[mythtv-users] Re: Get ABC Australia news video clips in MythStream

Phill Edwards philledwards at gmail.com
Fri Aug 12 13:42:36 UTC 2005


> This is one for the Aussie MythStream users mainly - it's a shell
> script that outputs news/sport/business headlines and links to the
> corresponding video clips on ABC's web site into a format that be
> copied into MythStream's streams.res file. You can then get a list of
> the latest headlines and watch the video clips in MythStream.
> 
> The shell script can be found at http://www.oaklands.aust.com/mythtv/abcvidz.sh
> 
> You can change some of the settings such as the filename to output to
> in the 1st part of the script. My suggestion is that you copy your
> streams.res to streams.res.static, or similar, and then run a shell
> script after this one that concatenates the file created by abcvidz.sh
> onto a cat of streams.res.static and redirect that to the real
> streams.res file.
> 
> On my setup I have abcvidz.sh running hourly on a box which is
> permanently connected to the internet. The output files are written to
> a web server dir and picked up from there by wget on my MythTV box
> when it wakes up and from there written to streams.res.

New Development
--------------------------
I've re-written this as a proper MythStream harvester/parser so that
you can just add some simple entries to your streams.res file and it
will work. If you follow the simple instructions below you will get
News, Australia Wide News, Sports & Business video streams from ABC
Australia.

The original one I wrote used shell scripts running under cron to
create a new streams.res containing the latest headlines. This new
version is more elegant and a lot easier to install and works more in
the way MythStream intended. The only downside to this over the shell
script version is that you get what ABC are currently showing on their
broadband news site rather than a listing of the last 24 hours.

To use it do the following 3 simple steps:

1) Download http://www.oaklands.aust.com/mythtv/abcheadline.pl.gz. Put
it in your mythstream/parsers directory, unzip it (gzip -d
abcheadline.pl.gz) and make sure it's executable.

2) Add the following to your MythStream streams.res file. If you're on
a low bandwidth internet link change vidqual=HQ to vidqual=LQ:
[item]
ABC Streams
ABC News
http://127.0.0.1/dummy.html?vidcat=news&vidqual=HQ
ABC News Videos
abcheadline

[item]
ABC Streams
ABC Aust Wide
http://127.0.0.1/dummy.html?vidcat=austwide&vidqual=HQ
ABC Australia Wide News Videos
abcheadline

[item]
ABC Streams
ABC Business
http://127.0.0.1/dummy.html?vidcat=business&vidqual=HQ
ABC Business News Videos
abcheadline

[item]
ABC Streams
ABC Sport
http://127.0.0.1/dummy.html?vidcat=sports&vidqual=HQ
ABC Sports News Videos
abcheadline

3) Install a file called dummy.html in your web server root directory
on your MythTV box because MythStream requires a URL to call. Mine
just looks like this:

<HTML>
<TITLE>
Dummy Parser for MythStream
</TITLE>
<BODY>
Fake URL required by mythstream for eg apple movie trailer parser and
ABC News Videos parser
</BODY>
</HTML>

That's it - much more simple! BTW, I'm not a perl programmer so I'm
sure the code is extremely dodgy and apologise in advance for that! If
anyone has suggestions for how it can be better written I'm keen to
learn.

One final note - it requires perl-libwww-perl to be installed on your
system. I think this is required by XMLTV packages anyway so you
almost certainly already have it.

Hope you find it useful.

Regards,
Phill


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