hmm here's a crazy idea, how about we make a tv schedule website??

...rambling

I say this because I think we need to seriously rethink how we work with guide data. Even with sat extraction the guide data isn't that great, ie missing alot of season info, movie info etc, the kind of information that could be extracted from IMDB and TVTome for example.

Now we can automate that into the sat grab but you've still got a couple of problems, eg reliability + legality. No offense to Jaidev because he's pretty committed (except this week of all weeks, doh!) but even still, having some basic guide data to fall back on would be awesome.

Considering that most of what I (u 2?) record is season stuff or movies then it's probably not that difficult. I've been thinking of a website whereby people could (visually) see a guide data schedule (much akin to sky's site although ideally alot better) and make changes to it (password protected/moderated, etc). eg incorporating season information, genre's, etc.

The biggest critique here is that the user base is to0 small,however I disagree, (1) you can extrapolate alot of information from past data, eg season programs and (2) you can gather (layer?) the information from existing sources eg saturn, tvnz, sky, etc. and (3) you can offer the format in xmltv as well to encourage mythtv,freevo users to participate.

...dreaming

It'd be real nice to have layers of data on top of time blocks. eg tv1 6:00-7:00. so for example u could (optionally) have saturn's data as one layer, sky's data as another, user entered data as another, etc. the top layer (which would be the data to be exported) would be a combination of these layers based on various rules and conditions. ie do we have this data from this source, has it been verified, is this the last episode in the season, etc etc.

The idea situation would be to have it entirely user driven, that would be legal then (a point to argue with some of you here I am sure!!).

I know Bruce Simpson (aardvark.co.nz) is thinking something along these lines for an xml tv schedule (probably alot simpler in concept tho), he has mentioned it briefly on his site but knowing him he'll be months or years before he gets it complete.

just ideas, constructive criticism and ideas please