XMLTV 0.5.32

Gather television listings, process them and organize your viewing.
XMLTV is a file format for storing TV listings, defined in xmltv.dtd.
Then there are several tools to produce and process these listings.

Please see doc/QuickStart for documentation on what each program does,
and xmltv.dtd for documentation on the file format.

* Changes in this release

An extension to the DTD: there can now be zero or more <episode-num>
elements.  This is a backwards-incompatible change for anything using
the XMLTV.pm library or otherwise parsing XMLTV files.  Existing files
remain valid.

Lots of improvements to tv_grab_na_dd, see below.

New grabbers tv_grab_no for Norway by Christian Wattengard, and
tv_grab_pt for Portugal by Bruno Tavares.  tv_grab_no has a new
dependency, HTML::LinkExtractor.

Small improvements to tv_grab_nl, tv_grab_uk_rt, tv_grab_de_tvtoday,
tv_grab_se, tv_grab_es.

** Notes on the new U.S./Canadian Grabber. (tv_grab_na_dd)

tv_grab_na_dd in the 0.5.31 release was actually a preview and should
have been noted as such in the README.  0.5.32 is the first stable release.
The config file, command line options, and some output values are different
from the previous release.  Efforts will be made from this point forward to
maintain compatability.

tv_grab_na_dd users are strongly encouraged to read the man page for
the new grabber.  Don't forget about the --old-chan-id switch if you
depend on tv_grab_na channel IDs.

Current plans are to retire tv_grab_na after this release.  This is being
done partially at the request of Zap2IT, as the data collection service
used by tv_grab_na_dd was created by Tribune Media Services partially to
reduce the load tv_grab_na had on their servers.  TMS should be commended for
their actions.  Data in the new grabber is more detailed and download
times are greatly reduced.  If there are any issues preventing migration,
please raise them on the mailing lists or as a feature request.


* Installation

% perl Makefile.PL
% make
% make test
% make install

To install in a custom directory, replace the first line with
something like

% perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/wherever/

The system requirements are perl 5.6 or later, and a few Perl modules.
You will be asked about some optional components; if you choose not to
install them then there are fewer dependencies.  The full list of
needed modules is:

XML::Parser 2.34
XML::Twig 3.10
XML::Writer 0.4.6
Date::Manip 5.42a 
LWP 5.65
Memoize (included with perl 5.8 and later)
Storable (included with perl 5.8 and later)

HTML::TreeBuilder       (for many of the grabbers)
HTML::Parser 3.34       (for some of the grabbers)
Tk::TableMatrix         (if you want to run tv_check)
CGI                     (if you want to run tv_pick_cgi)
Text::Kakasi            (if you want to run tv_grab_jp)
XML::LibXML             (if you want to run tv_grab_se)
SOAP::Lite              (if you want to run tv_grab_na_dd)
HTML::TableExtract      (if you want to run tv_grab_no)
HTML::LinkExtractor     (if you want to run tv_grab_no)

Where a version number is given any later version also ought to work.
You may have difficulty with the XML modules on perl 5.8.0 - if so
send mail to the xmltv-users list.  Other perl versions should be OK.

The following modules are recommended, but the software still works
without them:

Term::ProgressBar                (displays pretty progress meters)
PerlIO::gzip (for perl 5.8+)     (makes tv_imdb a bit faster)
Lingua::Preferred 0.2.4          (helps with multilingual listings)
Unicode::String                  (non-ASCII chars in LaTeX output)
Lingua::EN::Numbers::Ordinate    (not really needed, to be honest)

And the Log::TraceMessages module is useful for debugging, but not
needed for normal use.

All of these can be installed with tarballs downloaded from CPAN or
(hopefully) using the CPAN shell program: 'perl -MCPAN -e shell', then
'install XML::Twig' and so on.  But you may find it easier to search
for packaged versions from your OS vendor or others - places which
distribute a packaged version of xmltv will often provide the modules
it needs too.

* Author and copying

This is free software distributed under the GPL, see COPYING.  But if
you would like to use the code under some other conditions, please do
ask.  There are many who have contributed code, they are credited in
individual source files.

There is a web page at
<http://membled.com/work/apps/xmltv/> and a Sourceforge
project 'XMLTV'.  There are some mailing lists:

    xmltv-announce@lists.sourceforge.net
    xmltv-users@lists.sourceforge.net
    xmltv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net

You ought to subscribe to the announce list at least.  Contact the
users list with most problems.

-- Ed Avis, ed@membled.com, 2004-04-13
$Id: README,v 1.107 2004/04/13 22:20:54 epaepa Exp $
