PVR-500 in New Zealand

Step 2: Some small hacks

This step is needed for New Zealand users, as MythTV doesn't list New Zealand as having a TV grab script. If you aren't in New Zealand, you may be able to skip this, or taylor this step to your own country.

Electronic Program Guides (EPGs) allow the MythTV system to know that the Simpsons is on at 5pm weeknights as well as 7:30pm Wednesday on Channel 3. This is what makes MythTV so great, since you can just select "The Simpsons" and it will record it whenever its on.

Currently, there is now only one source for Electronic Program Guides in New Zealand. mr.geek.nz was shutdown, hairy.geek.nz's datafeed is now blank, and nz.ontv.uni.cc is down. The only feed left is a self generated feed using reven.co.nz's xmlTVNZ program. This program "screenscrapes" data from various websites.

These two scripts grabbed data from the respective feeds when they were working. They aren't working now, but I leave the links here incase they come back online, or someone wants to see them:

OnTV. tv_grab_nz_ontv. (Not working)
Mr.Geek.nz. tv_grab_nz_mrgeek. (Not working)

Instead, the way to get EPG is to install Mono on your system, then download xmlTVNZ from www.reven.co.nz. You will need to download new versions from this site often, as whenever one of the respective websites changes how they display TV data, the program needs to be updated.

xmlTVNZ

To update the EPG data, after you have set up mythtv (see step 3), run the following (assuming xmlTVNZ has been installed in /home/mythtv)

# cd /home/mythtv
# ./xmlTVNZ.exe tvguide.xml -days 5 tv1 tv2 sky_tv3 prime
# mythfilldatabase --file 1 -1 tvguide.xml --update

Feel free to replace the list of channel data with your own preferences (see the reven.co.nz website for what the channel data names mean. I found the default tv3 data crashed the program, so I used sky_tv3).

This script will need to be run routinely, and I set it up as a daily cron job.

This is obviously not the optimum way of doing this, and if anyone finds another source for EPG data, please let me know!

[Step 1] [Up] [Step 3]

Contact me: zaf@nrc.co.nz with any updates or suggestions, or maybe questions if they are intelligent ones.