Dutch TiVo system
From NLTiVo
Contents |
The System
To make the TiVo-concept work in the Netherlands, we need provider-, lineup- and guidedata. This guidedata needs to be presented to TiVo in a special format. Since this date is different for each provider and lineup, a system needs to be build which can handle the generation of these different slices on the fly. This system is called DutchTiVoGuide. Dennis started building in November last year. As we speak, over 3500 lines of code have been written to come to a working system.
The Design
The design of this system is shown in the following figure:
More documentation on the design can be found on the DutchTiVoGuide design-page.
What has already been done?
Referring to the schema, this is what has already been built:
- A working feeder;
- A working slice generator;
- A working enricher (currently enriches movies);
- A working integrity checker.
Apart from a working DutchTiVoGuide-guide and a working emulator, we have:
- IR-slices for a number of external devices (more devices can be added easily on request);
- A nlTiVo-image which can be used to image a harddrive with TiVo-software tailored to Dutch needs.
Still, work has to be done to come finalize the entire concept (see our planning-page for more information). If you know Perl and/or Ruby (on Rails) and you are willing to help, please let us know.
Features
Currently we have a working system. The feature-highlights are:
- Automatic building of all the necessary slices (headend-, guide- and area-slices);
- Support for Season-passes;
- Movies are enriched via the Internet Movie Database (starratings, director, year);
- Automatic genre-detection of showings.
Features of the already built modules, include:
Feeder:
- Feeding of XMLTV-files into a database.
- Enriching of program-data with genres using genre recognition.
Slicer:
- Generation of headend-, area- and guide-slices for each lineup in the database.
- Auto creation of palmod- and ukchan30-configfiles from the dtg-database.
Enricher:
- Enriches movies using data from the Internet Movie Database (imdb). Currently supports starrating, directors and year of production. Will be expanded to enrich more program-types.
Integrity checker:
- Checks for overlapping showings in the database.
