— FreeGuide

FreeGuide is an open-source Java application for displaying television schedules. You can get it from the project site. Red Hen uses it to check the broadcast schedule and to configure schedule downloads by the automatic recording scheduler.

FreeGuide uses the xmltv software in the package xmltv-utils. After installing this package, you can see the grabbers available here:

ls -l /usr/bin/tv_grab*

Or by listing the contents of the xmltv-utils package:

just list-files xmltv-util

The xmltv grabbers let us manage the schedule without having to use the graphical user interface check it manually, either by being present where the computer is, or through remote desktop. The script schedule parses these downloaded files and extracts the broadcast information for the automated recording schedule.

FreeGuide gives you a graphical user interface for the schedule:

To configure the guide, select Tools | First-time configuration and select your location. Use the +0000 time offset, since the offset does not handle daylight saving. Select only the networks you plan to record from. If you want to use FreeGuide for manual scheduling, you can now download the television listings using its grabber -- in this case called tv_grab_pt for Portugal:

Instead of running FreeGuide, you can run this same command straight from the command line -- for instance

tv_grab_pt --configure

The resulting configuration is also used by Red Hen's script xmltv-download to automate the downloading of the schedule outside of FreeGuide.