WebGrab+Plus

Version 1.1.5 of the manual.

This latest edition of the manual. With a lot of small additions of new features. To name a few:

• ​A chapter (7) with a step by step guide of how to develop a new SiteIni
• New modify commands : 'Set' and a 'Foreach .. Loop'
• Role attribute for the xmltv actor element
• new xmltv elements 'url' and 'country'
• new 'global' elements
• improvement 'time' elements scrubbing

The two time-zones:

• The first thing to realize is that there are two time-zones involved in the times in your final EPG, each with its own DST rules:
- the time-zone for which the times of the guide is provided (the 'source' time-zone) and
- the time-zone of the user (the 'target' time-zone).
In the majority of cases these two are equal, but that doesn't change the fact that there are two to consider.
• In principle, the guide times must be corrected for UTC offset and DST changes for both these two time-zones: The first correction, the one for the 'source' time-zone, is done by WG++ and the second, for the 'target' (should be done) by some piece of software at the viewers side, probably the PVR xmltv importer.

The wrong way:

• In earlier versions of WG++ (before version 1.1.1.53) the program was unable to identify the 'source' time-zone correctly, the only info available about it was the time-zone value in the SiteIni. But that value was limited to just an UTC offset, not the proper time-zone_id and the DST rules for that. (The reason for that limitation lies in the fact that timezone_id's are...

This Upgrade introduces an integrated TimeZones database which is derived from the public domain tzdata distributed by http://www.iana.org/time-zones. For the processing of that database it uses a customized version of the public domain ZoneInfo Api developed by  Mark Rodrigues as published @  http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/25001/ZoneInfo-tz-Database-Olson-Database-NET-API. With this added functionality it is now possible to calculate the proper daylight saving time cutoverdates for guidedata that is supplied in for timezones that have a different dst cutoverdate than that of the WG++ user.
 

Another important added feature is that by default the program uploads a small status report to this website at the end of each run. This status report contains data like program version used, siteini names and versions, the channels for which epg was requested and errors that occured during the run. With this data, a statistical database is created on the server side that gives insight in the problems of...

To get a more general guideline where we should go with WG++ development.

WG++SiteIni.xml is a User Defined Language (UDL) file. This file can be imported into Notepad++, to make Notepad++ highlight special WebGrab++ names. Latest update by Blackbear199

Read the howto.txt for more information how you must do that.

Below, a before/after screenshot

V008

With the MDB Postprocessor version 1.3, which is already part of WG++ since Beta build 1.1.1/53.2 it is possible to grab series episode data from IMDb.com. Potentially this series episode data can contain the IMDb episode_id, the episode number, episode title and basically all other EPG data for the actual series episode that is available in IMDb. Before this only the generic Series data could be optained, there was no episode matching. 
 
To get this to work, a dedicated MDB ini is used, imdb.com.imdb_series.ini,  which is available in the MDB postprocessor section of the EPG Channels page:  http://www.webgrabplus.com/sites/default/files/download/ini/info/zip/MDB%20postprocessor_imdb.com.imdb_series.zip. Since the MDB postprocessor main purpose is to add show details to the already grabbed (source) EPG, the shows in it must be matches with IMDb movies and/or series. For this new functionality to work, the matching algoritme uses the Series title in combination with the Episode title (sub-title) . Consequently, the 'source' EPG must at...