XMLTV 0.5.29

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_uk_rt has been tweaked to reduce the number of pages fetched,
and instead of the single --slow flag controlling whether full
programme descriptions are downloaded you can use --limit-details to
fetch descriptions for certain times of day.  Also fixed a case where
occasionally it would fail to parse a title from the site and die.
(Thanks to Niel Markwick and Charles Brej for these.)  Note that
tv_grab_uk_rt now requires the HTML::Parser package to be installed,
to provide the HTML::Entities module.

Small fix to get tv_grab_nl_wolf working again - it skips over
zero-length files seen on the download site.

A new grabber tv_grab_es_digital fetches listings for Spanish Digital+
channels (satellite TV on Astra and Hotbird).

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::Parser 2.34
XML::Twig 3.09
XML::Writer 0.4.1 - nonstandard release, see below
Date::Manip 5.42a 
LWP 5.65
Memoize (included with perl 5.8 and later)
Storable (included with perl 5.8 and later)

HTML::Parser 3.34       (if you want to run tv_grab_na or tv_grab_uk_rt)
HTML::TreeBuilder       (for many of the grabbers)
Tk::TableMatrix         (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.
You may have difficulty with the XML modules on perl 5.8.0 - if so
send mail to the xmltv-users list.  Other perl versions should be OK.

XML::Writer 0.4.1 is an unofficial bugfix release which you can get as
<http://cpan.org/modules/by-authors/id/E/ED/EDAVIS/XML-Writer-0.4.1.tar.gz>.
It might become the official latest version at some point.

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

Term::ProgressBar                (displays pretty progress meters)
PerlIO::gzip (for perl 5.8+)     (makes tv_imdb a bit faster)
Compress::Zlib                   (makes tv_grab_de a bit faster)
Lingua::Preferred 0.2.4          (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.

* 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'.  There are some mailing lists:

    xmltv-announce@lists.sourceforge.net
    xmltv-users@lists.sourceforge.net
    xmltv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net

You ought to subscribe to the announce list at least.  Contact the
users list with most problems.

-- Ed Avis, ed@membled.com, 2004-02-14
$Id: README,v 1.96 2004/02/14 22:33:03 epaepa Exp $
