Modifications to Get TV Grid

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Modifications to Get TV Grid

News, Download , What Changed?, Known Bugs , How to Use, What's left to do?

Latest News

Feb 26, 2002: The old tripod site appears to be down, which has sadly taken the older versions of this code with it. Lesson learned; I'll keep better backups when I update this site.

Intro

One of the things I really like about open source projects is the ability to build off of someone else's work to add the little touches that you personally want. That's what's happening here.

Bruce Winter's fantabulous Misterhouse home automation project, which is incredibly useful even if you don't have any fancy light switches or motion sensors, has the ability to download TV listings from online sources and process them for easier local viewing, and for notifying you when your favorite shows are going to air. I wanted it to do a little more, so I tinkered a bit, and this page contains the results.

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Download
Latest files can be found here. Use shift-click or right-click to download. Ideally, this will be merged into the main download of misterhouse, but not until it's gone through some testing and tweaking to ensure it's useful.

You might not have to change your .ini file to use these, but I still recommend reading the How to Use section here to make the most of this. Please send feedback and comments to me, either on the misterhouse-users list, or at ufuiy001 [at] sneakemail.com. (Sorry, I had to munge that so the web-scraping spammers won't get my email address.)

File	Description	Updated
get_tv_grid.gz RedirAgent.pm.gz or if you prefer Winzip: get_tv_grid.zip RedirAgent.zip	(Author note: Bruce wrote these originally; I've just been mercilessly hacking at his code to make it do what I want to do. Please don't give me more credit than I deserve...) Updated version of get_tv_grid and RedirAgent.pm. Unpack both of these files in misterhouse's bin directory. I'd rather have RedirAgent.pm be inline in get_tv_grid, but I'm not smart enough with Perl packages to figure that out. Send me an update if you know how to do this. :-) This version is essentially identical to the previous versions in functionality, but with rewritten URL-retrieval code which seems to be more reliable. It now mimics someone physically browsing zap2it, but this results in a lot of downloaded data that is simply discarded along the way. This is in no way intended to be a final product, but just a stopgap release to get downloads working again while I continue work on the db-driven one. The code has been significantly restructured in an effort to educate myself about networking in Perl.	Feb. 26, 2002
gen_grid.pl.gz or if you prefer Winzip: gen_grid.pl.zip	Modification of tv_grid.pl that uses some of the new options of get_tv_grid. You don't need this, unless you want an example to use when altering your own tv_grid.pl. This is already quite out of date with what I use myself.	Feb. 26, 2002

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What Changed

So what changed?

Better handling of multiple DBs. I like to keep separate tv listings pages for my broadcast and my satellite sources, so this was important to me. This was actually a very small change.
Better handling of channel_keep and channel_skip lists. You can now skip any channels you like without generating invalid HTML.
Uses channel_min and channel_max to limit the range of channels you're interested in. This overrides the channel_keep and channel_skip parameters above, so you can just list the channels between your min and max.
Ability to control how many channels are put into an HTML table before closing it off and starting a new table. Smaller tables tend to render faster. It defaults to 40 channels per table.
Ability to configure the frequency of the timebar. Defaults to showing the timebar every 5 rows, but you can set it to whatever you want.
Miscellaneous tweaks to strip out references to unobtainable graphics, such as leftArrow, rightArrow, and black.gif. This just prevents some warnings from mh at runtime while viewing the listings.
Inclusion of table listing footer is now optional.
Automatically deletes raw HTML files unless you specify it should keep them. (Useful if you're repeatedly calling 'redo' on the tables until they look the way you want them to.)
Ability to specify how many days back of channel data you would like to purge from the database file. This can speed up queries a bit, but I didn't really look much at the db side of things.

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Known Bugs for the latest version

I don't think purge is working as I intended. I don't think this is a problem yet, however.
Severely inadequate testing! This release was a bit rushed, so bugs are bound to surface. I'll continue fixing whatever I find, but problem reports and code updates are always welcome.

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How to Use

This should be a drop-in replacement to your existing get_tv_grid. However, if you'd like to play around with the options a bit more to get the most out of it, your might want to simply run "get_tv_grid -help" and read the usage message. The specific options I've altered or added are in the following table, but you don't need to use any of them if you don't want to.

New or Altered get_tv_grid options:

Option	Description
-channel_max xyz	The highest channel number you want to see. Overrides any entries in your keep and skip lists. Defaults to 9999.
-channel_min xyz	The lowest channel number you want to see. Works same as above. Defaults to 1
-purge xyz	Age in days of DB entries that you would like purged from the DBM. Defaults to 28.
-include_footer	If specified, includes the footer at the bottom of the listings page.
-table_channels xyz	Number of channels to put into one HTML table before closing it off and starting a new one. Defaults to 40.
-timebars xyz	Number of channels between each timebar. Defaults to 5.
-preserveRaw	If specified, get_tv_grid will not delete the raw HTML files it just downloaded and/or used. This can be useful if you're playing with the above options to get things more to your liking.

Also, you might want to alter your .ini files to have some entries like these. I've defined two databases, tv and sat, to contain my local listings and my satellite listings in separate pages and databases. There's probably easier and/or better ways of doing this, but this works for me.

# mh.private.ini entries for Denver # local broadcast tv_provider = 5452908 tv_name = Local Broadcast @ Used to give a useful label on the web pages tv_hours=02,06,10,14,18,22 @ Which hours to get. Use all for all hours tv_label=none @ Which web link name. Use none to disable, tv_channels_keep=2,4,6,7,9,12,20,31,59 @ Which channels to keep tv_channels_skip= @ Which channels to skip tv_channel_min= 2 tv_channel_max= 59

# mh.private.ini entries for Denver # satellite tv

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sat_provider = 25066 sat_name = Dish Network Top 100 @ Useful label sat_hours=02,06,10,14,18,22 @ Which hours to get. Use all for all hours sat_label=none @ Which web link name. Use none to disable, sat_channels_keep=105,107,112,118,120,122,129,130,131,135,137,138,178,182,191,21 3,220,230,239,300,301,302,303,304,305,340,341,350,351,352,353,354,355,356 sat_channels_skip= @ Which channels to skip
tv_channel_min=105 tv_channel_max=356

What's left to do?

Quite a lot! I've actually begun a db-driven version of this that would retrieve data for multiple sources (broadcast, cable, satellite, etc.) to a common DB, and then use a separate script to generate multiple TV listing tables from the DB based upon whatever criteria you supply. Since this will take a while, the existing versions will continue to be supported until the db-driven versions are done and pass some amount of beta testing. Planned features probably include:

Generate individualized tv listings for different household members, supplied by DB data which should maximize its flexibility. (This might be a bit of a cpu hog, but would allow things like conditional display of program info, highlighting favorite shows, re-ordering channels, extra highlighting for non-rerun favorites, etc.)
Some limited amount of "retries" for obtaining raw data until it gets all the data it needs
Suggestions welcome!