Tvheadend

for the moment the htsp protocol is the only methode to control tvheadend remotely.

You can use simple HTTP-POST-Requests to control Tvheadend. The commands are not documented. With Firebug you can see which commands are used by the JavaScript Webinterface. The response text is in JSON, which can be easily parsed.

Be careful, because the commands/parameters could change with a new version of Tvheadend.

Thanks for your tips.
This is what i need for now, and it seems easy to implement.

Sorry to dig this up, but could you give me a bit of guidance? I can see in Firebug that if, f.e, I go http://myip:9981/epg/ then I can get a json object returned containing the current broadcasts. How do I then add parameters to this in order to get specific channels etc? When I try and add the parameters described in firebug to the end of the URL they are simply ignored.

Sorry if this seems a bit like asking how to suck eggs, this is an unfamiliar area to me.

You must do a POST request instead of GET and you have to send the parameters as post-data.
Parameter you can use for epg is like "start=0&limit=300&channel=TV4". In firebug you can see these parameters in the POST tab.

I hope this will help you to make it work.

livehttp headers (a firefox plugin) is also very useful for inspecting, changing and sending http requests.