XmlTv

Activation

To enable or disable this plugin navigate to the Plugins section. Make sure you tick the XmlTv checkbox in the right pane or else the plugin will not be activated.

Settings

Expand the Plugins node and select the XmlTv node in the tree, you should see the following screen:

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• Folder where the tvguide.xml file is stored

• Browse to where your tvguide.xml is located. This will be where the creating program (such as WebEPG) saves the file. There should also be a xmltv.dtd file in this folder. If MediaPortal is installed this will usually be in the XMLTV folder. (Note in Windows Vista this folder may be located in the C:\Users\All Users\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal or C:\Program Data\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal folders.) The plugin will check this folder every minute to see if the file contained in it has changed since the last check. If it has, an import is automatically started.

• Import new tvguide.xml

• This should be ticked if you only have one tvguide.xml file that you wish to import.

• Delete old programs before import

• This should be ticked if you want the contents of your EPG to be deleted before a new tvguide.xml is imported.

• A reason for doing this is that some TV guide sources may have programmes listed 14 days in advance. However, the TV companies may not have confirmed all their schedule this far forward so the guide may contain entries such as "To be confirmed" or "Film to be confirmed". These will be loaded into the EPG database and MediaPortal sees them as another programme. This is not too much of a problem while they are 10-14 days off, but as current days age off a large proportion of your EPG may end up as "To be confirmed". The normal XMLTV import will only add new EPG entries where none exist in the database. It will not update existing ones. Deleting all the old programs before import ensures that the EPG data in the database is as up to date as the tvguide.xml being imported.

• Import files in new tvguide.lst

• A tvguide.lst file is a text file that contains a list of tvguide xml files to import (one filename per line). This would be used where you are using more than one XMLTV grabber. Make sure this is not ticked if you do not have a tvguide.lst as it can cause imports of the tvguide.xml file to fail. When option is ticked, import of the xml's happen whenever a newer version of the xml files is ready for import, or a new tvguide.lst file is detected.

• Apply timezone compensation when loading tvguide.xml

• If this option is checked the timezone information inside tvguide.xml will be used, otherwise it will be ignored and assumed that all times are local times. When this option is checked all times will be converted to UTC.

• Hours and Minutes

• The two text boxes (Hours and Minutes) provide a way to specify additional compensation, regardless and independent of the "Apply timezone compensation" setting. What you specify here will be added to all times in tvguide.xml. This additional compensation is normally used in conjunction with the "Apply timezone compensation" setting to convert UTC times back to local.
  So if you have a tvguide.xml that contains timezone info and your timezone is UTC+1 you should check the option and specify additional compensation of 1 hours and 0 minutes.
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• There is however a known issue with this: it cannot take into account daylight saving (i.e. your timezone changes from UTC+1 to UTC+2 during the summer). You have to change your configuration manually twice a year, which makes it an ugly solution. The issue is in mantis but not scheduled for 1.2.0, probably will be fixed in 1.3.0.

• Force Import

• Rather than waiting for a new tvguide.xml file to be detected you can force the plugin to import a guide. You may also want to use this if you are experiencing problems with and import and don't want to keep having to create a new tvguide.xml file in order to test.
• Note: You will need to have completed the mapping stage (below) before being able to run an import.

• Import status report

• Shows the time the last tvguide.xml was imported and the status of the import. The fields will be empty if a tvguide.xml has never been imported to the current TV Server installation.

Mappings

When you select the Mappings tab you will see the following screen:

If you have a populated tvguide.xml and press the Load/Refresh button you will see a screen similar to the following:

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• ID: Unknown.

• Tuning Channel: Shows the channel names as reported by the TV tuner (not the channel name you may have provided under TV Channel setup, so especially for analog tuners this name may not be accurate).

• Guide Channel: Shows channels from the XMLTV file, autodetected as good as possible.

• The next column shows how well the data in your tvguide.xml matches your channel configuration::
  • Green is an exact match
  • Yellow is a partial match
  • Red is no match
  • White is already mapped.

• Visible in Guide: These checkboxes are informative only, they cannot be changed. Their value corresponds to the checkboxes on the TV Channel setup.

The Partial match checkbox can be checked to help get the maximum number of channels automatically mapped and then unchecked for subsequent scans where there are likely to be only a few new channels.

You can fix any incorrect matches using the drop down control in the Guide Channel column.

The Export button writes the names of the selected XMLTV channels to a text file. (The use of this button is not totally clear, since there is no corresponding Import button, and the file written does not contain enough information to make a useful import.)

Hit the Save button after you've made changes to the mappings.

Remote

When you select the Remote tab you will see the following screen:

This is used when you wish to retrieve an XMLTV file from a Web- or FTP-site.

Some example addresses:

• http://www.mysite.com/xmltv.php for a dynamically-generated XMLTV file on a webserver.
• ftp://ftp.mysite.com/tvguide.xml for an XMLTV file on a FTP-server.
• ftp://user:pass@ftp.mysite.com/tvguide.xml on a password-protected FTP-server

If you wish the XMLTV guide from a remote folder to be automatically downloaded each day, set the Time and make sure the Enabled checkbox is ticked.