1 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
3 Copyright 2002-2004 The Apache Software Foundation or its licensors,
6 Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
7 you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
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18 <!DOCTYPE document PUBLIC "-//APACHE//DTD Documentation V2.0//EN" "http://forrest.apache.org/dtd/document-v20.dtd">
21 <title>Automatic Recording for KiSS Hard Disk Recorders</title>
25 KiSS makes regular updates to their site that sometimes require adaptations
26 to the crawler. If it stops working, check out the most recent version here.
28 <section id="changelog">
29 <title>Changelog</title>
32 <title>31 August 2006</title>
34 <li>Added windows bat file for running the crawler under windows.
35 Very add-hoc, will be generalized. </li>
39 <title>24 August 2006</title>
41 <li>The crawler now uses desktop login for crawling. Also, it is much more efficient since
42 it no longer needs to crawl the individual programs. This is because the channel page
43 includes descriptions of programs in javascript popups which can be used by the crawler.
44 The result is a significant reduction of the load on the KiSS EPG site. Also, the delay
45 between requests has been increased to further reduce load on the KiSS EPG site. </li>
47 The crawler now crawls programs for tomorrow instead of for today.
50 The web based crawler is configured to run only between 7pm and 12pm. It used to run at
57 <title>13-20 August 2006</title>
59 There were several changes to the login procedure, requiring modifications to the crawler.
62 <li>The crawler now uses the 'Referer' header field correctly at login.</li>
63 <li>KiSS now uses hidden form fields in their login process which are now also handled correctly by the
68 <section id="overview">
69 <title>Overview</title>
72 In 2005, <a href="site:links/kiss">KiSS</a> introduced the ability
73 to schedule recordings on KiSS hard disk recorder (such as the
74 DP-558) through a web site on the internet. When a new recording is
75 scheduled through the web site, the KiSS recorder finds out about
76 this new recording by polling a server on the internet.
77 This is a really cool feature since it basically allows programming
78 the recorder when away from home.
81 After using this feature for some time now, I started noticing regular
82 patterns. Often you are looking for the same programs and for certain
83 types of programs. So, wouldn't it be nice to have a program
84 do this work for you and automatically record programs and notify you
85 of possibly interesting ones?
88 This is where the KiSS crawler comes in. This is a simple crawler which
89 logs on to the KiSS electronic programme guide web site and gets
90 programme information from there. Then based on that it automatically
91 records programs for you or sends notifications about interesting ones.
94 In its current version, the crawler can be used in two ways:
97 <li><strong>standalone program</strong>: A standalone program run as a scheduled task.</li>
98 <li><strong>web application</strong>: A web application running on a java
99 application server. With this type of use, the crawler also features an automatic retry
100 mechanism in case of failures, as well as a simple web interface. </li>
105 <title>Downloading</title>
108 At this moment, no formal releases have been made and only the latest
109 version can be downloaded.
112 The easy way to start is the
113 <a href="installs/crawler/kiss/kiss-crawler-bin.zip">standalone program binary version</a>
114 or using the <a href="installs/crawler/kissweb/wamblee-crawler-kissweb.war">web
118 The latest source can be obtained from subversion with the
119 URL <code>https://wamblee.org/svn/public/utils</code>. The subversion
120 repository allows read-only access to anyone.
123 The application was developed and tested on SuSE linux 9.1 with JBoss 4.0.2 application
124 server (only required for the web application). It requires at least a Java Virtual Machine
125 1.5 or greater to run.
130 <title>Configuring the crawler</title>
133 The crawler comes with three configuration files:
136 <li><code>crawler.xml</code>: basic crawler configuration
137 tailored to the KiSS electronic programme guide.</li>
138 <li><code>programs.xml</code>: containing a description of which
139 programs must be recorded and which programs are interesting.</li>
140 <li><code>org.wamblee.crawler.properties</code>: Containing a configuration </li>
143 For the standalone program, all configuration files are in the <code>conf</code> directory.
144 For the web application, the properties files is located in the <code>WEB-INF/classes</code>
145 directory of the web application, and <code>crawler.xml</code> and <code>programs.xml</code>
146 are located outside of the web application at a location configured in the properties file.
151 <title>Crawler configuration <code>crawler.xml</code></title>
154 First of all, copy the <code>config.xml.example</code> file
155 to <code>config.xml</code>. After that, edit the first entry of
156 that file and replace <code>user</code> and <code>passwd</code>
157 with your personal user id and password for the KiSS Electronic
163 <title>Program configuration</title>
165 Interesting TV shows are described using <code>program</code>
166 elements. Each <code>program</code> element contains
167 one or more <code>match</code> elements that describe
168 a condition that the interesting program must match.
171 Matching can be done on the following properties of a program:
174 <tr><th>Field name</th>
175 <th>Description</th></tr>
178 <td>Program name</td>
182 <td>Program description</td>
186 <td>Channel name</td>
190 <td>Keywords/classification of the program.</td>
194 The field to match is specified using the <code>field</code>
195 attribute of the <code>match</code> element. If no field name
196 is specified then the program name is matched. Matching is done
197 by converting the field value to lowercase and then doing a
198 perl-like regular expression match of the provided value. As a
199 result, the content of the match element should be specified in
200 lower case otherwise the pattern will never match.
201 If multiple <code>match</code> elements are specified for a
202 given <code>program</code> element, then all matches must
203 apply for a program to be interesting.
211 <th>Example of matching field values</th>
214 <td>the.*x.*files</td>
215 <td>"The X files", "The X-Files: the making of"</td>
219 <td>"Star Trek Voyager", "Star Trek: The next generation"</td>
224 It is possible that different programs cannot be recorded
225 since they overlap. To deal with such conflicts, it is possible
226 to specify a priority using the <code>priority</code> element.
227 Higher values of the priority value mean a higher priority.
228 If two programs have the same priority, then it is (more or less)
229 unspecified which of the two will be recorded, but it will at least
230 record one program. If no priority is specified, then the
235 Since it is not always desirable to try to record every
236 program that matches the criteria, it is also possible to
237 generate notifications for interesting programs only without
238 recording them. This is done by specifying the
239 <code>action</code> alement with the content <code>notify</code>.
240 By default, the <code>action</code> is <code>record</code>.
241 To make the mail reports more readable it is possible to
242 also assign a category to a program for grouping interesting
243 programs. This can be done using the <code>category</code>
244 element. Note that if the <code>action</code> is
245 <code>notify</code>. then the <code>priority</code> element
252 <title>Notification configuration</title>
254 Edit the configuration file <code>org.wamblee.crawler.properties</code>.
255 The properties file is self-explanatory.
264 <title>Installing and running the crawler</title>
267 <title>Standalone application</title>
269 In the binary distribution, execute the
270 <code>run</code> script for your operating system
271 (<code>run.bat</code> for windows, and
272 <code>run.sh</code> for unix).
277 <title>Web application</title>
279 After deploying the web application, navigate to the
280 application in your browser (e.g.
281 <code>http://localhost:8080/wamblee-crawler-kissweb</code>).
282 The screen should show an overview of the last time it ran (if
283 it ran before) as well as a button to run the crawler immediately.
284 Also, the result of the last run can be viewed.
285 The crawler will run automatically every morning at 5 AM local time,
286 and will retry at 1 hour intervals in case of failure to retrieve
287 programme information.
292 <title>Source distribution</title>
294 With the source code, build everything with
295 <code>ant dist-lite</code>, then locate the binary
296 distribution in <code>lib/wamblee/crawler/kiss/kiss-crawler-bin.zip</code>.
297 Then proceed as for the binary distribution.
302 <title>General usage</title>
304 When the crawler runs, it
305 retrieves the programs for tomorrow. As a result, it is advisable
306 to run the program at an early point of the day as a scheduled
307 task (e.g. cron on unix). For the web application this is
308 preconfigured at 5AM.
311 If you deploy the web application today, it will run automatically
312 on the next (!) day. This even holds if you deploy the application
313 before the normal scheduled time.
317 Modifying the program to allow it to investigate tomorrow's
318 programs instead is easy as well but not yet implemented.
325 <section id="examples">
326 <title>Examples</title>
329 The best example is in the distribution itself. It is my personal
330 <code>programs.xml</code> file.
335 <title>Contributing</title>
338 You are always welcome to contribute. If you find a problem just
339 tell me about it and if you have ideas am I always interested to
343 If you are a programmer and have a fix for a bug, just send me a
344 patch and if you are fanatic enough and have ideas, I can also
345 give you write access to the repository.