Lan Barnes wrote:
OK, Tcl'ers, who wants to have some FUN! There is a MythTV project crying
out for Tcl.
BACKGROUND
MythTV is the OSS Linux-based home brew Tivo. It rocks. Historically Myth
got its TV listings for the data base by screen scraping the zap2it site
(http://www.zap2it.com/). zap2it got pissed because of all the hits by
bots and played cat-n-mouse, changing their interface almost weekly.
Finally zap2it caved and created zap2it labs that allowed Myth people to
register, fill out a survey, and download XML listings for their
region/service. It has been free.
Now zap2it has announced that they're pulling that service in September.
No offer (yet) to make it a paid service, just bye bye. The Myth users
mailing list, which is exceptionally vapid at best, has been an avalanche
of pointless hand-wringing over this. "Can't we DO something?!"
THE PROJECT
Yes, we can! We can write a more flexible screen scraper for zap2it, a
better cat to play with their mouse.
I'm picturing something done with Expect and the Tcl HTML add-in. Config
files for the user's home data (zip code, channel selection, cable or
dish, etc). And the output should be the same XML that zap2it labs has
been providing.
And flexible flexible flexible.
Anyone wanna play (and, yes, Mr. Penix, I'm talkin' to _you_)?
It may be a can of worms, but many TV stations list their line up on
their websites, do they not? If it (your Tcl proggie) is flexible
enough to get the line-ups from various sources (especially the original
sources), and then clean it up and offer it up like a mirror, then the
impact on the sources would much more nominal since your mirror would be
catching all the hits. You might even add a few sponsors' ads to offset
the cost of hosting and such.
As I recall, TV Guide got its start in a garage by someone calling up
the Networks and asking them for their line-ups. They sent the line-ups
free of charge. TV Guide got advertisers to pay for spots and was able
to then sell the Guide for a much smaller fee to the public. When TV
Guide became known, it was a little too late for the Networks to start
charging for it (although I think a few of them tried but later gave up,
IIRC).
--
Ralph
--
One day I stumbled across a case of Scotch.
As I recall, I stumbled several days thereafter.
--W.C. Fields
--
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