GShowTV is a simple XMLTV based TV program viewer.

DEPENDENCIES

GShowTV depends on the following libraries:

gtk2-perl - http://gtk2-perl.sourceforge.net/

libgnome        - www.gnome.org (This is needed if you want to see the help
                                 (gnome-help))

libnotify-bin - http://www.galago-project.org/ - used for displaying

notifications using the notification framework in gnome. OPTIONAL.

All of these libraries should be available from the linux distribution you are already using.

INSTALLATION

After installing the libraries, XMLTV has to be configured. This can be done either on the command prompt manually, or you can use a program called xmltv-druid to configure and set up periodical update of the xmltv file. The druid can be launched directly from GShowTV if it's installed. The druid is available at the same site as gshowtv, the packages name is xmltv-druid. Usage of the druid is highly recommended.

To configure and set up the XMLTV manually on the command prompt, your should do the following:

Select the appropriate tv_grab_* command. (e.g. tv_grab_es if you are in Spain and tv_grab_fi if you are in Finland)
Configure the tv_grab you selected by running: "tv_grab_* --configure"
Set up the cron job, an example task is given:
0 5 * * * tv_grab_fi --quiet | tv_sort >/tmp/fi.xml ; mv /tmp/fi.xml ~/.xmltv/fi.xml
How to set up a cronjob, see "man crontab", or "man anacron"
Run the above tv_grab command on the command prompt once to populate the xmltv data file.
Launch gshowtv.
Set up the configuration details from the preferences dialog, e.g. the location of the xmltv file, etc.

If your tv_grabber doesn't provide you with channel images, you can setup channel images via gshowtv through the channel configuration window, or by manually copying the appropriate channel images to ~/.gshowtv/images/ with the name pattern:

<xmltv.channel.id>.[ext]

where xmltv.channel.id is the xmltv channel id which you can check from the data file and the ext part is any common image file extension. (I.e. .gif, .jpg, .png, ...)

PVR INTERACTION

If you wish to be able to record tv shows, you have to get/select/create an appropriate interface script between your recording backend (PVR) and gshowtv. An example script with documentation is the pvr-interface command contained within the distribution.