XMLTV 0.5.19

Gather television listings, process them and organize your viewing.
XMLTV is a file format for storing TV listings, defined in xmltv.dtd.
Then there are several tools to produce and process these listings.

Please see doc/QuickStart for documentation on what each program does,
and xmltv.dtd for documentation on the file format.

* Changes in this release

tv_grab_na has been causing server problems at zap2it because some
users have set retry-delay to 0, which causes tv_grab_na to pummel
the zap2it servers when problems occur (500 http errors for example).
To fix this, a 2 second minimum retry-delay is enforced. Also fixed
problem in error reporting where array/scalar conversion was causing
error messages to be converted to '1'.

tv_grab_it now have working --days and --offset options and now
always warns if the downloaded page contains no programms. It
also now skips the whole channel if the first day of programs isn't
available.

tv_grab_nl now understands 'Breedbeeld uitzending' means wide-screen
and so sets the aspect ratio in the output to 16:9.

tv_grab_sn does more validation on stop times and drops questionable
ones.

tv_grab_uk channel lists now support transient field that is used
to suppress warnings about these transient channels disappearing
and reappearing on the web site.

tv_grab_uk_rt has had some more date validation checking added and
better identifies details that belong in the programme description.

tv_grab_de is not working in this release because the upstream data
files are not available.

* Installation

% perl Makefile.PL
% make
% make test
% make install

To install in a custom directory, replace the first line with
something like

% perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=/wherever/

The system requirements are perl 5.6 or later, and a few Perl modules.
You will be asked about some optional components; if you choose not to
install them then there are fewer dependencies.  The full list of
needed modules is:

XML::Twig 3.09
XML::Writer
Date::Manip 5.42a 
LWP 5.65
Memoize (included with perl 5.8 and later)

HTML::Parser            (if you want to run tv_grab_na)
HTML::TableExtract 1.08 (if you want to run tv_grab_sn)
HTML::TreeBuilder       (for many of the grabbers)
Tk::TableMatrix         (if you want to run tv_check)
XML::Simple             (if you want to run tv_check)
CGI                     (if you want to use tv_pick_cgi)

Where a version number is given any later version also ought to work.

The following modules are recommended, but the software still works
without them:

Term::ProgressBar                (displays pretty progress meters)
Compress::Zlib                   (makes tv_grab_de, tv_imdb a bit faster)
Lingua::Preferred                (helps with multilingual listings)
Unicode::String                  (non-ASCII chars in LaTeX output)
Lingua::EN::Numbers::Ordinate    (not really needed, to be honest)

And the Log::TraceMessages module is useful for debugging, but not
needed for normal use.

All of these can be installed with tarballs downloaded from CPAN or
(hopefully) using the CPAN shell program: 'perl -MCPAN -e shell', then
'install XML::Twig' and so on.  But you may find it easier to search
for packaged versions from your OS vendor or others - places which
distribute a packaged version of xmltv will often provide the modules
it needs too.

Installing a nonstandard release of Date::Manip is no longer needed
since the official version (as of 5.42a) includes the needed bugfixes.

* Author and copying

This is free software distributed under the GPL, see COPYING.  But if
you would like to use the code under some other conditions, please do
ask.  There are many who have contributed code, they are credited in
individual source files.

There is a web page at
<http://membled.com/work/apps/xmltv/> and a Sourceforge
project 'XMLTV'.  Please join the xmltv-announce mailing list at
Sourceforge for notification of new versions.

-- Jerry Veldhuis, jveldhuis@sf.net, 2003-09-28
$Id: README,v 1.77 2003/09/28 20:16:29 jveldhuis Exp $
