| Making a Swedish TiVo - Part 1 |
| Written by Stephen Baines | |
| Friday, 03 April 2009 | |
|
We moved to Sweden a couple of years ago. One of the things that we loved in the UK was our TiVo. Not being able to TiVo Swedish TV has made watching Swedish TV painful. The Viasat+ box we had is dreadful - it's actually worse than the UK Sky+ box it is based on - amazing but true! This is our journey to a real Swedish TiVo.
In September last year we got Canal Digital . We didn't go for a PVR from them. I intially set up one of our old UK TiVos (Series 1 hardware) to do manual recording, which was ok for a while, but hardly made it easy to watch TV. Around Christmas we started using a FireDTV card with DVB Viewer . It works well. Ish. The problem isn't the card, or the DVB Viewer. The problem is that it runs on Windows, and Windows crashes, has funnies, and so you can no longer use it. Also, unless the Canal Digital card is in the original box, it doesn't work properly and needs "refreshing" every month. This was fine as a stop-gap, but not long term. TiVo abandoned the UK years ago, and seem to not want to return. They also are very quiet on the Nero/Tivo LiquidTV system in Europe. So, the only alternative was to take inspiration from the Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, and Dutch, and set about modifying one of my UK TiVos for use in Sweden, complete with listings. The info is out there, but very spread out. This is my attempt to make it easy to get to in one single place for Sweden. First Get The Tools and HardwareThere are quite a few tools you need to get the TiVo up and running with a "roll your own" EPG. First, you need a TiVo. UK TiVos turn up on EBay on a regular basis, and sometimes can be picked up for around £20 if you are lucky. Even with shipping, it should cost you less than £60 for a TiVo. Next, you need a network card. Without this, you may as well give up now. You can go for either a TurboNet card or a CacheCard . I've had both over the years. The TurboNet is fine with a "standard" TiVo, but if you've got a large hard disc, the Cache Card makes it faster. If you don't want the hassle of customs and ordering from the US, there are a couple of UK suppliers that frequent the TiVo Community Forums in the UK. Their prices will look more expensive than the US, but if your package is stopped by Posten or Tull you'll have to add a customs charge, customs tarrif AND MOMs... I'm not going to go through how to install the cards - perfectly good guides are available on those websites. I'm also not going to go over how to put in a larger hard disc into your TiVo, that again is well covered on many websites. I especially recommend Steve Conrad's website for these sort of things. They are proven pages that many people refer to. Once you've got the disc you want, and the network set up, the next big thing you need to gather are the software tools. TiVo uses Linux, so a lot of this is done via telnet sessions. This can be using the standard telnet tools that come with your OS, but if you are using Windows I highly recommend downloading PuTTY and saving your sanity! PC Tools you'll need
For processing the data into slices, you'll need xmltv2tivo. TiVo specific tools you'll need:
Unless you've got all those things, don't think of going any further! Access to these tools from the UK, USA, Australia and New Zealand is blocked as they have a TiVo service they can subscribe to. Get your listingsUntil you know you can actually gather the listings, there is no point going any further with the TiVo.You will not get all your listings from one source. You will have to do some fiddling. Some sources are better than others. If you aren't prepared to spend some time, you may as well give up now. I have the Canal Film + Family package. I'm not interested in the other services. Here are where to obtain listings for these stations - stations not listed I either don't get or haven't selected. It is REALLY important to use UTC for collecting XMLTV data! If you don't, you will spend ages fiddling with timezones on your PC, TiVo etc, and drive yourself nuts. I did. XMLTVThe good news is that listings from XMLTV are free, they are also of a very good quality! A large number of the channels you need are here. The basic commands to configure XMLTV for Sweden are as follows. This example is with a Windows DOS prompt way. The same method applies to Linux or a Mac. set TZ=UTC xmltv tv_grab_se_swedb --configure Then follow the prompts for choosing the channels you want. If in doubt, select all. But it is better to just choose the ones you want! For Sweden, I recommend the following channels are downloaded using XMLTV:
xmltv tv_grab_se_swedb --days 14 --output sweden.xml This will generate an XMLTV file that can be processed later. On the next page are the MC2XML channels MC2XMLThis tool will grab listings from the Microsoft servers. The data isn't great. It's nowhere near as complete as XMLTV. But it fills in some holes in the data. I grab data for the following channels using MC2XML
To grab listings for Sweden, use the following command mc2xml -c se -g 241 -u Select digital satellite (5) and it will then download the listings to xmltv.xml I recommend making a file called mc2xml.chl with the following in I41.756718.microsoft.com It will then only download listings for those three channels. ONTV.DKTracking down the last few channels was not easy! Unfortunately, they included channels I really wanted! BBC Entertainment, etc, were not available elsewhere that I could find, whilst the older BBC Prime was. Grrr. ONTV costs money - about 80 DKK a year. If you don't want to pay, then don't have the listings for these channels, or try and find them elsewhere! Once you've purchased a subscription you'll get an XML link to your listings. You need to download your listings and save it to a file, OR if you are using windows the XMLTV GUI will do it automatically for you using one of it's grabbers. The listings here are complete, but the XMLTV feed does not include much in the way of genre information, etc, so the data isn't as good quality, even though you are paying for it. The following channels are the ones I get with ONTV.DK
If you don't need these channels, don't buy a subscription.
The Complete DataYou now have two or three XML files containing your listings. You can either process each file individually, or combine them , pre-process them, and get better data out. I recommend pre-processing them using XMLTV GUI. It will also sanitize the listings and make them easier to turn into a "slice" to upload to the TiVo. In Part 2 I will go over setting up the channels on the TiVo.
|
|
| Last Updated ( Friday, 03 April 2009 ) |