Electronic Program Guide Changes at Schedules Direct

I just noticed that my OpenELEC, Kodi and Tvheadend based DVR was no longer updating the Electronic Program Guide (EPG).

I would get the error:

Service description 'http://docs.tms.tribune.com/tech/tmsdatadirect/schedulesdirect/tvDataDelivery.wsdl' can't be loaded: 500 Can't connect to docs.tms.tribune.com:80 (Connection timed out)

when running the fetch script.

Digging around, I found out the reason is that the Gracenote service is being discontinued and thus some URLs have changed.

I use a script called tv_grab_na_dd from the Debian (wheezy) xmltv-utils package. Version 0.5.63-2 doesn’t appear to use the new URLs. The link above suggests adding:

54.85.117.227  docs.tms.tribune.com webservices.schedulesdirect.tmsdatadirect.com

to /etc/hosts and that worked well for me. Of course, if the IP address for Schedules Direct ever changes it will need to be updated.

It looks like this is fixed in xmltv-utils version 0.5.66.