[mythtv] Automated Sports Info Add-on?

[Mark J. Titorenko]

David Carlson wrote:
> >Although this is being thought of with sports in mind, I could see it work
> with other things,
> >in a general "informational" format. (e.g, watching something on the
> History Channel, and
> >then based on the description being able to pull something up from an
> encyclopedia site
> >automatically while watching it, etc).  Or if a catalog of shows to site
> info was done, it
> >could bring up custom info (e.g., watching the Simpsons, and press the
> button and based on
> >the description, would pull info from a Simpsons Episode Guide website).

On Fri, Aug 29, 2003 at 09:58:21AM -0400, Joseph A. Caputo wrote:
> Sounds like what you're proposing is an integrated Myth web browser (or at
> least an HTML rendering engine).  Otherwise, you'd have to write custom code
> for every site you wanted to pull data from to parse and re-format it, then
> maintain & update the code every time a site changed its format (look at all
> the problems with xmltv & zap2it)...

This sounds like a good time to mention that parsing sports/news
information might be made easier if you can find decent feeds that use
a standard such as RDF or RSS to encapsulate the information.  Then
adding further feeds in the future should be a matter of pointing at
another feed (and perhaps setting up some display options).

> I think you'd be better off just writing a 'MythSports' module.  An
> integrated minimal web browser would be nice, but that's a whole project in
> itself -- I don't think we have enough programmer bandwidth currently.

A minimal web browser would certainly be nice; I was wondering whether
an interface could be constructed around the Mozilla Gecko library
(http://www.mozilla.org/projects/embedding/).

But, as you say, that is a whole (big) project in itself.

> Just my $0.02.

And that's my 2 pence. ;-)

Cheers,

Mark.