[cruent]

wow, gratz with the new work mynci and thanks a lot for the half finished source on a xmltv-gui.

i want to give it a try to finish this, it looks really promissing.

anyone wanna help, let me know?

cheers

/cruent

[los93sol]

agreed, i would love to see someone finish this up and using xmltv it would be universal for anyone. this would be a great starting point for a my tv section in xbmc. anyone interested in this, please join us at efnet #xbmctvguide with enough interest this can take off so xbmc will be prepared when other projects like mediaportal have matured enough that we can start seriously considering some kind of interface. this has been discussed on the boards before so i won't go into it here. however, in my opinion, xbmc shouldn't rely on a backend to do everything, it should have it's own functionality to bring to the table so having its own tv guide would be great.
regards,
los93sol

[Gamester17]

request; as for actually getting/scraping the listing.xml for each country (and its tv-channels) i suggest that python-scripts be used (one for each country), you could then code it so the script to be used can be selected from the xmltv-gui or settings, and then so that the selected script can be runned from a button in the xmltv-gui (or set to auto-update once a day), ...that way whoever develops the xmltv-gui (in c++) don't have to worry about creating or maintaining any of the 'grabbers', and instead anyone with some python knowlage could create or help maintain the grabbers for his/her country, (a few such grabber-scripts already exist here), another good thing using this method is the end-users don't have to use/have a computer to grab their listing.xml

ps! there are also plenty of complete tv-guide python-scripts (which display everything themself) that could probebely be converted to output a standard xmltv listing.xml instead

[jj5768]

have you seem the mytv script on xbmcscripts ? - it does everything iteself, and is rather cool :agree:

[los93sol]

gamester: that's exactly what i was thinking as far as the grabbers and the gui. in my opinion though, the actual gui for the tv guide should be done in c++, but the existing python scripts would definitely be great to look at so the layout can be planned out as efficiently as possible. another thing to think about is the load on the servers that the whole thing would update from. i used to use zap2it and they had a problem with the load on the servers from all the mythtv users updating at once, but since i don't think everyone leaves their xbox on 24/7 i doubt this would be a problem for us. it seems that updating daily would be a bit overwhelming though, i would think if we just had it check to see when the last update was at xbmc start-up and set everything up to update every 7 days it should be fine. that way if everything is already up to date, then we won't put an unnecessary load on the servers. any interested dev's, please join in the irc channel so we can start making this a reality! :lol:
regards,
los93sol

[Gamester17]

the actual gui for the tv guide should be done in c++

that's what i (and cruent) were meant, in referense to mynci's half-finished tv-listings code (xmltv-gui), ...i too meant that only the listing.xml grabbers should be python (not the gui itself).

another thing to think about is the load on the servers that the whole thing would update from.  i used to use zap2it and they had a problem with the load on the servers from all the mythtv users updating at once, but since i don't think everyone leaves their xbox on 24/7 i doubt this would be a problem for us.  it seems that updating daily would be a bit overwhelming though, i would think if we just had it check to see when the last update was at xbmc start-up and set everything up to update every 7 days it should be fine.  that way if everything is already up to date, then we won't put an unnecessary load on the servers.

i guess that depends a bit on the websites that is 'ripped' and a bit on how xbmc is set to sheduale when a script is runned; what if one site only have tv-listings for one day, a other has listings for five days and a third for a full week, best would probebely be to just allow the user to select in gui from one of many pre-sets like example: manual/once-a-day/once-every-other-day/once-a-week (xbmc could then be configured by the developer to only run the selected script at first idle-time if set to auto-update),   ...and since most xbmc-users are on different time-zones and live in different countries so will use different scripts that uses different websites plus they will not be runned at any specific time (ie. they will/should not all be set to run at example 18:00 but instead set to run at first idle-time) thus it should balance itself out.

[jslawler]

i'm interested in contributing to this feature.
i've done quite a bit of c++ before. i admit i haven't done any xbmc programming, but i've been looking at the half finished code and it looks like it should be ok to pick up on.

do any of you have any ideas on the gui layout for this feature?
it is going to be in a grid format? or would it be more like have lots of listboxes which go to the next window:

tvguide (shows list of channels)
-->picks a channel (once clicked it lists all days)
----->picks a day (once clicked it lists all shows for that day)
------->picks a show to see the specific details

i'd prefer to see some kind of grid view so you can get an overall picture of whats on for that day. but i'm worried the screen would be very cluttered and messy.

anyway i'll keep looking into the code and mess around with it until i understand it better.

[Striker]

yes, but extend it with a movies view
a whats on now view is also preferred
if possible have the time at the top in a row and make it clickable
to switch to a later time

[los93sol]

jslawler,
please stop by the irc channel so we can chat more about how the layout should be, but i agree that grid view is the way to go. i think if this is going to be done that it should be planned for the future...i mean we should think about the layout as if there is already a my tv section in xbmc. i have been doing some sketches of layouts and looking at other tv guide layouts quite a bit recently, and i have come up with something that would work nicely and keep as much clutter off the screen as possible. the way i see it, the tv guide should be easily laid over something playing in the background (like a live tv stream from your mediaportal box....in the future of course) anyhow, there could be two parts to the tv guide, the top 25% of the screen would display the information about the currently selected channel and show. the channel name and number would be on the left in a header and the current time would be on the right side of the header. when you have a show highlighted, a description of that episode would be displayed in this window as well. the bottom 75% of the screen would be for listing channels and what's on at what time. we can experiment to see how many channels, and how many hours of scheduling is reasonable to have on the screen at one time. i think 10 channels and 3 hours would work nicely, but like i said, we can and will need to experiment with that portion of the layout.

the other side to this project is the grabbers, we need this to be as universal as possible since people all over the world use xbmc. we should have a place in the settings to configure your parameters for the grabber. ideally, it would be nice if we could have one universal grabber and setup the settings so that your configuration customized it so there would be as little maintenance on the grabbers as possible.

regards,
los93sol

[jslawler]

i have managed to get the code to show the grid of current tv shows, by using the code supplied, but slightly modified.

i have removed the favourites feature for the time being. i personally don't see any need for it.

at the moment i have it showing 4 channels, and 2 hours of television. the biggest problem at the moment is fitting the information on the screen. with two hours shown, and using "font10" <-- small font, it can't fit most of the show names in the button width. and "font10" is quite difficult to read, so i don't think it would be usable. if it doesn't work out i might make it only show one hour at a time.

also, at the moment i have it set up so the bottom 75% or so is a grid vision of the xmltv data, and the top 25% will have show description on the left side, and on the right side will be space for an image (channel logo, or tv show logo)

los93sol, i will send you an email later with the code so you can organise it. i'll do a little more coding before though so browsing the tv grid works.

[cruent]

good work jslawler!

i'm working on a tvlisting python grabber for danish channels.

we need to get a lot of different python grabber for each country.

cheers

[Gamester17]

be nice if it was scalable so those with hdtv (720p and 1080i) could take advantage of the additional space (would probebely mean more channels and more hours displayed at once compared to the lower-resotion on standard tv), and remember that some with normal tvs use 4:3 while others use 16:9 (16:9 wide-screen could probebely display another hour compared to normal 4:3 and still look good).

personaly i would also love it if the grid was dynamic (instead of all squares with the same sine) when it comes to displaying the programs, maybe as much as down to 15 minutes in detail (though 30 minutes splits would be nice enough), see my poorly made mockup here (link) or be inspired by freevo (link), beyondtv (link) and mythtv (link).

ps! a future thing to think of; some websites show which programs are movies and which ones are tv-series to distinguise between them, it would be nice if this is kept in mind by maybe adding separate tags for each in the xml when gabbing the listing (one tag for movies, and one for tv-series) to mark which is which, thus the tv-guide gui could later be linked with http://www.imdb.com and http://www.tv.com (once a such interface get added to xbmc) to get more information on that movie or tv-serie directly in the tv-guide by pressing 'info' on that title. this would have to be supported both in the xmltv-gui code and in each python grabber which writes the listing.xml file (though only be optional in the python grabber).

[Nickman]

would it not be possible to use some of mediaportals code ?

i'm not up to speed how diffrent c# is to c++ though.

looks good anyway

[mvoosten]

don't forget gbpvr (http://gbpvr.com)!!
mediaportal is nice, but too much of an overkill. gbpvr does essentialy the same thing, can run as a service background and has a full featured web interface.. and best of all... freeware.
i use xbmc for 90% of my media tasks.. the only thing that it doesn't do is tvguide and recordings and gbpvr makes it (almost perfect). only missing the remote scheduling from my xbox

for screenshots:
http://gbpvr.com/screenshots.htm

it also includes 2 pics of the tvguide in action to stay on topic

[nianhbg]

be nice if it was scalable so those with hdtv (720p and 1080i) could take advantage of the additional space (would probebely mean more channels and more hours displayed at once compared to the lower-resotion on standard tv), and remember that some with normal tvs use 4:3 while others use 16:9 (16:9 wide-screen could probebely display another hour compared to normal 4:3 and still look good).

personaly i would also love it if the grid was dynamic (instead of all squares with the same sine) when it comes to displaying the programs, maybe as much as down to 15 minutes in detail (though 30 minutes splits would be nice enough), see my poorly made mockup here (link) or be inspired by freevo (link), beyondtv (link) and mythtv (link).

ps! a future thing to think of; some websites show which programs are movies and which ones are tv-series to distinguise between them, it would be nice if this is kept in mind by maybe adding separate tags for each in the xml when gabbing the listing (one tag for movies, and one for tv-series) to mark which is which, thus the tv-guide gui could later be linked with http://www.imdb.com and http://www.tv.com (once a such interface get added to xbmc) to get more information on that movie or tv-serie directly in the tv-guide by pressing 'info' on that title. this would have to be supported both in the xmltv-gui code and in each python grabber which writes the listing.xml file (though only be optional in the python grabber).

i really like this idea. and it would be great if it would be hd compatible like 720p im running tv.guide.py an python script that shows channels in a grid format and it does not look any good in 720p. so lite more channels and more time frames