Plugin: Sage Recording Extender 4 (SREv4)

[jdezur]

Originally Posted by Slugger

So the red mark is expected since the teams aren't known. And when they are known, if the EPG doesn't update to list them then you may need to create an override in order for SRE to monitor the games.

Just forced an EPG update since World Series Game 1 is tomorrow night. Still has that red mark, so I manually added an override and made it green. Apparently my cable company (or the epg provider for my area) thinks that it shouldn't be named "MLB Baseball", like every other game of the series, but "2014 World Series" instead. I think they just like being difficult.

[Slugger]

The title isn't the issue, SRE can handle '2014 World Series'. The issue is that the teams probably aren't in the subtitle. The web service will only attach to a game if it's told what teams are playing.

[Slugger]

Finally had a chance to rewrite the CFL monitor; it's back online as of now. Let me know if there are any issues.

[emveepee]

Originally Posted by Slugger

Finally had a chance to rewrite the CFL monitor; it's back online as of now. Let me know if there are any issues.

Thanks I'll try tomorrow night. I do have issues watching the RedBlacks lose game after game but you can't really help me there.

Martin

[emveepee]

Although it didn't go over schedule, Formula 1 today worked great, thanks a lot.

Martin

[tmiranda]

Martin beat me to it. F1 monitor worked great for me too.

(And it was a good race. Go Hamilton!)

[Slugger]

A monitor for the IIHF U20 Championships is now online. Unfortunately, Tribune uses the title "Hockey" for these games, which is too generic and so you will need to create overrides to monitor these games. The title required is WJC Hockey.

If you use the sdepg plugin for your EPG data then you can use the following program filter to automatically convert airings of this tournament into the appropriate format so they will be auto monitored by SRE. If you don't use sdepg, you will need to create manual overrides for SRE as usual.

Go Canada go!

Create a file called wjc.groovy in your SageTV/plugins/sdepg/program_filters/ folder with the following contents:

if(_src_.title == 'Hockey' && _src_.episodeTitle && _src_.episodeTitle.indexOf(':') != -1 && _src_.episodeTitle.indexOf('IIHF World Junior') != -1) {
	def newEpisode = _src_.episodeTitle.substring(_src_.episodeTitle.indexOf(':') + 1).trim()
	newEpisode = newEpisode.replaceFirst('United States', 'USA')
	_src_.title = 'WJC Hockey'
	_src_.episodeTitle = newEpisode
	_log_.info "Modified ${_src_.id}: $newEpisode"
}

[Slugger]

As of tonight, I have unsubscribed from this thread. What does this mean? It means I am no longer actively developing or supporting this plugin. All my plugins have actually been EOL'd since about 2012-2013, but tonight I unsubscribe from these threads which means I no longer get instant email notifications when people post. I'm not leaving, I'm still a user, I'm still around these forums, but I no longer support these out of date plugins and since I don't sub to these threads any longer, I may or may not notice your questions and therefore may or may not answer them -- assume that I won't, certainly not in a timely manner.

This also means I will never release another version of this plugin to the repository. I remain the owner of the plugin in the repository, but will approve a transfer if requested. No one has taken me up on that offer since my original announcement many weeks back. Unless someone does, there will be no more releases of this plugin.

[skiingwiz]

Originally Posted by Slugger

This also means I will never release another version of this plugin to the repository. I remain the owner of the plugin in the repository, but will approve a transfer if requested. No one has taken me up on that offer since my original announcement many weeks back. Unless someone does, there will be no more releases of this plugin.

I took you up on it when you made the offer and Opus4 transferred the ownership to me at the end of February. I don't plan to make any releases unless something breaks.

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by skiingwiz

I took you up on it when you made the offer and Opus4 transferred the ownership to me at the end of February. I don't plan to make any releases unless something breaks.

Ah, ok, perfect. I didn't know you went ahead with Opus and took ownership of the plugin in the repo.

[tmiranda]

So skiingwiz, any chance of a monitor for MLS soccer?

[skiingwiz]

Originally Posted by Slugger

Ah, ok, perfect. I didn't know you went ahead with Opus and took ownership of the plugin in the repo.

You're right, I guess I never told you I took that step. Sorry about that.

Originally Posted by tmiranda

So skiingwiz, any chance of a monitor for MLS soccer?

Well, the livepvrdata.com backend still belongs to Slugger, so new monitor requests still go to him. If he adds it and there is something preventing SRE from using it, I'll get it working.

[cat6man]

Originally Posted by Slugger

Ah, ok, perfect. I didn't know you went ahead with Opus and took ownership of the plugin in the repo.

time for my annual, 'thank you for the best plugin ever' post.
opening day was yesterday, and of course, i never have to worry about extra innings or missing part of a long game!

3 cheers for slugger AND new owner skiingwiz

[Slugger]

And the Blue Jays beat the Yankees. The best thing about MLB and April is that every team is in it, even the Blue Jays!

[Slugger]

Also, @tmiranda: Others (outside of Sage) have asked for MLS monitors, too. I actually wrote one a week or two ago and it was even live for a few days, but it's quite unstable so I had to turn it off. When I have the time to clean it up I'll turn it back on and SRE won't have any issues using it. Where SRE will have some problems is mapping the team names in the EPG to those on the source web site. I'll need users to report those diffs to me so I can update the server side map so keep an eye out for that.

[Slugger]

Just an update on this plugin, well, actually the web service that backs this plugin: www.livepvrdata.com

The web sites are getting smarter/better at blocking what I like to call "alternate user agents". The two big sites I use in this web service are no longer usable. One, whose parent company owns the rights to one Donald Duck, has changed their live scoreboard format in such a way that the base html served no longer contains the data of interest and that data isn't available as an ajax or other accessible request.

The other site, Canada's Sports Leader as it were, has just recently simply started to drop and refuse connections from Google Appengine, which is where the web service is hosted.

Therefore, the following sports are currently left without support:

NBA, NCAA (all), NFL, MLS, CFL

In an attempt to replace the NBA monitor, I started looking at other sites and they all seem to block appengine requests one way or another. The easiest and most standard way is to require a specific, standard user agent header in the requests. Google Appengine doesn't allow spoofing of this header and so that knocks out a lot of contenders. The ones that remain seem to employ similar tactics as Donald Duck's site.

A few sources remain, but they aren't detailed enough to be usable without some serious rework on my end -- work I'm not all that interested in doing at this time especially since the cat & mouse game momentum now seems to be in the favour of the other side.

What's left? NHL, MLB and motor sports. The motor sports monitor is a beta monitor and if Donald's team makes any changes there then it will die as well.

NHL is from a supported source and shouldn't die anytime soon. MLB data is sourced directly from the horse's mouth so to speak and should be fine for the foreseeable future.

If anyone knows where to get some reliable data, I'm all for trying to at least keep the big 4 alive: MLB, NHL, NBA, NFL. I'd also like NCAA hoops and football as well, but NCAA data is especially hard to come by.

If the cat & mouse game continues to go sour then the service may very well die off. As a point of reference, I researched this years ago when I started it and did a quick refresh of my research over the last couple days and nothing much has changed. XML feeds of this data start at ~$1000 (US)/month to cover the big 4 leagues. I'd be willing to invest a few bucks a month to get the data needed, but $1K/month is not even in the realm of possibilities.

So, again, if any users out there have any ideas then do fire them my way.

[KryptoNyte]

I have no idea how you guys approach this constantly changing data set. I often wonder who the poor bastard is that has to fix the EPG server every time it's misbehaving ... probably on vacation when they get that message that it has to be fixed ... and fixed right now of course.

The only possibility that I see is for SageTV user intervention. For anyone using Sage that is watching the sports event live, they would have to manually report in that the sports event is starting late/early/running long ... press this or that button for another 10 minutes of sport event ... etc.

How else can a guy keep up with this? That's a pretty tall order.

[Slugger]

Yeah, crowd sourcing isn't the best -- it would be so unreliable that it just wouldn't even be worth it. Some events would have plenty of people eyeballing it, but a late season game between last place teams that no one but the one guy from the one city cares about isn't going to have anyone else helping it extend. This kind of thing has to be automated. Honestly, until these recent setbacks, my work was minimal. The monitors I had in place were basically maintenance free. One site's monitors were actually untouched for some 18 months. Any that did require tweaking were minimal... 20 minutes of my time once every 6-8 months and they were fixed.

Now these sites I used (and most of the others) have figured out ways to prevent such uses of their data and are now using these methods. Are they beatable? Probably, but it's requiring more effort than I'm willing to give, especially for events I don't have a need to monitor.

I think I'll at least be able to partially restore the monitors for the big 4, but we'll see. I'd at least like to restore something for the upcoming NBA Finals for those that record it; I have a few days to try and figure something out.

[Slugger]

After some tips and links from others, I think we're back on the good side of the cat & mouse game, at least for now. There are some concessions to be had, but it's better than nothing.

As of today, NBA is back partially. Live monitoring works, but we lost future look aheads (beyond 2-3 days). For Sage users, this means the little green checkmarks won't appear for future games in your recording schedule. It might even be red, but on the day of a game it will eventually correct itself and most importantly it will monitor the game. The same source will be used for the NFL unless something new is discovered over the summer. We gained back MLS Soccer (for those who care, I don't but it was sitting right there in this new source so why not, I said) and we also stumbled into a new monitor from the same source: FIFA Women's World Cup. Actually, this source has all kinds of soccer leagues covered if there were any interest in Euro leagues? I don't watch it so I'm not going to write one for Euro soccer unless asked and a rainy day presents itself during the summer. These all come from the same source, which doesn't provide future schedules and so the green check missing problem will surface for monitors of these events.

All of that said, I'm really only focused anymore on the big 4: NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL. And of those, I don't watch the NBA. I think we might get Top 25 NCAA football/basketball coverage come autumn, but not sure yet and won't be making any extraordinary efforts to restore NCAA coverage. Anything else is a bonus and anything that breaks outside of the big 4 will probably not be fixed.

Edit: Also, the Blue Jays played a rare doubleheader today, which brought to light the fact that the MLB monitor did not monitor doubleheaders properly. The fix for that was also deployed with the other stuff today.

[KryptoNyte]

Originally Posted by Slugger

Yeah, crowd sourcing isn't the best -- it would be so unreliable that it just wouldn't even be worth it. Some events would have plenty of people eyeballing it, but a late season game between last place teams that no one but the one guy from the one city cares about isn't going to have anyone else helping it extend...

Yeah, I hadn't considered that, or how remarkably applicable that revelation is to a Brewers fan.