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");
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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>
31 <title>13-20 August 2006</title>
33 There were several changes to the login procedure, requiring modifications to the crawler.
36 <li>The crawler now uses the 'Referer' header field correctly at login.</li>
37 <li>KiSS now uses hidden form fields in their login process which are now also handled correctly by the
42 <section id="overview">
43 <title>Overview</title>
46 In 2005, <a href="site:links/kiss">KiSS</a> introduced the ability
47 to schedule recordings on KiSS hard disk recorder (such as the
48 DP-558) through a web site on the internet. When a new recording is
49 scheduled through the web site, the KiSS recorder finds out about
50 this new recording by polling a server on the internet.
51 This is a really cool feature since it basically allows programming
52 the recorder when away from home.
55 After using this feature for some time now, I started noticing regular
56 patterns. Often you are looking for the same programs and for certain
57 types of programs. So, wouldn't it be nice to have a program
58 do this work for you and automatically record programs and notify you
59 of possibly interesting ones?
62 This is where the KiSS crawler comes in. This is a simple crawler which
63 logs on to the KiSS electronic programme guide web site and gets
64 programme information from there. Then based on that it automatically
65 records programs for you or sends notifications about interesting ones.
68 In its current version, the crawler can be used in two ways:
71 <li><strong>standalone program</strong>: A standalone program run as a scheduled task.</li>
72 <li><strong>web application</strong>: A web application running on a java
73 application server. With this type of use, the crawler also features an automatic retry
74 mechanism in case of failures, as well as a simple web interface. </li>
79 <title>Downloading</title>
82 At this moment, no formal releases have been made and only the latest
83 version can be downloaded.
86 The easy way to start is the
87 <a href="installs/crawler/kiss/kiss-crawler-bin.zip">standalone program binary version</a>
88 or using the <a href="installs/crawler/kissweb/wamblee-crawler-kissweb.war">web
92 The latest source can be obtained from subversion with the
93 URL <code>https://wamblee.org/svn/public/utils</code>. The subversion
94 repository allows read-only access to anyone.
97 The application was developed and tested on SuSE linux 9.1 with JBoss 4.0.2 application
98 server (only required for the web application). It requires at least a Java Virtual Machine
99 1.5 or greater to run.
104 <title>Configuring the crawler</title>
107 The crawler comes with three configuration files:
110 <li><code>crawler.xml</code>: basic crawler configuration
111 tailored to the KiSS electronic programme guide.</li>
112 <li><code>programs.xml</code>: containing a description of which
113 programs must be recorded and which programs are interesting.</li>
114 <li><code>org.wamblee.crawler.properties</code>: Containing a configuration </li>
117 For the standalone program, all configuration files are in the <code>conf</code> directory.
118 For the web application, the properties files is located in the <code>WEB-INF/classes</code>
119 directory of the web application, and <code>crawler.xml</code> and <code>programs.xml</code>
120 are located outside of the web application at a location configured in the properties file.
125 <title>Crawler configuration <code>crawler.xml</code></title>
128 First of all, copy the <code>config.xml.example</code> file
129 to <code>config.xml</code>. After that, edit the first entry of
130 that file and replace <code>user</code> and <code>passwd</code>
131 with your personal user id and password for the KiSS Electronic
137 <title>Program configuration</title>
139 Interesting TV shows are described using <code>program</code>
140 elements. Each <code>program</code> element contains
141 one or more <code>match</code> elements that describe
142 a condition that the interesting program must match.
145 Matching can be done on the following properties of a program:
148 <tr><th>Field name</th>
149 <th>Description</th></tr>
152 <td>Program name</td>
156 <td>Program description</td>
160 <td>Channel name</td>
164 <td>Keywords/classification of the program.</td>
168 The field to match is specified using the <code>field</code>
169 attribute of the <code>match</code> element. If no field name
170 is specified then the program name is matched. Matching is done
171 by converting the field value to lowercase and then doing a
172 perl-like regular expression match of the provided value. As a
173 result, the content of the match element should be specified in
174 lower case otherwise the pattern will never match.
175 If multiple <code>match</code> elements are specified for a
176 given <code>program</code> element, then all matches must
177 apply for a program to be interesting.
185 <th>Example of matching field values</th>
188 <td>the.*x.*files</td>
189 <td>"The X files", "The X-Files: the making of"</td>
193 <td>"Star Trek Voyager", "Star Trek: The next generation"</td>
198 It is possible that different programs cannot be recorded
199 since they overlap. To deal with such conflicts, it is possible
200 to specify a priority using the <code>priority</code> element.
201 Higher values of the priority value mean a higher priority.
202 If two programs have the same priority, then it is (more or less)
203 unspecified which of the two will be recorded, but it will at least
204 record one program. If no priority is specified, then the
209 Since it is not always desirable to try to record every
210 program that matches the criteria, it is also possible to
211 generate notifications for interesting programs only without
212 recording them. This is done by specifying the
213 <code>action</code> alement with the content <code>notify</code>.
214 By default, the <code>action</code> is <code>record</code>.
215 To make the mail reports more readable it is possible to
216 also assign a category to a program for grouping interesting
217 programs. This can be done using the <code>category</code>
218 element. Note that if the <code>action</code> is
219 <code>notify</code>. then the <code>priority</code> element
226 <title>Notification configuration</title>
228 Edit the configuration file <code>org.wamblee.crawler.properties</code>.
229 The properties file is self-explanatory.
238 <title>Installing and running the crawler</title>
241 <title>Standalone application</title>
243 In the binary distribution, execute the
244 <code>run</code> script for your operating system
245 (<code>run.bat</code> for windows, and
246 <code>run.sh</code> for unix).
251 <title>Web application</title>
253 After deploying the web application, navigate to the
254 application in your browser (e.g.
255 <code>http://localhost:8080/wamblee-crawler-kissweb</code>).
256 The screen should show an overview of the last time it ran (if
257 it ran before) as well as a button to run the crawler immediately.
258 Also, the result of the last run can be viewed.
259 The crawler will run automatically every morning at 5 AM local time,
260 and will retry at 1 hour intervals in case of failure to retrieve
261 programme information.
266 <title>Source distribution</title>
268 With the source code, build everything with
269 <code>ant dist-lite</code>, then locate the binary
270 distribution in <code>lib/wamblee/crawler/kiss/kiss-crawler-bin.zip</code>.
271 Then proceed as for the binary distribution.
276 <title>General usage</title>
278 When the crawler runs, it
279 retrieves the programs for today. As a result, it is advisable
280 to run the program at an early point of the day as a scheduled
281 task (e.g. cron on unix). For the web application this is
282 preconfigured at 5AM.
285 If you deploy the web application today, it will run automatically
286 on the next (!) day. This even holds if you deploy the application
287 before 5AM in the morning.
291 Modifying the program to allow it to investigate tomorrow's
292 programs instead is easy as well but not yet implemented.
299 <section id="examples">
300 <title>Examples</title>
303 The best example is in the distribution itself. It is my personal
304 <code>programs.xml</code> file.
309 <title>Contributing</title>
312 You are always welcome to contribute. If you find a problem just
313 tell me about it and if you have ideas am I always interested to
317 If you are a programmer and have a fix for a bug, just send me a
318 patch and if you are fanatic enough and have ideas, I can also
319 give you write access to the repository.