[mythtv-users] Free US/Canada Listings

[aaron]

On 9/6/07, Nedim Cholich <mythtv at cholich.com> wrote:
>
> The true practical problem with scrapers is what happens when scraped
> website changes? I, for one, have to time or will to monitor some log or
> mailinglist for signs of changes, hack the script myself or apply some patch
> and miss the recording in the meantime. You come back from three week
> vacation and find out that last 10 days you've been recording Martha Stewart
> instead of Heroes.
>

Back in the Goode Olde Dayes (about 5 years ago, I guess?) when we had
to use XMLTV to scrape the Zap2It site, I wrote a wrapper script
around mythfilldatabase to detect when grabbing failures occurred, and
see if it was due to site format changes. XMLTV would check if you
were on the latest version and print out a message if there was a
newer version available. I parsed that and would automatically
download, configure, compile, and install the new version and then
rerun mythfilldatabase ("at" is my friend). Of course, it was
error-prone, so I'd e-mail the output to myself and carefully check it
to see if things were done properly.

Not really something I'd look forward to going back to.... (and no, I
don't still have that script... I happily removed all that stuff once
DataDirect was available)

-- 
aaron

"Oh oh oh. I'm incoherent with excitement. Please tell me what fascinating
bit of badger-sputumly inconsequential trivia you will assail me with next."
        -- Arthur Dent