UK TV Listings

[David Johnston]

Just been playing around this morning, fed up with not being able to get decent tv listings on my Jornada without having to pay a subscription to some service that only works every other Thursday with a full moon...

This is the result:
http://www.johnsto.co.uk/tv/

It lists all the mainstream terrestrial TV channels here in the UK in a (reasonably) neat compact format. Took ages to find a half-decent colour scheme. All the data is provided by Ananova, so it's reasonably good quality.

The only problem at the moment is that it's all generated on the fly. It needs some caching or my host will start complaining again (and rightly so).

Comments, suggestions, ideas, improvements?

This is only a mini-project so don't go overboard :)

[lonesniper]

Nice project, shame there is nothing on UK TV worth watching.
A quick glance at any daily schedule looks like this.

7.00pm Depressing Soap Opera.
8.00pm Gardening Show.
9.00pm Home Improvement Show.
10.00pm Poor Quality Drama (ie; Holby City)
11.00pm News.

[Jereboam]

David, have you looked at Digiguide?

http://www.digiguide.com/

Although no dedicated Pocket PC client yet, they are working on one and in the meantime you can download TV listings through Avantgo, or there are a few utilities so that you can sync your fave programs into Outlook, and then into Pocket Outlook, with associated icons, reminders etc if you use PI or AF.

Once they have a Pocket PC client available I will almost certainly sign up.

J

[Duncan]

Unless you have a Sky+ box - when your daily schedule always looks good! 8)

David,

It is V. nice looking - and it's good that you are developing something free - but myDigiGuide - http://www.digiguide.com/dg/faq/avantgo.asp - gives you every programme on every channel in the UK, in any combination, for any number of days (up to 7) - for just £6.99pa. It can be used with any of Mobile Favorites, iSiloX or AvantGo (plus your PC web browser) - and soon with MobiPocket or Mazingo as well!

Now if anyone were to develop a Pocket PC version of the stand-alone PC TV guide that DigiGuide also provide - http://www.digiguide.com - that would be wonderful...


EDIT: Ooops - was writing my post at the same time as Jereboam's

[Jereboam]

Ha! Beat ya.... :D

TiVo is worth having too, although no new UK hardware is currently being produced...Sky+ is a major temptation for me - for the two tuners alone...you get on with it well Duncan?

Hadn't heard that Digiguide was being formatted for Mobipocket too - that will be great, Mobipocket is my favourite reader and Avantgo constantly gives me the device components missing or out of date bollocks these days ('scuse my French).

J

[David Johnston]

I had seen DigiGuide, but hadn't noticed they were working on a client for PocketPC - I'll give that a look. I've never bothered with AvantGo, for some reason. Seems everyone else has!

I was actually going to write an application using XMLTV listings - that way I could get listings for just about every channel in the world :) Alas, instead I've ended working on image processing on PCs...

Ultimately of course, I'm a programmer - I'm not going to pay for something that I can create myself for free :)

[wocket]

I've been looking at this for a while.

http://www.fourteenminutes.com/code/tellyguide/

All you need is a very tiny bit of Perl knowhow to use it.

Looks good too.

[Duncan]

Sky+ is a major temptation for me - for the two tuners alone...you get on with it well Duncan?

I find Sky+ a godsend. As a teacher I get remarkably little say in when I am able to sit down and watch TV. Videos require effort to remember to set them and lael them, have them in the right room etc. - plus you have to put up with 250-line TV!

Now all I do is get the Sky+ box to watch everything for me automatically and I watch it when I get the chance. Plus live pause, live rewind of shows I'm not even recording etc. - and I can watch one show while another is recording.

One thing I will say - it is occasionally flaky - not rcording a program that it is set to etc. - though this is very rare.