[mythtv] Automated Sports Info Add-on?

[Joseph A. Caputo]

>-----Original Message-----
>From: mythtv-dev-bounces at mythtv.org
[mailto:mythtv-dev-bounces at mythtv.org]On Behalf Of David
>Carlson
>Sent: Thursday, August 28, 2003 6:32 PM
>To: mythtv-dev at mythtv.org
>Subject: [mythtv] Automated Sports Info Add-on?
>
>
>Hi, I just subscribed, and I'm planning on converting a machine to a Myth
system pretty soon.
>Looks very cool, can't wait to try it out.

Welcome aboard.  FYI, please post only in plain text.

>Since I am a C developer I've been thinking about add-ons as well, and I
wanted to run one by
>the list and see if the idea's come up before, or if anyone is already
working on something
>similar.
>
>Basically I'm thinking of something that, if you pressed a certain button,
it would make the
>TV screen 1/4 size in the upper left, add a menu to the upper right 1/4,
and the bottom 1/2
>would be a display area.
>
>Then, based on parsing the information from the show title/description from
the XML TV, if it
>can determine what you are watching is a sporting event, it will try to
find data from some
>source (ESPN, yahoo, whatever) that you can pull up while you have the game
still on in the
>corner.
>
>So, for example, your watching a baseball game, and you hit the "info" or
whatever button on
>the remote/keyboard, and it goes into this mode, with this in the upper
right menu:
>- Starting Lineups
>- Box Score
>- Chicago Weather (home teams weather from MythWeather)
>- Return to Full Screen Video
>
>So, if you choose one of the options, you'd get that info in the bottom
half of the screen.
>
>Although this is being thought of with sports in mind, I could see it work
with other things,
>in a general "informational" format. (e.g, watching something on the
History Channel, and
>then based on the description being able to pull something up from an
encyclopedia site
>automatically while watching it, etc).  Or if a catalog of shows to site
info was done, it
>could bring up custom info (e.g., watching the Simpsons, and press the
button and based on
>the description, would pull info from a Simpsons Episode Guide website).


Sounds like what you're proposing is an integrated Myth web browser (or at
least an HTML rendering engine).  Otherwise, you'd have to write custom code
for every site you wanted to pull data from to parse and re-format it, then
maintain & update the code every time a site changed its format (look at all
the problems with xmltv & zap2it)...

I think you'd be better off just writing a 'MythSports' module.  An
integrated minimal web browser would be nice, but that's a whole project in
itself -- I don't think we have enough programmer bandwidth currently.

Just my $0.02.

-JAC