XMLTV 0.5.31

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.

* Changes in this release

Summer time changeover fixes; in particular avoid errors about
'impossible dates' (those during the 1 hour summer time changover) by
assuming winter time for such dates.

New U.S./Canadian grabber (tv_grab_na_dd) using Zap2it's Data Direct
Service.  Instructions for signing up is in the man page and --config 
option.  Please migrate off (tv_grab_na), it will be dropped from a future
distribution.  Zap2it has made this new  method available to reduce their
server load.  The new method is much, much faster and includes
more detail.  If there are any issues preventing migration, please raise
them on the mailing lists or as a feature request.

XML::Twig 3.10 is now required and if you want to use tv_grab_na_dd
you'll need SOAP::Lite as well.

Some improvements to tv_grab_de_tvtoday, tv_grab_se, and
tv_grab_uk_rt; small fixes to tv_check.  Fixed test suite on Cygwin.

* Installation

% 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 5.6 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.  The full list of
needed modules is:

XML::Parser 2.34
XML::Twig 3.10
XML::Writer 0.4.6
Date::Manip 5.42a 
LWP 5.65
Memoize (included with perl 5.8 and later)
Storable (included with perl 5.8 and later)

HTML::TreeBuilder       (for many of the grabbers)
HTML::Parser 3.34       (for some of the grabbers)
Tk::TableMatrix         (if you want to run tv_check)
CGI                     (if you want to run tv_pick_cgi)
Text::Kakasi            (if you want to run tv_grab_jp)
XML::LibXML             (if you want to run tv_grab_se)
SOAP::Lite              (if you want to run tv_grab_na_dd)

Where a version number is given any later version also ought to work.
You may have difficulty with the XML modules on perl 5.8.0 - if so
send mail to the xmltv-users list.  Other perl versions should be OK.

The following modules are recommended, but the software still works
without them:

Term::ProgressBar                (displays pretty progress meters)
PerlIO::gzip (for perl 5.8+)     (makes tv_imdb a bit faster)
Lingua::Preferred 0.2.4          (helps with multilingual listings)
Unicode::String                  (non-ASCII chars in LaTeX output)
Lingua::EN::Numbers::Ordinate    (not really needed, to be honest)

And the Log::TraceMessages module is useful for debugging, but not
needed for normal use.

All of these can be installed with tarballs downloaded from CPAN or
(hopefully) using the CPAN shell program: 'perl -MCPAN -e shell', then
'install XML::Twig' and so on.  But you may find it easier to search
for packaged versions from your OS vendor or others - places which
distribute a packaged version of xmltv will often provide the modules
it needs too.

* Author and copying

This is free software distributed under the GPL, see COPYING.  But if
you would like to use the code under some other conditions, please do
ask.  There are many who have contributed code, they are credited in
individual source files.

There is a web page at
<http://membled.com/work/apps/xmltv/> and a Sourceforge
project 'XMLTV'.  There are some mailing lists:

    xmltv-announce@lists.sourceforge.net
    xmltv-users@lists.sourceforge.net
    xmltv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net

You ought to subscribe to the announce list at least.  Contact the
users list with most problems.

-- Ed Avis, ed@membled.com, 2004-03-21
$Id: README,v 1.104 2004/03/21 14:51:33 epaepa Exp $
