UK TV Listings Solution

08-21-05, 02:22 PM

There is a working solution for UK PPC owners to view 14 days of a wide range of satellite & terrestial TV Channels, together with a synopsis for each programme.
The Pocket PC Viewer looks good on a QVGA PDA, but is very crisp on an X50v.

There are three steps;

1. Install XMLTV Radio Times, to allow download of the channel data from Radio Times to your PC.

2. Make a simple edit of the file using Wordpad before copying to your PDA.

3. Install XMLTV EPG Pocket Viewer to view the TV Programme schedules on your PPC.

Detailed instructions follow.

1. Download the TV Listings "Grabber"

XMLTV Radio Times 2.19 for Windows

Install this to your PC. When you run it, you can choose which channels to download, and set a location for saving the xml file, which contains all the downloaded TV channel data. A good place to save the file is the "My Documents" folder on the PC. You'll need to give the file a name. Mine is called TV.

2. Edit the TV.xml file you created above in Wordpad (NOT Notepad).

Open the xml file with WordPad.
On the first line, delete the encoding="ISO-8859-1" part only
Go to File Save As... and save it as a Unicode Text Document type

The last step is important. If you do not save it as a "Unicode Text Document" it will not work.

Copy this edited xml file to the "My Documents" folder on a storage card or built-in storage on your PDA.

3. Download XMLTV EPG Viewer Pocket PC Version

XMLTV EPG Viewer Pocket PC Version

Install as normal to your Pocket PC. You can install to either built-in storage or to a storage card.

When you run the programme, you'll see "Tap and hold here for menu" at the bottom. Do this, then navigate to the TV.xml file you saved earlier. You start to navigate by clicking on the little yellow folder with the arrow on it, which is at the bottom left of that screen.

That's it - the programme has nice simple layout and is easy to use.

It all sounds a bit complicated, but it isn't really. Editing the xml file with Wordpad is about the trickiest part. You download 14 days worth of programmes each time, so it's worth doing.

The author of the Pocket PC Viewer is very keen to receive feedback for improvement. For future releases, he is considering adding a utility to automate the file edit part, as well as making the colour scheme user configurable.

Please try the utility and give feedback to Ian (the author) at the place where you downloaded the Pocket PC Viewer.

Regards

Martin

08-21-05, 02:37 PM

Originally Posted by Lancaster

PS I tried to attach a screenshot, but I'm getting an error saying "Invalid attachment specified." It is the correct size & type...

Thanks for posting :approve:
and for the image use a host
www.imageshack.us
www.photobucket.com

08-21-05, 02:51 PM

Originally Posted by fishwood

Thanks for posting :approve:
and for the image use a host
www.imageshack.us
www.photobucket.com

Thanks!

Martin

psionandy · 08-21-05, 02:58 PM

Cheers.. can't give it a go tonight, but will tomorrow :approve:

08-22-05, 06:30 AM

Thanks, Martin,
I'll give it a try this evening.

I've discovered yet another problem with PTVL! :D
The data file refuses to load after being "stale" for about 2 days, despite having 14 days of data. Let's hope this XMLTV prog works well.

Martin, see if you can have a word with the Radio Times grabber author to see if the text-editing procedure can be done automatically. Alan Birtles, the author, is usually very quick at replying and offering assistance.

08-22-05, 06:35 AM

Another thing:
Can you set ActiveSync to sync individual files from your PC to your PPC?
I've noticed there isn't a way for XMLTV to sync with the listings file on the PC.
PTVL uses an ActiveSync plugin called ListingsSync (or something along those lines).

08-22-05, 07:23 AM

Originally Posted by vinnielo

Another thing:
Can you set ActiveSync to sync individual files from your PC to your PPC?
I've noticed there isn't a way for XMLTV to sync with the listings file on the PC.
PTVL uses an ActiveSync plugin called ListingsSync (or something along those lines).

Hi,

You just need to drop the PC file into your PocketPC File Folder on the desktop. The name of that folder will depend on the name of your Pocket PC. Then you can set Activsync to synchronise the files in that folder each time you sync. However, this sychnronisation only works when the file on your PC is in the My Documents Folder in Main memory, and you really do not want to put it there! Best put the xml file in Built in Storage, or on an SD card, as it's quite a big file.

I believe the author of EPG Viewer for Pocket PC has raised the encoding point to Gary Birtles, but feel free to ask Gary yourself! It's actually very simple and quick to edit, given it has 14 days of data in it!

Good luck with it.

Martin

stonehenge8 · 08-22-05, 07:24 AM

Originally Posted by vinnielo

Another thing:
Can you set ActiveSync to sync individual files from your PC to your PPC?
I've noticed there isn't a way for XMLTV to sync with the listings file on the PC.
PTVL uses an ActiveSync plugin called ListingsSync (or something along those lines).

Would the addition of the MightySync add-on enable this?

08-22-05, 07:30 AM

Originally Posted by stonehenge8

Would the addition of the MightySync add-on enable this?

Yes, looks like it would.

I'll have a play...

Regards

Martin

08-28-05, 05:31 PM

Originally Posted by Lancaster

Go to File Save As... and save it as a Unicode Text Document type

This effectively doubles the size of the xml file.
I wish there was a way where this wasn't even necessary.

08-28-05, 05:57 PM

Originally Posted by vinnielo

This effectively doubles the size of the xml file.
I wish there was a way where this wasn't even necessary.

Ian is working on automating the process...

Regards

Martin

IanB · 08-28-05, 06:03 PM

Originally Posted by vinnielo

This effectively doubles the size of the xml file.
I wish there was a way where this wasn't even necessary.

There will be in a day or two... :)

I've made some changes to the program, including an automatic conversion from ISO-8859-1 to windows-1252, which is the correct encoding. It will do this only when necessary, which is effectively when a freshly-grabbed file is first loaded. The converted file will be the same size as the original file.

There are some other changes and enhancements too, which I'll post about when I upload the new setup file.

Thanks for your comments so far - keep 'em coming...

08-30-05, 06:50 PM

Originally Posted by IanB

Thanks for your comments so far - keep 'em coming...

Comparing this application with the PTVL one, this one takes a rather long time for listings to display after selecting a channel. Is there a way of reducing the time needed to load? I'm pretty sure the listings load instantly with PTVL.

**Rishad** · 08-30-05, 07:10 PM

Is there any solution for Canadian TV listings?

IanB · 08-31-05, 05:21 AM

Originally Posted by vinnielo

Comparing this application with the PTVL one, this one takes a rather long time for listings to display after selecting a channel. Is there a way of reducing the time needed to load? I'm pretty sure the listings load instantly with PTVL.

The problem is that the RT xml file is not very well structured. Basically, you have to iterate through all the programmes in the xml file, regardless of what channel or date they're on, because the programmes or not organised by date or channel. So the more channels or dates you have in your listings file, the longer it'll take to display the listings for a particular date/channel combination.

The PTVL program, I believe, uses separate xml files for each channel, organised into folders for each date. This would make it more efficient when displaying the listings.

But my program was designed to use the Radio Times xmltv data - there would be no point in writing a program which is basically the same as PTVL, and which uses the same data.

I'll have a look to see if I can reorganise the RT xml file to make it more efficient, but that tends to be quite memory-hungry, something which PPCs tend to be quite short on. But I'll see what I can do...

Thanks for the feedback.