thelinuxlink.net

http://www.schedulesdirect.org/

looks like we will have to pay though for it

The big question is how much? We'll find out soon!

riddlebox wrote:http://www.schedulesdirect.org/

looks like we will have to pay though for it

Like I've mentioned before, I actually think that's ideal (assuming the price isn't total assrape) - that way the majority of people won't suffer because several either refuse to play the game, or because dickhead manufacturers do.

Prices announced:
$15 for first 3 months (initial offering)
$20 per year eventually

http://schedulesdirect.org/

I'll sign up at the end of the month. These guys had to do this FAST!. It sounds like they plan on improving things as they go along. $20 per year is reasonable IMHO.

TBH, they kind of controll the market at this point - it's nice they aren't gouging. Not that I'd expect them to, considering who makes up their core, but still. $5 a month for a service that essentially makes what amounts to a dumb recording device, like a VCR, into a fill-blown DVR isn't a bad deal at all, especially when you consider how many myth boxeN (yeah, boxeN) are deployed. What I'm trying to say is that w/o sceduling, mythtv is more or less useless - it'd be easier to just setup a bunch of at jobs that fire off mencoder than it would be to use myth.

We had a free ride for several years with zap2it. Nothing is stopping someone from coding their own xml screen scraping script. You run the risk of that breaking every so often. $20 a year for piece of mind and good info is worth it. Still much cheaper than tivo:
1 year monthly - $17 = $204 a year
2 year monthly - $15 = $180 a year
3 year monthly - $13 = $156 a year

1 year pre-paid - $179
2 year pre-paid - $299 ($150 a year)
3 year pre-paid - $299 ($100 a year) 4th year is free

https://www3.tivo.com/store/plans.do

How long will it take KnoppMyth to make the change so that they support the latest schedulesdirect service, I wonder. I haven't upgraded to the most recent release, even, so maybe I'd better get my tail in gear and do it so I'm ready for the next upgrade that brings the schedulesdirect service in. Right now the price seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Article with details:
http://www.linux.com/feature/118505

Schedules Direct went live over the weekend. I haven't upgraded yet since my MythTV box is based on Ubuntu. Supposedly the feisty packages will be updated any day now. Please post and let us know how the transition goes.

I'm still archiving some shows, but I'll update to the latest KnoppMyth as soon as I can—I hope I can this weekend—and then start looking into updating to whatever version uses SchedulesDirect when it's available. I'll post here on my experiences, but I have to get through the latest update first. Time to look at the known issues section…

Updated packages for Ubuntu are in the "proposed" repos. Initial reports are positive. Should be in the universe repos very soon:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=536555

I need to get an entirely new setup and give it a try! I'm personally very optimistic about this project.

I may have to eventually go a different route. Much as I like MythTV and KnoppMyth, the MythTV music navigation is just not at all to my liking, and I'm interested in the Elisa project for their navigation UI alone. With KnoppMyth it's hard to imagine installing it, but with Ubuntu I think it wouldn't be that hard. I wonder what I'll do when Elisa eventually adds PVR capabilities...

Just saw this on /. thought y'all might enjoy:

Three MythTV Linux distros compared
http://www.linux.com/feature/118668

Patrick wrote:We had a free ride for several years with zap2it. Nothing is stopping someone from coding their own xml screen scraping script. You run the risk of that breaking every so often. $20 a year for piece of mind and good info is worth it.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but why should it even be necessary to code up screen-scraping scripts? The original providers of this information (i.e. the programming producers: TV stations, networks, and other broadcasters) have no reason for people not to know their programming schedules, and every reason for people to know them: otherwise they will not be able to watch the programming. So shouldn't it be simple to just ask them to provide this information in standardized format? Then all that is needed is to aggregate it (relatively easy). Why isn't the "ideal"/"target" price $0 rather than $20? In the worst case, something like an open-source project could produce the listings with a set of volunteers, each of whom runs scripts to "scrape" a given web-page or set of pages (and periodically verifies that they run correctly), which is again aggregated into one master database. But, I don't think even that should be necessary -- the providers have every reason to cooperate: has anyone even asked them?