[mythtv-users] tv_grab_au immir... defunct?

[Peter Schachte]

On Mon, Jul 17, 2006 at 08:01:54AM +1000, Mark Hetherington wrote:
> Is anyone still wanting to work on the script?
> I'm willing to host it/spend time applying patches if people wish to still 
> give it a go. 

I guess there are a lot of people who have been using Michael Smith's
great script and are all thinking the same thing.  I'm willing to work
on it too, but if ninemsn is determined to make their site unscrapable
and willing to devote the resources, it's probably an exercise in
futility.  I can think of several things they could do that we
couldn't really work around.  Though it might be fun to keep them
scrambling as long as possible :-b .

I took a look around and found that SBS, ABC, ABC2, and Ten all have
online schedules for their own programming (ABC's go more than 2 weeks
into the future and have more detail, eg, what today's Four Corners is
covering and who's on Enough Rope.  Neither OzTivo nor Ninemsn have
this info.) that shouldn't be too hard to scrape.  None of them have
policies I could find against scraping.  But I couldn't find that kind
of site for seven or nine, just their "don't scrape me" sites.  I'm
not sure about SBS NEWS.  I was thinking about a script to scrape the
sites of each station, and then maybe use OzTivo for Seven and Nine.
Of course, this is nowhere near enough for cable subscribers, but it
covers the FTA digital stations.

> Although perhaps it's best to try to put the effort into OzTivo instead? Do 
> they accept "scraped" data?

This appears to be the path of least resistance, and probably what
most users of the immir.com script will do.

Maybe the best solution would be to see if ABC, SBS, and Ten would be
willing to put their sites under a creative common license and to
allow a single nightly scrape of their sites into OzTivo.  Then
everyone could benefit from greater detail in OzTivo program listings
with less effort, and without undue stress on the stations' servers.
Has this been tried?

-- 
Peter Schachte              Politics is the most concentrated expression of
schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU        economics.
www.cs.mu.oz.au/~schachte/      -- V. I. Lenin 
Phone: +61 3 8344 1338