[December 10, 2002] Description from the home page:

"XMLTV is a set of utilities to manage your TV viewing. They work with TV listings stored in the XMLTV format, which is based on XML. The idea is to separate out the backend (getting the listings) from the frontend (displaying them for the user), and to implement useful operations like picking out your favourite programmes as filters that read and write XML documents. There are five backends at present [2002-12], grabbing TV listings for Canada, the USA, the UK, Germany, Austria, Sweden and Norway. There are filters to sort the listings by date, to remove shows that have already been broadcast, and a couple of programmes to organize your viewing by storing preferences of what shows you watch. There are a couple of backends to produce printed output. This software is still being developed and most of the tools are command-line based, but at least many of them have manual pages."

"The [file] format used differs from most other XML-based TV listings formats in that it is written from the user's point of view, rather that the broadcaster's. It doesn't divide listings into channels, instead all the channels are mixed together into a single unified listing. Each programme has details such as name, description, and credits stored as subelements, but metadata like broadcast details are stored as attributes. There is support for listings in multiple languages and each programme can have 'language' and 'original language' details..."

Principal References

• XMLTV Homepage

• XMLTV SourceForge Project

• XMLTV CVS repository

• XMLTV SourceForge mailing lists

• Snapshot from the CVS 2003-04-27. See the file listing and XML DTD.

• XMLTV XML DTD. Snapshot 2002-12-10 [source]

• XMLTV Presentation. By Edward Avis. Presented 2002-03-14 to members of the Department of Computing, Imperial College London.

• [February 23, 2004] "Television Listings and XMLTV." By Kyle Downey. From XML.com (February 18, 2004). "With a mini PC with a TV capture card, a WiFi card, a monster hard drive, and a Linux package like MythTV, can not only do almost everything a TiVO can do, but can also serve up MP3 files, act as a Windows file server with Samba, run a web server, and more. One critical element of a DIY TiVO is TV listings. Without these all the fancy hardware in the world won't do much good. But there's an open source, Perl XML-based solution by Edward Avis called XMLTV that many of the TV-on-your-PC packages like Freevo and MythTV support. With support for screen- scraping data for many country's cable systems, XMLTV can take various sources and create a consistent stream of XML. Good software can be used as a building block to make other software, and by this measure XMLTV -- both the de facto standard and the software -- is very useful. Although dreams of combining computers with televisions have yet to pan out, now there are solid mechanisms that let you combine Internet data with live video, and insert your own software in between. The exciting element is not what has been done, but the convergence of interesting information, ease of access and processing with XML-based formats like XMLTV, with freely-available, powerful software..."

Earlier references 2000-2001

• See also: TVSCHEDULE DTD for VideoXML. "This is a simple DTD designed to represent a week's (or more) programming schedule for one or more public-access TV channel... Related files include: The TVSCHEDULE DTD (tvschedule.dtd); Salem Access TV Example Schedule (satvexample.xml) in XML; TVSCHEDULE XSL Stylesheet to HTML; SATV example schedule in HTML. ScXML is a Java program that converts TVSCHEDULE pages to Scala Lingua (TM) scripts that can run on a video bulletin board system. Complete source code, executable class files and test files are provided." [cache]

• See also GTV - for German TV database queries

• See also: "Automatic Construction of Personalized TV News Programs," by Bernard Merialdo, Kyung Tak Lee, Dario Luparello, Jeremie Roudaire. "In this paper, we study the automatic construction of personalized TV News programs, where we want to build a program with predefined duration and maximum content value for a specific user. We combine video indexing techniques to parse TV News recordings into stories, and information filtering techniques to select stories which are most adequate given the user profile. We formalize the selection process as an optimization problem, and we study how to take into account duration in the selection of stories. Experiments show that a simple heuristic can provide high quality selection with little computation. We also describe two prototypes, which implement two different mechanisms for the construction of user profiles... A number of projects have already addressed the problem of TV news indexing... The result of our processing is a segmentation of the TV News program into a set of consecutive stories. An XML file is created to hold this information. An extract of such a file would look as in the following example (timing information is based on video frame numbers)..."