Re: Updating the IceTV grabber for possible inclusion in the XMLTV project

On 5 May 2017 at 02:20, Daniel Hall <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Hi Everyone,
>
> Just wanted to introduce myself. I am the CTO of the Australian EPG provider IceTV.
>
> We have been upgrading our XMLTV feed and even have a basic XMLTV subscription now which doesn't include our remote scheduling and advanced recording options for a reduced price.

Hi Daniel,

Welcome to the XMLTV project, and thank you and IceTV for providing an
XMLTV listings feed to users.

> We want to see if we can get a new grabber added to the XMLTV distribution to make it easier for people to use IceTV, with that in mind I do have some questions that I hope you guys can answer.

Great :)

> With the grabber are the 'days' and 'offset' options mandatory? We generally provide the entire feed at once but then can also just provide incremental updates of changed guide data (using the 'fast' parameter).

Those options are mandatory iff the grabber claims support of the
"baseline" capability [1].

The baseline capability is ideally that - the minimum options that a
grabber provides to an end-user to control output of their configured
channels and data. I'd hope that all grabbers support at least this
capability.

If you haven't already found them, I'd recommend looking through both
the "XMLTV Capabilities" [1] and "How to Write a Grabber" [2] articles
on the XMLTV wiki to get a grounding in which capabilities are
supported and how to advertise them in a grabber to
end-users/applications.

  [1] http://wiki.xmltv.org/index.php/XmltvCapabilities
  [2] http://wiki.xmltv.org/index.php/HowtoWriteAGrabber

Note that there is also the "preferredmethod" capability that can hint
to end-users and consuming applications the preferred (to the
supplying service) way to retrieve data i.e. if it is faster to
download all available data and filter locally in the grabber, or
specifically ask for certain days/offsets at runtime.

Please feel free to ask for more details if this doesn't answer your
question, and any more questions you might have.

Cheers,
Nick

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