| Newsgroups |
gmane.comp.tv.xmltv.general |
| Message-ID |
<[email protected]> |
Hi,
On Thu, 24 Apr 2014 10:24:31 -0300, jcanistrum wrote:
> Each list contains programming a month and can contain up to 40,000 rows
> and in general only 1,000 unique programs.
>
> As far as I understand the XMLTV format contains a header to describe the
> channels and later their referenced by their unique codes, but wouldn´t it
> be more efficient and produce much smaller files if we could have a XML
> group to describe the program and another to describe the schedule using
> just program codes?
Yes the file would be smaller but only where a programme is repeated during the period covered by the XML file. Most grabbers fetch only 4-7 days worth of listings and while it's true there will be repeats in there, as a percentage of the total file size I don't expect any saving to be huge.
It would also complicate the data grabbing as all the usual issues with programme 'matching' then come into play. E.g. unless the source data itself contains programme identifiers, the grabber has to make comparisons to try and decide whether a programme is a duplicate of another. Not as simple as it sounds! Sure the series/episode numbers can probably do this... provided they are available. Else you are left with comparing each programme object against every other in the set to see if it's a copy. (40,000 objects at an average 500 lookups per object = 20,000,000 object comparisons... yikes!)
One also needs to consider the downstream application: currently an app can take the XMLTV file and just display it 'as is' with negligible (if any) processing.
I guess it depends on the purpose behind your original question: are you looking simply to reduce file size, or are you looking for something which identifies duplicate programmes for you?
I think you have a very skewed data set if you are only seeing 1,000 unique entities out of a db of 40,000 (that means *every* programme is shown 9 times a week on average!). Or perhaps it's reasonable if you are looking at adverts. But then the XMLTV format wasn't designed for logging adverts ;-)
Just my tuppence worth :-)
Geoff
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