[mythtvnz] epgsnoop/xmltv-proc-nz/tv_grab_nz-py

[Aaron Pelly]

TL;DR Comments requested for a replacement xmltv grabber for NZ

I've been thinking about how to string all this together in an xmltv 
friendly way.

My thoughts, based on my progress so far:
1) Change mhegepgsnoop to invent xmltv channel names based on somehting 
like trim(name)+'.freeview.nz' and return all channel data, regardless 
of which channels interest you. We have to decode it all anyway. This 
means mhegepgsnoop no longer needs configuration. But will probably mean 
renaming some of your channels in Myth. Can also make it handle utf-8 
characters properly.

2) Process the data as per the xmltv spec, to exclude everything that is 
not interesting. This should be easy enough to do by modifying an 
existing grabber. The recommended new grabbers do seem more 
feature-complete than our current one.

3) Within the modified grabber, call xmltv-proc-nz to augment any 
remaining data. This processes the minimum amount of data, which is a 
good thing.

I'm kind of reluctant to make yet another copy of an mheg reader, 
knowing that my copy will surely fall into disrepair at some stage. 
Perhaps the author would care to comment? On the other hand, the code 
could really do with some comments and a bit of a clean up. Caching 
would be good too, for testing. And it might be interesting to make it 
Python 3 as well.

As for utf-8; I haven't had any to work with yet, because they have been 
missing in the guide data. I am confident this can be made to work 
properly with only minor changes to existing code.

I feel like I'm very close to something good here. xmltv-proc-nz 
probably needs more options, but, from where I am, this should be 
crazy-easy to implement.

Anyway, I'm kind of thinking out loud here, but if anyone has an opinion 
I'm all ears.