Easy TV Data promises TV listings for Myth TV users

A group of developers from free software digital video recorder (DVR) related projects announced the first step towards a solution for obtaining free television listing information this week. The search for such a free guide data source has been on since June, when Zap2it Labs announced it would shut down its free, XML-based service as of September 1.

Zap2it’s announcement cited “continued misuse” of the service — which it had offered “to hobbyists for their own personal, noncommercial” use — and “other business factors” as reasons for discontinuing the service. Zap2it is a product of Tribune Media Services, a commercial TV listings provider supplying information to newspapers and proprietary DVRs.

Zap2it’s primary product is a TV listings Web site, but its Zap2it Labs XML service proved more useful for free software projects because it provided a structured data source easily parsed for usage in a scheduling database. For free DVR projects like MythTV, such a commercial service is not available. The alternative method for acquiring guide data is “screen scraping” — parsing the rendered HTML from TV listings Web sites, including Zap2it’s.

Screen scraping is inherently less reliable in the long run because the HTML markup can change at any time, interrupting service until developers can adjust the parser. But even when the parser is functioning, the unstructured nature of HTML is inferior to the semantically marked up XML — which portions of table content are episode titles, series names, actors’ names, and so on must be determined by a human being.

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