Freevo, xawtv, anything to watch TV on Linux (and get xmlTV working)?
 

Hi there! I've been dorkin with this for quite some time now, and just when there seems to be a light at the end of the tunnel, bam! It's a flashlight. Anyway...

I am trying to get xmlTV working. I am in a world of perl modules. Currently I am getting trapped from what seems to be a loop. Here's the deal:

From the xmlTV install:
So like a good little linuxer not knowing jack about jack, I just followed the directions blindly and went to google and freshmeat to find the packages listed (not HTML::TableExtract HTML::TreeBuilder Tk::TableMatrix XML::Simple or CGI since I didn't install those things associated with them). I seemed to have gotten them all, and installed their dependencies and finally themselves. However, when I fire up LWP to install it, I get:
The problem is that I have installed HTML::Parser but it's not recognizing it. Then when I go back to install xmlTV after that (if I continue regardless) I still get the error:
Even though they are. Again, I don't know jack about anything, much less about perl, so if anyone could shed some light on this for me, or if I am making this too hard, then the easier way to get around this, that'd be great.

I'm doing it so I can watch TV on my PC, using any TV player out there, however I would like to use Freevo and/or XawTV if that's at all possible.

If you need any more info, please, let me know :)

Thanks for any suggestion

Cool

<edit>
My card info:
It's a WinTV GO card, using the bttv module. From lspci I get:
I'm running Slack 8.1 and I'm in the US so it's NTFS.

</edit>

Cool

you don't need xmltv to use xawtv at all. I really dislike xmltv. the way it downloads info seems very backwards, so i took the remote sites out of it's code and wrote my own app to get tv listings in a quarter of the time. i also didn't like that freevo stuff, far to gimmicky and flashy. but then as i hate kde too, that's no suprise. if all you want to do is watch normal tv xawtv is the way to go.

as for HTML::Parser it should be listed in:

/usr/lib/perl5/vendor_perl/5.8.0/i386-linux-thread-multi/HTML/Parser.pm

or your equivalent if you're not using 5.8.0. if it's not there, do a find for it in the perl5 directory. and if it's not there, it's not there.... check the parser install for errors you might have missed.

and as for the card itself, all you should need in modules.conf is

alias char-major-81 bttv

as it's such a common card the default tuner settings etc. should be picked up by default.

Thank you for your response, I'll fire it up tomorrow and give it a go. That XML crap was giving me a headache, so I left it alone until now, and then I saw your response and was relieved. I've had some luck watching TV with mplayer:
mplayer -tv on:blahblah the default line from the docs.
And with kino's v4l input (very shoddy there).
But in mplayer the frequency seemed jacked up as there was the upper half of the screen at the bottom of the window seperated by a large black line showing the bottom half of the screen at the top of the window (if that makes any sense).

Anyway, I'll give xawtv another try tomorrow and see what I can get. I'll add that line to modules.conf

Thanks again Chris

Hey Chris, long time since I visited this thread :)

Anyway, I've given your simple.pl script a try, but like you mentioned elsewhere, it's for the UK and I'm not sure how to "port it" to US tv. I can see some of the places to change things, they are quite obvious but in there is comments that I don't understand very well. Also, anacova.com or whatever, like you said, is just for the UK, do you know of an equivilent for US?

I really am just lookin to get something working to record my scheduled programs at regular intervals (whether it's through cron or whatever I don't care) without me having to do anything after the initial setup.

I've now moved onto another project: www.mythtv.org which is using mysql and such but that's giving me a slight headache as well. However, it seems very "neat" so I'll stick it out until the end of the docs at least.

Anyway, basically just an update and a request for more comments/documentation on your simple script :)

Thanks

Cool

well i found how to make that script from the xmltv source code. i think the US site they use is called zapit, not sure. either way it's a completlely different xml format (which was the whole point of xmltv really..) so you'd need to totally restructure it. just use the source if you want to. i had to stab in the dark a lot to find the right params

Coal