CT TV Listings - Now in Public Beta

[carm]

Hi stevech,

The price is located in the first post. It is kind of buried now. I'll move it up so other can see it easily.

There is no prerequisite involving CTpvr in any way.

Regards,
Carm.

[stevech]

great.

Perhaps after beta, you will post a description of the service with terms and conditions and a statement on service assurance (server availability) and so on. This is worth $ to me.

[sgrayban]

I'm wondering that as well and how payments are going to be required.... Monthly ? Yearly?

I'd pay for the whole year seeing how cheap it will be.

[carm]

Transaction control and handling:
It is the very same billing service we are currently using for our other products that would be handling the transactions. They will handle all the monthly collections which is all automated for the one year period. This of course will not matter if you chose to prepay instead. In which case you will only be billed the yearly discounted price just once. All plans are renewable after one year. At the end of the yearly agreement, you will receive a notice with an offer to renew.

All this information will be made available in a few days. When we will add CT TV Listings to our store page.

Regards,
Carm.

[sgrayban]

I'd still like to test this out and see if Maxemum TV-Guide can read the listing.

I'm still blocked since I still can't get anything.

[carm]

[sgrayban]

Turned off windows firewall and still nothing. Just sits there.

The IP I'm trying to connect from is 71.32.15.197 -- static IP block 71.32.15.192/28

Check your logs.......

Also you do not have AIR only channel listings. Bad bad when you are going to have NON cable/stat users like me.

[bsr123]

I noticed a few differences already.
-CTV pads the channel numbers with zeroes
-CTV added two zeroes after the MV/SH/EP, and SP in the program ID
-CTV uses 20070810 format instead of 2007-08-10 format for originalairdate field

Also, the XML contains different characters for the same content. I see the XML indicates utf-8 encoding but it is not clear that the titles, etc. are really encoded as such. For example, the Spanish show "Sin Verguenza" where the u has the umlaut (two dots) accent does not look right in the CTV feed but looks fine in the old Zap2it feed. Why does the same content look different (titles/plots for same shows) when comparing the Zap2it XML file from CTV to the old style Zap2it XML file directly from TMS? Was the old file also UTF-8 encoded?

Is there a document describing any other changes between the Zap2it XML file from CTV and the old Zap2it XML file?

[carm]

Hi bsr123,

Documents are still being worked on. The differences between the file formats are to be fully compatible with preexisting formats(i.e. XMLTV, Zap2it). Work is still being done to make each format compatible with the original. This will include much of what you mentioned(i.e. padding of zeros, accents).

The title/plot differences are probably due to how many of each they have available in the data feed. TMS provides many of each to choose from. If you have an exact example that I could look at, changes could be made to collect from one of the other choices.

Regards,
Carm.

[bsr123]

Here is an example of the wrong characters showing up in the CTV Zap2it XML feed.

First let me show you what it should look like. This comes from the existing Zap2it feed from TMS. The utf-8 pair c3bc (shown in bold) is a small u with two dots above the u. This is indeed how the word is spelled (Verguenza).

<title>Sin Vergüenza</title>
$ od -x zap2it_title.txt
0000000 743c 7469 656c 533e 6e69 5620 7265 c367
0000020 65bc 7a6e 3c61 742f 7469 656c 003e

Now this is what the CTV Zap2it XML file looks like. It shows c281 (shown in bold) which is a control character.

<title>Sin Verg�enza</title>

$ od -x ctv_title.txt
0000000 743c 7469 656c 533e 6e69 5620 7265 c267
0000020 6581 7a6e 3c61 742f 7469 656c 003e

So something is indeed incorrect in the CTV Zap2it XML file. Hope this helps.

[carm]

[carm]

[sgrayban]

Well I got it to download but there were lots of errors about tags not being closed.

I develop lot's of programs and in beta testing I always had log files created just for things like this... *hint*

7 day free bee is running out on this testing too.

[bsr123]

Thanks for looking into the Zap2it feed. I wonder why the TMS Zap2it feed is different from what you get from TMS? Were you going to keep the same programID field or use the one that is two characters longer (with the two extra zeroes)?

[carm]