Tvheadend

I'm running Ubuntu 12.04.1 with the latest git tvheadend and I use the xmltv* packages in Ubuntu for the TV listings grabbing (in my case, it's tv_grab_uk_rt for the UK listings). However, Ubuntu 12.04.1 is lagging two versions behind with its xmltv packages - it's on 0.5.61 and the current release is 0.5.63. Before you ask, no, I'm not moving to Ubuntu 12.10 because I want a long term distro for my media PC setup.

Normally it wouldn't matter, but tv_grab_uk_rt in the 0.5.63 release (inside the xmltv-util package) has had an important fix for the massive CPU thrashing (5 minutes at 100% CPU on an i7!) that it's suffered for several prior releases (including 0.5.61). 0.5.63's tv_grab_uk_rt never reaches 100% CPU and completes its grabbing in half the time compared to 0.5.61.

Hence, I think tvheadend should persuade the end-user that the 0.5.63 or later versions of xmltv packages should be used and display a warning if they're older than that. To check the version, it appears the first line of "<xml_tv_grabber> --version" displays:

XMLTV module version 0.5.63

So I guess it means checking the fourth field of the first line of output for the version. It should be noted that I haven't checked non-UK grabbers - they may be OK (in which case only do the version check/warning for tv_grab_uk_rt - that's version 1.28 in the xmltv-util 0.5.63 package).

BTW, to get the 0.5.63 packages installed on Ubuntu 12.04.1, I had to download the .deb's from Debian's Wheezy repo and install them manually.