XMLTV 0.5.70

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.

* Major Changes in this release (0.5.70)

tv_grab_eu_egon - removed broken grabber
tv_grab_fi_sv   - re-enable Swedish language listings of Finnish TV channels
tv_grab_sd_json - renamed to tv_grab_zz_sdjson (not country specific)

And lots of other changes (see ChangeLog for details)

* Installation

Note: Windows users are strongly advised to use the pre-built EXE as installing
all the prerequisites is non-trivial. For those who want to give it a go,
instructions are in doc/exe_build.html. Those instructions can be used for both
building xmltv.exe as well as a local install.

Basic installation instructions (Linux/Unix):

% 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 5.8.3 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.

Please note that in addition to the specific modules listed below, the
tv_grab_zz_sdjson_sqlite grabber requires Perl 5.16 to be installed.

** Required distribtions/modules

Required distributions/modules for XMLTV's core libraries are:

Date::Manip 5.42a
File::Slurp
JSON (see note below)
LWP 5.65
Term::ReadKey
XML::LibXML
XML::Parser 2.34
XML::TreePP
XML::Twig 3.28
XML::Writer 0.6.0

Required modules for grabbers/utilities are:

Archive::Zip                  (tv_grab_eu_epgdata, tv_grab_uk_bleb)
CGI                           (tv_pick_cgi, core module until 5.20.3, part of CGI)
CGI::Carp                     (tv_pick_cgi, core module until 5.20.3, part of CGI)
Compress::Zlib                (for some of the grabbers, core module since 5.9.3, part of IO::Compress)
Data::Dump                    (for tv_grab_it_dvb)
Date::Calc                    (tv_grab_il)
Date::Format                  (for some of the grabbers, part of TimeDate)
Date::Language                (tv_grab_ar, tv_grab_dtv_la, part of TimeDate)
Date::Parse                   (tv_grab_dtv_la, tv_grab_nl, part of TimeDate)
DateTime                      (for several of the grabbers)
DateTime::Format::ISO8601     (tv_grab_zz_sdjson_sqlite)
DateTime::Format::SQLite      (tv_grab_zz_sdjson_sqlite)
DateTime::Format::Strptime    (tv_grab_eu_epgdata)
DateTime::TimeZone            (tv_grab_fr)
DBD::SQLite                   (tv_grab_zz_sdjson_sqlite)
DBI                           (tv_grab_zz_sdjson_sqlite)
Digest::SHA                   (tv_grab_zz_sdjson{,_sqlite}, core module since 5.9.3)
File::HomeDir                 (tv_grab_zz_sdjson_sqlite)
File::Which                   (tv_grab_zz_sdjson_sqlite)
HTML::Entities 1.27           (for several of the grabbers, part of HTML::Parser 3.34)
HTML::Parser 3.34             (tv_grab_it, tv_grab_it_dvb, part of HTML::Parser 3.34)
HTML::Tree                    (for many of the grabbers, part of HTML::Tree)
HTML::TreeBuilder             (for many of the grabbers, part of HTML::Tree)
HTTP::Cache::Transparent 1.0  (for several of the grabbers)
HTTP::Cookies                 (for several of the grabbers)
HTTP::Request::Common         (tv_grab_eu_epgdata, part of HTTP::Message)
IO::Scalar                    (for some of the grabbers, part of IO::Stringy)
IO::Uncompress::Unzip         (tv_grab_fr_kazer, core module since 5.9.4, part of IO::Compress)
List::MoreUtils               (tv_grab_zz_sdjson_sqlite)
LWP::Protocol::https          (tv_grab_zz_sdjson)
LWP::UserAgent::Determined    (tv_grab_zz_sdjson_sqlite)
SOAP::Lite 0.67               (tv_grab_na_dd)
Time::Piece                   (tv_grab_huro, core module since 5.9.5)
Time::Seconds                 (tv_grab_huro, core module since 5.9.5)
Tk                            (tv_check)
Tk::TableMatrix               (tv_check)
URI                           (for some of the grabbers, part of URI)
URI::Escape                   (for some of the grabbers, part of URI)
XML::DOM                      (tv_grab_is)
XML::LibXSLT                  (tv_grab_is)

** Recommended distribtions/modules

The following modules are recommended (e.g. faster JSON processing, better
character handling) but the software will works without them installed:

File::chdir                      (testing grabbers)
JSON::XS                         (faster JSON handling, see note below)
Lingua::Preferred 0.2.4          (helps with multilingual listings)
Log::TraceMessages               (useful for debugging, not needed for normal use)
PerlIO::gzip                     (can make tv_imdb a bit faster)
Term::ProgressBar                (displays pretty progress bars)
Unicode::String                  (improved character handling in tv_to_latex)

** JSON libraries

By default, libraries and grabbers that need to handle JSON data should specify
the JSON module. This module is a wrapper for JSON::XS-compatible modules and
supports the following JSON modules:

JSON::XS
JSON::PP
Cpanel::JSON::XS

JSON will use JSON::XS if available, falling back to JSON::PP (a core module
since 5.14.0) if JSON::XS is not available. Cpanel::JSON::XS can be used as an
explicit alternative by setting the PERL_JSON_BACKEND environment variable
(please refer to the JSON module's documentation for details).


All required modules can can be installed from CPAN using the CPAN shell program:

% 'perl -MCPAN -e shell'

then 'install XML::Twig' and so on.

You may find it easier to search for packaged versions of modules from your OS
provider - software sources which distribute a packaged version of XMLTV will
often provide the modules it needs too.

* Proxy servers

Proxy server support is provide by the LWP modules.
You can define a proxy server via the HTTP_PROXY enviornment variable.
    http_proxy=http://somehost.somedomain:port

For more information, see the the following:
http://search.cpan.org/~gaas/libwww-perl-5.803/lib/LWP/UserAgent.pm#$ua->env_proxy

* Known issues

If a full HTTP URL to the XMLTV.dtd is provided in the DOCTYPE declaration of
an XMLTV document, be aware that it is possible for the link to instead
redirect to a page for accepting cookies. Such cookie-acceptance pages are more
common in Europe, and can result in applications being unable to parse the
file.

* Author and copying

This is free software distributed under the GPL, see COPYING. There are many
who have contributed code: they are credited in individual source files and
in the authors.txt mapping file.

* Resources

We have a project web page and wiki at http://www.xmltv.org

We maintain our source code using git and our Github project is available at
https://github.com/XMLTV/xmltv. Please browse and submit new issues on our Github
issue tracker at https://github.com/XMLTV/xmltv/issues.

We run the following mailing lists:

    xmltv-announce: Subscribe — XMLTV Release Announcements (low traffic)
    xmltv-users: — XMLTV users list, mostly for problem reporting and general XMLTV questions
    xmltv-devel: Subscribe — XMLTV development discussion group

Please subscribe to any/all lists at https://sourceforge.net/p/xmltv/mailman/

Finally, we run an IRC channel #xmltv on Freenode. Please join us!

-- Nick Morrott, [email protected], 2018-06-14