[vdr] xmltv2vdr 1.0.6. enhancements - personal "proof of concept"available for testing

[Sean Carlos <seanc@libero.it>]

Hello all,

I have been happily using xmltv2vdr to populate epg.data where it is not
already available.  However, with the great new search functionality
available with the epgsearch plugin, I thought it might be useful to
import additional data not currently managed by xmltv2vdr, but available
in some xml data.  

I have tried to contact the program's author in order to propose
official enhancements; in the meantime, if anyone is interested in
testing the changes I made as a "proof of concept", let me know.

Proposed changes to xmltv2vdr-1.0.6:

1) Import event "sub-title" if present in the xml data.  This is the
second title, NOT to be confused with subtitles. I.e. what you see in
yellow under the blue title in VDR if using the skin ST:TNG Panels.

2) Append additional data to the description, i.e. date, director(s),
actor(s), category/ies, rating(s).  Ideally, this should consider the
xmltv data domain; for now I've only worked on what is actually in the
UK and Italian feeds.... i18n support is provided for data element
labels.

3) Add an error check and possible workaround for data which is missing
an event stop date.  Italian data doesn't carry a stop date which was
causing the data import to fail without warning.

4) Add an option to import data without erasing the existing epg.data. 
This is required if you are importing xmltv data from multiple sources -
at the price of risking duplicate entries.

5) Add radio channels support (add RID if not 0)

6) Create channel ID as specified by vdr 1.3.15+.  Specifically, the
frequency is used ONLY if nid and tid are 0.  I also include parsing out
provider name etc.  I suspect this may not be backwardly compatible, but
I haven't tested this.

7) Additional html conversion: — seen in UK data, becomes a long
dash.

8) Add an option to output the epg data as a separate backup file.  This
is useful for debugging but could be of interest for keeping snapshots
of epg data. 

Sean