[mythtv] Status of Schedules Direct SD-JSON grabbers

Robert Kulagowski rkulagow at gmail.com
Mon Jul 18 14:27:02 UTC 2016


On Sun, Jul 17, 2016 at 2:25 PM, Peter Bennett <pgbennett at comcast.net> wrote:
> I tried the Robert K program on my test machine. I am using Ubuntu 16.04
> and Mythtv 0.28. There were multiple issues, see the ticket that I
> raised below.
>
> https://github.com/SchedulesDirect/mfdb-json/issues/20

I'm not on Xenial / 0.28  but I can spin up a VM and see what's happening.

> This was originally denigrated by the developers as it was directly
> updating the database.

If the settings table had a "tainted" field I'd be happy to set it.
But then all the other scripts that directly manipulate the database
should as well.

The grabber is / was a proof of concept for developers to build off of
if they wanted to incorporate the JSON API directly into their
applications, and as JSON it's easily parseable by both human and
machine alike. I tried to use the Services API wherever possible in
the utility program to configure videosources, but most of the API was
undocumented, and there wasn't anything that I saw that related to
inserting schedules.

The existing XMLTV spec doesn't have a one-to-one mapping with the
data available in the JSON. A number of fields in mythconverg are /
were ENUMs, so in some cases I was able to create a translation layer
and coerce JSON values into something mythtv understood. In others
there just wasn't a fit.

> If I remember correctly it would add all channels to your database
> regardless of whether you need them, and I seem to remember would reset
> all of the priority settings on the channels. I use the priority
> settings, so that would be no good.

A bunch of those issues were fixed, including reset of the priority.

Anyway, if there's interest in consuming the JSON API natively instead
of through a translation, I'm available, but my focus is on the server
side and not the PoC grabber. (Other than that it will bother me that
it's not working) XML just isn't my itch.


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