PCH Media Scraping

[spicemuseum]

I know I can install a jukebox to do this, but to satisfy my curiosity...

Does anyone know why the default user interface does not automatically scrape for media info (for example from imdb) when it's displaying lists of media files?

(BTW, if this question has been asked before I apologise, can someone point me at the thread...)

[benji99]

(01-22-2009 04:36 PM)spicemuseum Wrote:  Does anyone know why the default user interface does not automatically scrape for media info (for example from imdb) when it's displaying lists of media files?

Because they didn't want it to?

[spicemuseum]

(01-22-2009 04:44 PM)benji99 Wrote:  Because they didn't want it to? :D

Well that's nowhere near as satisfactory an answer as "they don't know how to do it, or they don't have the resources to do the work, or the platform doesn't have the performance to make it a good experience", but who's to say your guess isn't right.

I'm used to XBMC, and the incredibly rich experience that provides, and I'd love to see more of its features ported to (or at least replicated on) the NMT.

[dc11ab]

The imdb.com terms requires a company (or possibly anyone, didn't read the fine print) to have a license to use the data on their site and in their dB:

http://www.imdb.com/help/show_article?conditions
http://www.imdb.com/licensing/

I'd wager that Syabas do not have that kind of license.

There might be other reasons too, technically the internal browser is rather trimmed and limited.


You'll get disappointed on your NMT if you keep comparing all the nice things an open source xbmc htpc can do. However, there are many ways to enrich the 'NMT experience'! Browse the User Apps-, UPnP and Http server- and Video Jukebox sections for inspiration.

[daniel_owen_uk]

You can get a jukebox that will sit on your PCH and will update a menu with that sort of info, but it will not be the default Syabas menu.

I think DC's comment is true, and is probably why they release YAMJ as a plugin only for MyIhome

[spicemuseum]

(01-23-2009 05:15 PM)dc11ab Wrote:  The imdb.com terms requires a company (or possibly anyone, didn't read the fine print) to have a license to use the data on their site and in their dB:
http://www.imdb.com/help/show_article?conditions
http://www.imdb.com/licensing/
I'd wager that Syabas do not have that kind of license.

Thanks for the info. I used imdb as an example, my main point is that it doesn't scrape.

(01-23-2009 05:15 PM)dc11ab Wrote:  There might be other reasons too, technically the internal browser is rather trimmed and limited.

That's much more like the answer I'd expect, but I can't see why the browser would be the limiting experience - I'd have thought horse-power of the processor to render images in lists with reasonable responsiveness might be.

(01-23-2009 05:15 PM)dc11ab Wrote:  You'll get disappointed on your NMT if you keep comparing all the nice things an open source xbmc htpc can do.

My eight year old XB0X (running X8MC) offers a fantastic user experience, it's just a shame it can't handle a 1080p h.264. - which is, of course, the raison d'etre of the Popcorn Hr/NMT.

[dc11ab]

Sites such as freedb.org are available even for commercial entities, so that could be a possibility for Syabas, at least when it comes to music. I havn't found a similar site for video media, though.

Scraping is hard to make consumer friendly. It is very likely that there will be exceptions in media which will post the wrong information in X percentage of a user's media library. I'm not saying I'm against scraping (I use a batch script myself!) but, IMHO, I don't think it is ready for the masses, even if one has access to imdb sources.


The browser and other applications are a different beast to the hw-accelarated decoding of HD media formats.
As an application server, the NMT's performance can be compared to a set-top satelite reciever box, or a simple NAS - today's embedded devices are still less powerful than your 8 year old Xbox1, so to speak.

[Trollslayer]

(01-22-2009 04:36 PM)spicemuseum Wrote:  I know I can install a jukebox to do this, but to satisfy my curiosity...

Does anyone know why the default user interface does not automatically scrape for media info (for example from imdb) when it's displaying lists of media files?

(BTW, if this question has been asked before I apologise, can someone point me at the thread...)

The Sgima chip has quite a small processor as a lot of the decoding work is done in hardware or by specialised cores plus processing this kind of thing would take quite a lot of memory.
As ever, someone had to make a tradeoff on size/cost/performance.