DirecTV - NBA League Pass listings workaround

[alewando]

As a DirecTV customer and NBA League Pass subscriber, I was disappointed at the listings information that is available from Tribune/Schedules Direct for the League Pass channels. It only lists generic blocks of time, not aligned to the actual games being broadcast and no details (title, description) related to the games. Not very useful for PVR scheduling (MythTV in my case). I pursued with both SD/Tribune and DirecTV, with the response being:

DirecTV has directed us to not list the game information in our lineups
database, so unfortunately you would only have access to the static "NBA
League Pass" messages as you are viewing - even though the true game
information can be found on their site.

As they note, the true game information is available on the DirectTV website. I asked DirecTV if they would mind if I used XMLTV to scrape their listings. Response:

We provide the information given on
the online guide for our customers to use, so you may use your PVR
software, but keep in mind the online guide is subject to change at any
time.

So I was able to get things going by supplementing my SD listings data with data scraped using the XMLTV DirecTV grabber (tv_grab_na_dtv). I did have to modify the stock grabber to get it to pull down the extened channel list. Had to add an extra parameter to the requset URL. Patch is attached. 2nd issue is that the scraped listings have a progam length of 6 hours. I'm running the listings through another little Perl script (attached) to adjust them to be 2.5 hours long. Then I use mythfilldatabase to load the listings into the MythTV database. The whole process is managed by a shell script (attached) that gets run once a day (at noon) by a cron job.

I'm posting all of this here in case somebody else is in the same situation. I hope google indexes this post and was able to help!

[rmeden]

I'll ping Tribune and ask, but I suspect like PPV, DirectTV doesn't want to give the info to Tribune.

TV Guide doesn't have it either.

Robert

[alewando]

I could only add three attachments to the original post, so here's the last attachment, the script for running the import.

P.S. Robert K did ask Tribune, their response is in the OP.

[rmeden]

Sorry I missed the reply in the original post. DirectTV's support person's response was surprising, but most welcome!

Great post BTW.

Robert