[drhoeh]

With microsoft legacy down I have been playing around with zap2xml as a replacement. I currently have a Raspberry Pi 2, Openelec using TV Headend as both the back and front end. I am have experienced difficulties getting getting zap2xml to work. I have a windows 8.1 machine, I installed perl and tried to run zap2xml.exe but nothing happens.

Does anyone have any good setup advice for running zap2xml?

Also since zap2xml is written using perl could I put it on Raspberry Pi and not use the pc to autoupdate like I did with the MC2XML?
Thanks,
Dan

[oldtvwatcher]

I don't see any reason you could not run a Perl script on a Raspberry Pi, provided Perl is installed or can be installed (type which perl from a command prompt to see if it's already installed; if it is it will return the path). I have RasPBX running on a Pi and it has Perl (the path is /usr/bin/perl).

You may need to install one or more Perl modules to get zap2xml to run. At the top of the file it has these use statements:

use Compress::Zlib;
use Encode;
use File::Basename;
use File::Copy;
use Getopt::Std;
use HTML:arser 3.00 ();
use HTTP::Cookies;
use LWP::UserAgent;
use POSIX;
use Time::Local;
use URI::Escape;
use JSON;

If any of those are missing, and probably one or two will be, you will need to install them. The first time you run the script, it will probably tell you what (if anything) it's missing.

Be sure to go download the latest version of zap2xml; the program has been changed significantly in the last month or so.

This article was somewhat useful to me, it might be to you as well:

Some hints for getting free-to-air satellite channels into the Electronic Program Guide in Kodi or XBMC (or another frontend)

It is not that hard to get zap2xml to work, but if you are still having problems after getting it to run and produce the tv_grab_file.xmltv output file, post again and we can try to help you figure out the problem. Since you already know how it worked using mc2xml, that's half the battle already.

[drhoeh]

thanks for all of the help and I got zap2xml.exe to work.

Does anyone know how to auto update my epg using zap2xml? I am currently running openelec on my raspberry pi and using tvheadend as my backend on the pi. I was told that openelec does run perl so I could not run on the pi using openelec.

I used to use task scheduler but I need to run zap2xml in command line and that takes several steps. I tried a .bat file but I could not get it to work.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Dan

[drhoeh]

I figured it out. I wrote a small batch file and shortcut it to the startup. Now zap2xml.exe runs every time I boot up and updates the epg.
Now I just need to figure out how to run perl in openelec and I will be all set.