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TVProg

licensed under GPL by Christian Hahn (ch@medianetz.de).

What is TVProg?

TVProg is experimental software. It may be unstable and it is in a very early stage of development.

TVProg is a tv guide software. It fetches the tv guide source from tvmovie.de (using "getdata.pl" (thus, the current version "getdata.pl" is for Germany only, but contributions for other sources are welcome!) and stores it in a MySQL database. The TVProg package contains a script "list.cgi" that is run as a CGI script to browse the tv guide. You can select channels, do searches or look what is running right now. There's a detail view for every single tv show. Cookies are supported for keeping the view properties while browsing. A cron job script, "vcrwrapper.pl", acts as a wrapper for vcr. Run it every minute and you will have a nice frontend for vcr: In the tv show detail view you can click the record link to schedule it for recording.

I want to see it

Have a look at http://www.tvprog.org

Prerequtisites

MySQL + DBI + Apache + Perl

How do i install it?

1.) Set up the database (presuming you have the default root account):

[bash] mysqladmin -u root create tvprog [bash] mysql -u root tvprog < tvprog.sql [bash] mysql -u root tvprog < channels.sql (attention: contains german tv channels)

2.) Copy all the stuff to the cgi-bin dir, e.g. /home/httpd/cgi-bin/tvprog

3.) Edit config.pl and set your paths in the variables

4.) create a data dir writable by the web server: [bash] mkdir data
[bash] chmod 777 data

5.) Fetch initial data using "<fullpath>/getdata.pl <date>", where <date> is YYYYMMDD

6.) Browse your tv guide calling the URL with list.cgi

7.) Optionally: Edit the first line in get_data_for_next_day.pl and set the "-I" parameter. Edit the "cron" file and do a "crontab cron" to get vcrwrapper.pl running once a minute and get_data_for_next_day.pl running every night.

PLEASE NOTE THAT TVPROG IS EXPERIMENTAL AN IN VERY EARLY STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT. TVProg COMES WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY. IT IS LICENSED UNDER THE GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE (GPL).

Have fun!

FAQ

Q: The getdata stuff does not work, i get database errors! A: Please verify that you have set up the database correctly (step 1) and that the database access data is set correctly (in config.pl)

Q: That list.cgi stuff does not work!
A: Please have a look in the Apache log files, e.g. by [bash] tail -f /etc/logs/httpd/error_log

Q: I can get a listing of tv shows for a single day, but if i click on the next day's link, my channel selection is gone. A: You need to enable cookies in your browser and to call list.cgi with a full qualified hostname (see next question).

Q: Cookies don't work for me although i enabled cookie support in my browser. What's wrong? A: You probably don't have a "valid" server name. Check if there's a valid /etc/hosts or DNS entry for the ip address of your Apache server. If not, set the ServerName variable in httpd.conf to something. In list.cgi cookies need to have a domain. The domain is extracted from $ENV{'SERVER_NAME'}, so we need something like "host.domain" as ServerName.

In short: Do not call "http://myserver/cgi-bin/list.cgi" but call "http://myserver.mydomain/cgi-bin/list.cgi"

Q: When i try to run ./vcrwrapper.pl or ./getdate.pl directly from the current dir, it complains about missing libs or dirs. A: These scripts are intended to run as cronjobs. Please call them with the full path.

Credits

Thanks to Andreas Roedl <flood@flood-net.de> for the 20:15 patch. Thanks to Juergen Henge-Ernst <juergen@henge-ernst.de> for the CalendarLib patch Thanks to Jan Windischmann <jwmn@gmx.de> for reporting the error in a corrupt sql channel dump.

Contact

Christian Hahn - ch@medianetz.de