[mythtv] Re: [mythtv-users] Slightly OT: MythTV as Senior Project?

[Brad Templeton]

On Thu, Mar 03, 2005 at 03:03:21AM -0800, Louie Ilievski wrote:
> Hi everyone.  I have been an avid MythTV user for over 6 months now and
> I love it.  I also have wanted to get involved in some development for
> it.  My friend and I are seniors at the University of California,
> Riverside, and we are trying to find a fun project we can work on for
> our senior project.  However, this is supposed to be a "compilers"


There are lots of projects available within mythtv, big and small, but
you will be pushed to find one that's compiler like.

It is often a good idea for any complex system to have its own internal
language for customization, so it was a common trick to "add a language"
(including writing an interpreter for it, not usually a compiler) to
a system as it grew.  So common that a number of systems were developed,
like TCL and to a lesser degree XML libraries, to do much of this work for
you.  Rarely do you do your own parsing.

Recently there has been debate about switching the myth internal protocol
away from the custom-parsed one that's in it.  But the talk is all about
how to switch to one of the standard canned protocols like soap/corba/xml-rpc
etc.

Again, no parsing to write, definitely no code generation, symbol management,
all the things in a compiler.

Now I will admit that one of my own side projects could use some fancy
parsing, but not compiler-like parsing.  Rather attempts to parse and
scrape data from web pages.   The recently released TVWish project
allows you to import from the web lists of show recommendations.

So for it, it would be handy if there were a tool that could scan the
web pages of all the major TV critics (on newspaper and other web sites)
and extract their recommendations (including star ratings or whatever
other rating they give.)   This needs to be custom tuned to each critic,
which in turn requires a mini-language to configure how to scrape that
page.

Anyway, the goal is to make a sort site like "Rotten Tomatoes" or the
new Google Movies, except for TV.   Scan all the critics and amalagamate
their results, identify the TV they are universaily hailing or panning.

Then readers can read it and myth boxes can suck it down and record
the desired shows.