'Film' genre removed

[Adam Jansch]

Hi,

In the switch of the XMLTV feed from the Radio Times some change has
been made which stops my application from working. Previously, if a
programme was a film it would say 'Film' in the genre attribute of
that programme; now it has generic genres, like 'Drama' or 'Comedy'.
Please can a method be provided so films can be filtered separately
from other types of programme?

Thanks,

Adam

[Jonathan Tweed]

Hi Adam

Thanks for reporting this and apologies that it's broken your application.

There is actually already a better mechanism in the feed for identifying films. Column 8 in the feed is true if the programme is a film and false if it's not.

We've tried as best we can to replicate the existing format, as we wanted to maintain compatibility with existing uses of the data, but as this demonstrates it's not the most self-documenting or flexible format.

Over time we'd like to work with everyone who uses the data to move to a format that is better over the longer term. We'll also take another look at the genres to see if we can make any improvements there, but hopefully the separate film flag will work for you as it's the best way to tell what's a film and what's not.

Cheers

Jonathan

[Adam Jansch]

Hi Jonathan, thanks for your reply. I'll check out the film flag, that
might fix my issue.

Adam

[Top-tom]

I came across this problem also. It will affect users of the MyStuff
gui on the Topview. I noticed also that the film scores provided by
the RT reviewers are no longer there. These were previously shown as
1-5 ratings eg 4/5. Any plans to fix that?

Thanks
Tom

On Dec 14, 1:59 pm, Jonathan Tweed <jonat...@metabroadcast.com> wrote:

[Jonathan Tweed]

On Thursday, 15 December 2011 at 19:12, Top-tom wrote:

I came across this problem also. It will affect users of the MyStuff

gui on the Topview. I noticed also that the film scores provided by

the RT reviewers are no longer there. These were previously shown as

1-5 ratings eg 4/5. Any plans to fix that?

Hi Tom

Sorry about the change to the genres. Will the film flag be a potential solution here too?

Reinstating the ratings has been the most requested feature so far. As I said in the other thread, we're looking at how we can provide both RadioTimes reviews and star ratings early next year. No definite timescales yet, but it's on our list.

Cheers

Jonathan

[Chris]

On Dec 14, 1:59 pm, Jonathan Tweed <jonat...@metabroadcast.com> wrote:
>

> There is actually already a better mechanism in the feed for identifying films. Column 8 in the feed is true if the programme is a film and false if it's not.

The film flag doesn't seem to be working as a reliable indicator that
a programme is a film. It seems to be set to true for any programme
that is about films including behind-the-scenes documentaries, etc

See for example:
"Mission: Impossible Special" in http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/2204.dat
"Harry Potter Special" in http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/249.dat

Previously this flag was always a pretty reliable indicator that
something was a film. Could we log this as a bug please?

[Chris]

Also: http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/2058.dat

Many, many films on this channel have column 8 == false

[Jonathan Tweed]

On Saturday, 17 December 2011 at 20:41, Chris wrote:
> The film flag doesn't seem to be working as a reliable indicator that
> a programme is a film. It seems to be set to true for any programme
> that is about films including behind-the-scenes documentaries, etc
>
> See for example:
> "Mission: Impossible Special" in http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/2204.dat
> "Harry Potter Special" in http://xmltv.radiotimes.com/xmltv/249.dat
>
> Previously this flag was always a pretty reliable indicator that
> something was a film. Could we log this as a bug please?

Hi Chris

If we mark an item as a film, it's because we've been told it's a film.

You're correct that many things on film channels are actually programmes about films and we'd like this data to be better.

I'll follow up and see if there's any way it can be improved.

Thanks
Jonathan