Dear Lazyweb, do you know of a particularly good online TV listings site or application?
We don’t watch a lot of TV, but from time to time there’s some good stuff. I prefer to sit down once a week and look through what is on, save it to a list and then program it in to my PVR. At the moment I use Radio Times, but the site is often down for hours at a time. It’s rather frustrating when I’ve found time to program the PVR but the list of what I want to program is locked away inside a broken web site. The programme guide on the PVR itself is a bit cumbersome to use.
So, anyone got any good alternative sites / services?
Required features:
- Save shows to a list, diary, whatever
- Save shows with series link or at least to save every instance of that show name on that channel
- Has all UK freeview channels
- Customised channel list
Would be nice:
- Able to dump out the list of saved shows, their times and channels so I can still program stuff even if the web site is down
- Radio too
Radio Times fits the above requirements, but as I say it’s very unreliable. DigiGuide looks like it might be good, but it’s a Windows-only application. They say they’ve been working on a Linux version since 2007. I’m currently trying tvguide but am not sure about its “favourites” feature.
I would probably be willing to pay up to £1/month for a service that met all requirements and was actually stable. I know that TV listings data is not free to license. Anyone know how much it costs out of interest?
What about mydigiguide.com, the web version of digiguide?
Ooh! Thanks Paul, I didn’t know about this. Will give it a try.
Paul, mydigiguide.com is really good! It does almost everything I wanted and it’s only £8.99/year. Thanks!
I use zingzing.co.uk for web listings but I don’t do anything complex with it, there is support on it at least.
Hi Paul, I suggest FreeGuide, which I wrote because I had roughly the same requirements you describe.
It’s at http://freeguide-tv.sourceforge.net/
Let me know whether it works for you.
Sorry, that should have been “Hi Andy”.
xmltv can parse the radiotimes xml feed, it’s what mythtv uses to grab information into its scheduler.