Teletext EPG grabber

This EPG grabber allows extracting TV programme listings in XMLTV format from teletext pages as broadcast by most European TV networks. The grabber works by reading teletext pages via a TV card from all individual networks, then extracting programme title and starting times from programme tables (e.g. in Germany usually pages 301-399) and finally adding description texts from pages which are referenced in the overviews.

The grabber can be used stand-alone, but is best used as addition to the Nextview EPG grabber nxtvepg (3.0.0 and 2.9.0) which can also be used to view the programme listings in the generated XMLTV files. The grabber is integrated into the nxtvepg acquisition control and can be activated via the configuration menus. The main intent of the combination is firstly to compensate for the recent loss of several Nextview EPG providers (such as German providers 3sat and RTL2) and secondly to add more description texts to the Nextview EPG. In teletext, many networks have good descriptions not only for movies, but especially also for weekly magazines, daily soaps or current events. The only major downside is lack of categories (e.g. making it harder to search for movies).

Since the grabber has to read each individual network's teletext stream and many networks use sub-pages at least for descriptions, the process unfortunately takes relatively long: For full EPG grabbing, typically between 90 and 120 seconds per channel are required. When receiving via DVB, this can be sped-up significantly however, as it's possible to receive teletext from all channels sharing a transponder concurrently.

For now, only nation-wide German networks are supported well. For other networks the parser will need to be adapted to different page formats. That's because almost every network formats tables, dates, times and descriptions slightly differently, so that the parser will have trouble locating the EPG data among all the advertisements and other content in teletext.

Download

This download is mainly inteded for users who want to use the grabber stand-alone, i.e. without nxtvepg. In this case you need the ZVBI library, see below.

Since 2020 the grabber's homepage is https://github.com/tomzox/tv_grab_ttx. You can download the latest sources directly from the git repository instead of using the release package below.

Latest Release: Version 2.3 from March 21st 2021

Development was resumed with release 2.1 after a 9 year gap. The first release mainly focused on enhancing working with digital TV capture cards (e.g. by adapting the `capall.pl` example automation script). Also tools have been updated (e.g. removed the need for the Boost regex library by requiring C++11) and the parser was slightly enhanced and adapted to changes in teletext content by networks. Subsequent releases provided further enhancements and fixes in parser and tools, as well as interface adaption for integration in nxtvepg.

The latest release is included in nxtvepg releases 3.0.0 and 2.9.0.