Electronic Program Guide with XMLTV

While channel surfing is the favorite pastime of couch-potatoes, I prefer watching selective programs; that too with some summary of the program playing. An Electronic Program Guide (EPG) aids in this purpose. This was also the reason why I decided to move to Direct-to-Home (DTH) from analog TV almost a decade back. So when I embarked on the journey of TV on computer, this was the obvious next step.

XMLTV is the most widely used standard for EPG information. However, there are no grabbers for India. So I added my own which retrieves information from Indiatimes website. To install, use following commands.

% git clone https://github.com/atamariya/xmltv.git
% cd xmltv
% perl Makefile.PL
% make
% make install
Once installed, you can configure the channels for which you want to retrieve information by running
% tv_grab_in --configure
Then you can run the command without any arguments whenever you need the information.

Searching program

EPG timeline view


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