[mythtv-users] Data Direct "service"

Nemo Inis nemoinis at telus.net
Sat Apr 7 23:59:30 UTC 2007


On Apr 7, 2007, at 3:51 PM, David Kramer wrote:

> Bruce Markey wrote:
>> That said, I honestly have always believed that one or more
>> people [AND I AM NOT THAT PERSON] has maintained a copy of the
>> XMLTV North America grabber that can grab from tvlistings.com .
>> If the DataDirect service became unavailable [WHICH I DO NOT
>> ANTICIPATE AND CERTAINLY HOPE DOES NOT HAPPEN], a scraper would
>> come to light [FROM SOMEONE THAT I HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE OF] and be
>> widely distributed within days [AND I WOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO
>> WITH ITS DISTRIBUTION].
>>
>> [I DIDN'T PLOT TO KILL JFK EITHER!]
>
> Thinking about DNS and NTP and other servers/protocols, would it not be
> possible for one to write (but not widely distribute) a screen scraper
> that could in turn answer requests and return XML, just as DD does?  
> And
> if a few dozen (or a few hundred) people ran those screen scrapers, 
> then
> everyone else sucked that data, then TMS is not overburdened, no new
> software is needed for myth, and the bandwidth burden is spread.
>
> Thoughts?

For that matter, one could scrape or otherwise acquire the data, 
convert it to XML and then post it -possibly compressed- to one or more 
newsgroups created for that purpose and that myth could download from. 
This would spread the data hosting and bandwidth burden over thousands 
of news servers. Using newsgroups for this would not be worse than a 
lot of other things they are used for, I think...



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