I have XMLTV!

Something that is very hard for Australians to get their hands on is a good XMLTV stream. Using the alevtd teletext webserver, Channel Seven‘s AUSTEXT service and some Python, I’ve got XMLTV feeds for ABC, Seven, and Network Ten. It’s still needs some bugfixing before I release it, and some better support for SBS (which has the TV listings in two columns for parts). There’s no Channel 9 stream as Channel 7 doesn’t carry a TV guide feed for it.

The idea is make a nice daily cron job to switch your TV card to Channel 7 at about 7:00am, start alevtd, wait a couple of minutes, and run the script... you get nice XMLTV data. I’m not going to be publishing the generated stream, just the program to make it. (Copyright issues) You’ll need a good Channel 7 signal to use this program.

Definitely worth the good overnight hack that created it, and far better than the existing tv_grab_au with a feed only for SBS that’s quite off in places.