveys. You've been warned. After the three month subscription expires, you must re-configure your grabber program (see above).

Once you're configured, run: tv_grab_code --days 3 --output tvguide.xml where code is the same grabber code you used above. This command will download 3 days worth of listings and stick them in tvguide.xml. You can change those values if you wish.

Now you can view the listings (see below). Later to update your listings, repeat the step above. You may wish to add that to your crontab so it happens automatically.