Preston Crow wrote:
On Thu, 2005-04-21 at 11:26, Joe Votour wrote:
As much as I hate to say it, if Zap2It stopped
providing the free data, then (likely) one of two
things would happen:
2. We'd go back to using screen scrapers (back before
the first version of MythTV that natively supported
Zap2It). This was somewhat painful, as I remember
guide downloads were taking up to 20 minutes per day,
and it was a real bandwidth hog to Zap2It (which is
why they gave us direct access in the first place).
What I would really like to see if we go back to screen scrapers is the
ability to use a separate one for each channel.
That would be a nightmare from a coding standpoint. There's no accounting for Timezone information, and no standard way to parse the metadata for the shows. You'd have to manually map the data from each page to the database, and whenever somebody decides to change the URL or the page layout, your guide would break, or load incorrect data, etc...
The only way screen scrapers can be successful for the mass market is if they scrape guides, which already aggregate the data quite efficiently.
-- John Sturgeon <>< http://www.sturgeonfamily.com/mythtv.php
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