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»Who is leading?
It is said, that the computer enters new territories of our daily life. Now, there are two tools, that don't want to replace the TV magazines, but at least complete it. This test is supposed to show, if this can be achieved.
In detail, WebTVGrab and TVGuide are each a combination of small Internet tools like HTTX and HTTPGet and an ARexx script. An installation is not necessary for both programs, but a few libraries have to be copied manually, if they aren't already present in the Libs: directory.
WebTVGrab and TVGuide can download the TV guide from the Internet home page of the "Illustrierten Wochenzeitung" (http://www.iwz.de) via the search engine, present on the home page and put them into readable form.
The settings
But these are the most common things. But in a central point WebTVGrab and TVGuide use different methods: While the last one allows basic settings, WebTVGrab was made for a flexible output of the TV guide. This is done using the additional tool WebTVGrabView, which can show the TV guides of one or multiple days, if requested sorted by date, time, station, program or description.
A print function for printing the data is missed at this place, so an ASCII text displayer with print function or text editor has to be used.
Before receiving the data WebTVGrab just needs to know tha desired day or days. This is done quite comfortable on the Workbench.
More options to select from, apart from the optional input of a proxy server, that might allow a higher download speed, are not present.
This is quite different with TVGuide: Here you can set various preferences before downloading, which can be made using Shell arguments or Tool types. So you can e.g. set, what days have to be considered for the download. In opposition to WebTVGrab TVGuide cannot download two days, that aren't in a series, e.g. Sunday and Tuesday. In this case you have to start the program twice.
But TVGuide offers the big advantage of station pre-selection: Using codes, which consist of three characters, you can set unique stations, which program guides are to be downloaded. Of course, the Joker (*) can be used for any TV station, which is present on the IWZ server. And what, if I want the TV guide of a certain station within a certain period of time, let's say between 8.00 p.m. and 11.00 p.m.? Well, this is no problem for TVGuide - the argument 'Zeit' allows this. In opposition to WebTVGrab TVGuide is able to read some additional informations of the programs, like picture format, sound format as well as the movie evaluation(!).
Because TViewGuide doesn't offer a special viewing utility, like WebTVGrab does, the output has to be achieved using a text viewer.
The name of the favorised viewer is set into the icon of the TV guide file, if requested. Anyway, there are some Shell arguments resp. Tool Types available for optimizing the text output like setting the list width or if the tiles of the programs are to be written in bold using the ANSI codes (as well as the text viewer supports this feature).
The speed
One thing is to mention here: usually it needs some minutes until the download of a whole day has been completed. But there are some differences between both programs: TVGuide uses an optimzed download routine, which splits the request to the IWZ into various processes, if requested. This results in a higher speed compared to WebTVGrab.
The documentation
The large amount of functions of TVGuide can also be noticed from the documentation. While there is quite a large German AmigaGuide manual available, WebTVGrab offers just two short text documents, which are also in German. Anyway, this is acceptable, because WebTVGrab doesn't offer any Shell arguments or Tool Types and is much easier to use than its competitor.
Personal conclusion
Even, if WebTVGrab is leading with the daily selection and offers an additional viewer with sort routine, TVGuide is to be recommended more. The most valuable point are its various configuration possibilities, which cannot be found with WebTVGrab and last not least the much higher download speed.
But the ideal tool of this kind was a combination of both programs, which would result in a TVGuide with flexible daily selection and own viewer with sort routine and an added print function.
There's one thing to mention...
In the end there is the question, if a tool of this kind is of use, while there are Teletext, Internet services and of course the TV guides. Well, neither WebTVGrab nor TVGuide can replace the TV guides offering lots of informations and photos. But as an addition, which offers you the latest program informations, especially TVGuide and its flexible configuration possiblities proved successful.
WebTVGrab
| Tested revision: | v1.3 |
| Authors: | sTEELER/phanTasm, sUNMBEAM/dc |
| Status: | eMailware |
| Requirements: | AmigaOS 3.0 or better, TCP/IP stack, various libraries |
| Source: | Aminet (comm/www/WebTVGrab#?) |
| eMail: | steeler@ms.demo.org |
TVGuide
| Tested revision: | v1.3 |
| Author: | Andreas Boerner |
| Status: | Freeware |
| Requirements: | AmigaOS 2.0 or better, TCP/IP stack, varopis libraries |
| Source: | Aminet (comm/www/TVGuide.lha) |
| eMail: | anbojjei@sp.zrz.tu-berlin.de |
| Homepage: | http://www.user.tu-berlin.de/~anbojjei/ |
Carsten Schroeder <aakt@gmx.de>«
