[mythtv-users] MythWeather small bug to report

Schlomo Schapiro ivtv at schlomo.schapiro.org
Sun Aug 8 16:58:42 EDT 2004


Hi,

I live in Berlin, Germany and the weather report on MythTV is usually far 
from the reality, especially the forecast seems sometimes pure fantasy.

Some kind of a XMLTV like mechanism would allow me to use a German weather 
website for information (like wetter.msn.de), which are quite accurate. I 
wouldn't mind writing the grabber for that, if the interface was clear.

Regards,
Schlomo


On Sat, 7 Aug 2004, Michael T. Dean wrote:

> Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> 
> >On Fri, Aug 06, 2004 at 09:01:28AM -0400, Jeff C wrote:
> >  
> >
> >>On the topic of MythWeather, I love the feature but my location isn't
> >>supported at all.  :S  I was wondering if there is any active development on
> >>MythWeather and whether or not there is any interest in moving to a site
> >>like Weather Underground which supports airport codes for lookups...
> >>
> >>http://www.weatherunderground.com
> >>    
> >>
> >That site seems more accurate for non-US weather than the current
> >source, at least for Melbourne Australia. That is, the current
> >temperature matches what our government forecaster (www.bom.gov.au)
> >currently reports.
> >
> >Unfortunately the 5-day forecast seems to have no correlation to
> >the official forecast at all. Pure fantasy even!
> >
> >Ideally there'd be something like xmltv for weather, allowing
> >people to write grabbers for local data. The bom.gov.au site is
> >always best for Australia, for example, and it doesn't make much
> >sense to be hitting US web sites for local weather.
> >  
> >
> Unless, of course, you're the author of MythWeather (and, note that I'm 
> not); in which case the thought of maintaining a program to "screen 
> scrape" weather information from hundreds of different websites (which 
> are constantly being changed by their owners) is probably not a pleasant 
> one.
> 
> The weather data is currently being pulled from MSNBC and the weather 
> maps from weather.com.  Even though I live in the US, I don't really 
> like the weather data from MSNBC--primarily because it gives relative 
> humidity, but not dew point (I like to see both).  Therefore, I was 
> looking at weather.com and whether it would be usable as a source.
> 
> Pulling the data from weatherunderground.com would be extremely 
> difficult because of how it's buried within the page.  However, 
> weather.com, like MSNBC, has the data consolidated in a single easy to 
> parse line.  Therefore, modifying MythWeather to use weather.com would 
> be relatively easy.  Unfortunately, though, the page on which the one 
> line of data exists is about 64KB larger than the one at MSNBC...
> 
> So, how's the data at weather.com?  Based on an intial look (comparing 
> MSNBC, weather.com, and weatherunderground.com for Syndey, Australia), 
> weather.com seems to agree with weatherunderground (whereas MSNBC was 
> very different).  It's possible that there's another way to get that 
> line of data from weather.com that doesn't involve the extra 64KB of 
> stuff, but if there's no compelling reason to use weather.com (i.e. much 
> better data for non-US users while maintaining similary data quality for 
> US users), it's not worth the time to try to find that way.
> 
> Mike
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-- 
Regards,
Schlomo


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