Reply to thread

I can't speak for the MediaPortal guys, but on the Moving Pictures project, I spent a lot of time looking into the XBMC scraper system before we implemented our own generic Cornerstone Scraper Engine. I have not looked too closely at the new ScraperXML project (although I did take a peek and by the way it is written in Visual Basic, not C#). But if it works similar to or is based on the older C++ scraper engine for XBMC it has a couple problems.

1. The method of outputting results with the XBMC scripting engine is fairly cryptic. The script writer has to basically construct an XML document for the output. And what makes this even worse is this construction is embedded in an existing XML document, which means all special characters must be escaped. This dramatically complicates things, reducing the maintainability of existing scripts and making new scripts much more difficult to write.
2. The output of the search function is only a text based string and a url for the details page for the movie, tv show, etc. The string is not even consistent, sometimes it is title, sometimes it is title and year, sometimes it is official title, english title, then year. It's just not reliable. This would create difficulties with the auto approval system in Moving Pictures.
3. The way the scraper engine is written, it's just not that extensible. What if someone wanted to add XML parsing tools to be provided to the scraper? What if someone wants to execute XSLT queries on a web page found on the internet? Or what about pulling details from the filesystem rather than a URL? These are not features I particularly care about, but my point is it would not be easy to add these features with the way the XBMC stuff is coded. The core of the scraper engine would have to be modified and this would bring risk to existing functionality, because everything as it is, is lumped together in a big class / file.

For these reasons I chose not to get involved with the XBMC scraper engine a while back. Instead we created the Cornerstone Scraper Engine (also GPL) that powers Moving Pictures. I think that a community effort to create a common data provider system for multiple HTPC apps is a good idea, but if the project is going to base the engine on the XBMC implementation, I am unfortunately not really interested in getting involved.