South Park's descriptions are often wrong on my Tivo, too. At least you know that the accuracy of the zap2it data is as good as what they sell to Tivo

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Good thought, but same results here. In fact, Zap2it doesn't provide listings for at least one of my digital channels, so I rely solely on the EIT for info in mythtv (which only provides a couple of hours advanced data).

One other possibility might be this: Many of the national broadcasters are offering tv shows for downloading via Internet, after they have been broadcast. Perhaps Myth could take advantage of these listings (as well as providing handy links for d/l'ing content)? Heck, I'd like my machine to schedule d/l's as well as broadcasts. No tuner card required.

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I'd like d/l'd too.

If it could be determined that MythTV's EIT implementation is rock solid, and if you're getting guide data for a window shorter than 12 hours from EIT, you could probably push the FCC to get your local station to comply and provide at least 12 hours of guide data. They were all supposed to comply by February 1, 2005: http://www.digitaltelevision.com/articl ... _834.shtml

My guess is that most people don't have any technology that even looks for EIT data, so stations that don't send EIT data receive no complaints. I don't know what the FCC did to test for compliance for the February 2005 order, either.

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I was checking the ATSC channels on my 26" Samsung last night and noticed that half of my HD channels were displaying EIT data an hour in advance. So when I hit the program info button, half of the stations listed the title and description of the current show, while the rest were displaying the description of the next show to be aired. Sometime between now and Sept 1st I'll have to hook up my HD5000AV to my OTA connection and see what kind of EIT data I get in Myth.

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If they are anything like the Australian equivalent then they didn't do any testing, and wont until enough people complain.

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I hope that this is resolved quickly and constructively. That being said, from an implementation standpoint, I wonder if the tv guide distribution mechanism could benefit from a virtuous cycle: such as that used in bit torrent.

I would suppose that there would be little benefit to this if:
1) a source \ seed is not available
2) strain on Zap2it servers is not the root cause of the problem

The other question that sits in my mind is "does anybody own the tv guide data?". If one pays for cable, does that include tv guide data (independent of the delivery mechanism and format) for personal usage? I suspect that the answer is yes: someone does own the data and the answer to the latter question is probably no.

My gut feeling that as soon as someone with a vested ($) interest in guide data (right or wrong) perceives their income stream is pinched, they will go after the distribution mechanism.

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This is really the solution to the whole aggregation/populating a master database/distribution problem. We should not have to rely on a listing service like TMS for this information. We should enforce the regulations.

I remember once driving on the road to Manhattan, which was perenially under construction. Spray painted on a concrete barrier were the words:


If we complain to the FCC, then we will get the data directly from the stations for all the digital channels, which will all be digital soon anyway.

The dev should just scrape for long term data, and EIT for short term data. Screw you Zap2it!!

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Correct! And this would solve the problem for unencrypted digital channels, either broadcast or cable. Satellite and analog cable users would still need something.

However, as I said above, I am not certain that MythTV's EIT implementation is rock solid. I don't want to be in a position where I escalate a complaint to the FCC because MythTV 0.20-fixes has an EIT bug that chokes on some compliant (yet obscure) data from local channel WXYZ. It only takes one incident like that for the FCC to never listen to you again

So, how can MythTV's EIT implementaion be validated? Are there any broadcast engineers out there who have a test box that sends EIT data in every possible format, covering the widest possible timespan? If so, it should be a simple matter to compare the test box's input data set to mythconverg's data. Maybe the MythTV devs have already done this in some form, and I could just be ignorant of EIT's robustness in MythTV. The only reason I raise it is because I don't get EIT data from at least one local digital broadcast channel, and at this point I don't know if it's because:

1) it's not there
2) it's there but not compliant to the EIT spec
3) it's there, compliant, and MythTV's EIT implementation is incomplete

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Is this the right thread to monitor regarding a solution to the sap2it problem? After reading this thread, it appears as thought there is no good replacement plan in progress. Is this true?

Untrue The MythTV developers are tackling it. Check the links in previous posts here for discussions on the MythTV mailing list.

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Try looking at the MythTV Wiki for updates and information. There's a big red/pink box about the issue at the top.

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Although there is no solid information on the migration away from Zap2It there seems to be some action behind the scenes. The MythTV Wiki page has a little info and a link to the newly formed EasyTVData.org website. They're looking for legal council and an accountant as well.

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I encountered some problems with the zap2it accounts sooner than expected. I went to labs.zap2it.com to check up on some problems I had, and I got a message that one of my listings (HDTV broadcast) was no longer valid and had been deleted. My DirecTV listing was still there. I tried to add a new broadcast HDTV listing, but I get a Not Found error when I try. I was able to get past that Not Found error for all other listing types.

This will likely affect anyone who has a broadcast listing, whether for HDTV, NTSC, or both.

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I have had a similar problem. My Local Lineup has vanished and the zap2it website gives me an error when I try to recreate it.

Tim