XMLTV Lineup Generator for the UK and Ireland

A tool to generate XMLTV lineups for the majority of TV platforms in the UK and Republic of Ireland.

Introduction

Each lineup generated by this utility should contain all channels available on a given TV platform. A platform is a specific TV service like Freesat or Virgin TV in the UK.

Lineups are generated by merging a variety of information. Currently the following daa sources are employed:

TV service provider websites (e.g. Virgin, Sky) for EPG/channel details
Wikipedia for EPG numbering, and channel availability
Transmitted DVB stream information for service/network identifiers and service names extracted via the w_scan or dvbscan tools
Data I maintain for the XMLTV Project including regional availability, XMLTV IDs and icons for supported channels
Channel index file from the Radio Times XMLTV service
Significant configuration information for each supported platform is also stored within the tool

Lineups are generated using the XMLTV Lineups Schema from the XMLTV Project to ensure that documents are not only well-formed but also valid lineup documents.

Prerequisites

In addition to a current installation or local build of XMLTV (0.5.63 at time of writing), this tool requires the following Perl modules to be installed for XML parsing and generation:

XML::Compile::Schema

If the tool should fail to run due to other missing dependencies, please install them via your favourite package manager or from CPAN.

Usage

To generate an XML document listing all supported platforms:

./lineup-generator --list-platforms

Each supported platform has an id which is used as an identifier in the following commands.

To generate an XML document containing the full lineup for a particular platform (e.g. 'freeview'):

./lineup-generator --generate-lineup --platform freeview

To output a multi-line list of icon URLs for all channels on a given platform (e.g. 'freesat'):

./lineup-generator --list-icons --platform freesat

To view usage information:

./lineup-generator --help

Supported TV platforms

Separate high definition and standard definition lineups are generated to cater for users with or without HDTV capability. Lineups for the following TV platforms are currently supported:

Freesat
Freesat HD
Freesat From Sky
Freeview
Freeview HD
Saorview
Sky
Sky HD
UPC Ireland
UPC Ireland HD
Virgin
Virgin HD

Pre-generated lineups

Regularly generated lineups for all supported platforms are available in my xmltv-lineups-uk repository on GitHub.

Filtering lineups

Channels are associated with regional/national availability and subscrition package details to allow filtering of a generated lineup to contain only those channels available in a particular location with a specific subscription. It is therefore quite likely to see several channels in a lineup occupying the same EPG slot even though only one should be available in a given location.

Note that the tv_grab_uk_rt listings grabber from the XMLTV Project filters lineups automatically during configuration and listings retrieval based on a user's configured location, TV platforms and subscription package selection.

Lineup details

The following details may be provided for a lineup:

type (generally DVB or STB)
display name
availability (by country, region or postcode where necessary)
details of lineup generation (date, generator, lineup id)

Channel details

The following details may be provided for each channel that is part of a lineup:

EPG preset
EPG section
Package (i.e. a subscription package or FTA)
Availability (by country, region or postcode)
Type (TV or radio)
XMLTV ID (where supported)
Name and short name
Channel icon
HDTV status
Aspect ratio
Whether channel is advert free

Additionally, channels broadcast via DVB-T (Freeview) and DVB-S (Freesat) may include the following information broadcast in the digital signal:

ONID (original network ID)
SID (service ID)
LCN (logical channel number)
Transmitted service name
Encryption status

xmltv-lineups.xsd

The XML Schema document supplied is that used by the XMLTV Project. All lineups are generated against this schema.

If you would like to see an example of the Perl data structure that is required by XML::Compile::Schema when generating a lineup against the xmltv-lineups schema, the following script will generate it for you:

./print-lineups-xsd-code

Robustness

In October/November 2012 many Wikipedia-based platform EPGs were deleted when it was determined that they were in contravention of Wikipedia policies. Backups of the relevant EPGs (providing channel numbering and other useful information) were taken and are now used when creating lineups.

If you notice any channels that have been renamed/added/deleted on a platform which are not reflected in its lineup, please inform the developer.

This tool employs significant pattern and string matching when merging data from multiple sources, and thus is prone to breakage if channel names or other key matching data are not consistent across sources.

Author information

I contribute to the XMLTV and MythTV projects and am working on various ways to make channel configuration in these project easier, especially for users in the UK and Republic of Ireland.

Feel free to follow me on GitHub and Twitter.

knowledgejunkie/xmltv-lineup-generator-uk