A live demo has been placed online at jive.benow.ca. Use user: admin, pass: jive. Use an ipod/iphone/ipad to see the remote interface. There is no tv backend, so don't expect recordings, etc.

DOWNLOAD
benow-tv.nightly.tar.gz - Nightly build. Requires Linux and XMLTV (unless you're up for some work).

NOTE this project is still in development... changes still to come, including refinement to this document.

The TV project (AKA Jivo) is a TV listings, recording and archival application. It is built specifically for large subscription packages from satellite and cable TV providers (I use StarChoice here in Canada). It is made to weed out the 90% of crap on tv and to find and preserve the golden 10% in as best a way as possible. It grabs listings via XMLTV, parses, indexes and them into a SQL (firebird) backend. The indexed listings are then presented in a grid layout on a web page. The indexing joins (most of) the data within the listings with additional infomation fetched from IMDb (and others) so it is possible to browse the listings according to many relationships... all programs on a channel, all movies, all movies with nudity, all movies with nudity starring Molly Parker, etc. These refinements can then be used to setup record profiles, so that as new listings are fetched as the refinements are matched and shows automatically recorded. Recording can also be initiated manually (this movie looks good, record it). Conflict resolution is included for recording, with automatic conflict resolution suggestion. It validates recording (to the best of its ability) and does not re-record successfully recorded shows... in such a manner it can automatically record all (or many) episodes of a series, for example. Commercial detection and deletion (via comskip) is supported, as is high fidelity re-encoding. There is also a remote-control interface... web pages built for display on small display networked devices (pda, etc) which allows for channel changing when watching live TV, etc. Some initial support has been made into an archiving backend, with the data network and knowledge of successful recording being retained even after the files themselves have been moved to offline storage. Offline storage is facilitated via the metafs project, which provides large fileset query and navigation for offlined data. Also, as the interface is all through web pages, it is accessible remotely and is potentially multi-user (tho granularity is not yet surfaced).

If it sounds like alot, it is. It is still very much a work in progress, but the fetching, listing and recording aspects work well, when configured. I know of no other small scale project which indexes and presents such an amount of data. It really makes the TV experience better than it ever has been. However, this project needs a few more months of solid loving, but try it out if you're feeling adventurous.

Here's a few screenshot in its various stages of development:

Listing, programmes, programme and recordings.

Filters

IMDb Fetches

Channel filtering

Favourites for recording

People