MyTVSeries - Plugin that organizes TV Video Files (4 Viewers)

[WeeToddDid]

Thanks everyone... It's a she... and the first one.


Anyways... I will make it a point to fix the plugin to make sure its working with the new TV.com layout.

 

[mzemina]

WeeToddDid - I hope all your years with her and your wife are filled with joy. Congratulations!!

Mike

 

[aasmund Nordal]

Congratulations
The next generation mediaportal developer is born pherhaps?

 

[mzemina]

WeeToddDid - Since it seems like one of the most common issues with a plugin/program like yours is when the associated web page changes its format enough to break the formatting and that causes the source data to not appear correctly to your parser. The end result is users think that the plugin/program is "broken."

I know that what I am about to inquire about is well beyond the realm of what you have any plans for, especially since Daddy duties have taken over for you and it is a much higher task than any MP task could be. Anyway it would be nice if there was a multi-purpose standalone web-page format converter-parser input tool and its use would be to allow it to be used for the TVSeries plugin and EPG, and any other web page scrapper - its purpose would be to tag the necessary data locations so the underlying parse could take those "tags" and allow its input for the necessary parsers of the associated plugins.

I know that what I am describing is too simplistic and it may not work in general due to the overall complexity and asking for users to perform such a task maybe well beyond the scope of "are you nuts?"

But it is a thought. And if worked would then not require a programmer to "fix" the code to work with the new web page's changed format/layout.

Mike

 

[Rick164]

Good idea, that would make this great plugin future-proof if it can be coded of course

 

[CHli]

I think this is already implemented by James in his WebEPG since the grabber are fully configurable through a XML file describing the web pages and what to grab on it.

 

[strontium]

Congratulations WeeTodd


I have finally downloaded visual c# 2005 express edition, and I have succesfully compiled Mediaportal and your plugin.
I know the TV.com layout has changed so I thought I would have a look at the code and see if I could figure anything out.
The only programming knowledge I have is Delphi from about 4 years ago :lol:
Is the problem located in videoimporter.cs?
If it is at least I have figured out that much for myself!

 

[falkyre]

First things fitst, congrats WeeToddDid on your impending new arrival. All the best to you and your familiy. I understand how much time can get away from you once kids arrive (I'm having a hard time finding my own time creating my own plugin with two older children)

Second...

A point about using TV.com and how we can handle the changes in it. Someone mentioned looking for another site to provide the data. What about using

http://tviv.org/Main_Page

It was created when C|Net took over the original TVTome and turned it into TV.com. It's a wiki based page so it should remain pretty standard.

 

[falkyre]

perhaps use a backup or different site

http://epguides.com/

Checked out the epguides site as well, an it looks good as a nice non changing frontend to TV.com. Maybe that would help out for parsing. Also looks like there are some RSS feeds to play with that would make some parsing easier.

 

[Salty.dh]

Rebuilding the importer

So I finally got a few days off and as usual love tinkering. I've rebuilt the tv.com importer. That's the good news. The bad news is tv.com's format bites.

Not having access to the old format I can only assume this is a new problem to tv.com

Each tv show starts at episode number 1 and goes up and up and up... Season 2 might start with episode 23 or 25 or something depending on how many episodes were in the previous season. This is not helpful as all video files no longer map to the episode information because these episode numbers don't actually exist.

Further more, tv.com doesn't distinguish between specials. Take for example Prison Break. It currently has two episode 7s.

what do we do about it?

A few posts I've seen in the forums suggest using epguides.com or tviv.org

Here's my take on these:

epguides.com

- Simple format -> easy to scrape.
- Distinguishes specials from season episodes.
- Links back to tv.com for episode guides and resources.

The search in epguides is a problem. It uses a raw google search which is horrible to try and data mine. (Do a search and have a look at the source!)

Now this can be solved by using google api. The problem with this is google limits the searches to 1000 / day / developer key.

I believe google dev keys are still free so the 1000 searches can be circumvented by requesting your own google dev key and then replacing it in a config file?


tviv.org

- Simplistic approach using the wiki format as stated earlier in another post will unlikely change. Great for scraping.

- Searching is nice and easy and will scrape easily.

- Episode descriptions and resources are next to non-existent for the shows I commonly watch.


So at this stage I'm really leaning towards the google api integration into the epguides.com site for episode downloading. This site seems to maintain a fairly comprehensive and error free listing. With links back to tv.com we can then access the banners and thumbnails which WeeToddDid currently utilises.

Comments and Suggestions please!

With WeeToddDid's blessing I'll embark on the task of getting this cool plugin working again.


Salty.