[kwlug-disc] Schedules direct: What do you think about them?

[Paul Gallaway]

On Sun, Mar 8, 2009 at 1:31 AM, Raul Suarez <rarsa at yahoo.com> wrote:
[snip]
> Is anyone using Schedules Direct? I was searching and as far as I can tell it is the only source that can be used with MythTV (Other than screen scraping).
>
> So, is anyone of you using them? What do you think about them?

There's a scraper called mc2xml that supports scraping Canadian/North
American listings among others.
http://mc2xml.110mb.com/

It supports multiple websites and will even retrieve listings from
Schedules Direct if you have an account.

This of course raises other questions about what the terms of use for
the site are and whether you have the right to access said data with a
scraper. I'll leave it up to you to determine for yourself since I am
not a lawyer. My best guess, that as an individual the answer is
'probably' ;)

It works pretty well in a cron job. Some days it seems that the data
is overly generic for a lot of the shows in my scheduler - in which
case they get [re]recorded. Most often these are reruns that I've
already seen so I just mark them as watched or delete them. I've been
considering switching to Schedules Direct just to see if the data are
better. But everything works so I don't want to break it.
-- 
~pAul.

        all good things. all in good time.