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.
8 You may obtain a copy of the License at
10 http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
12 Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
13 distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
14 WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
15 See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
16 limitations under the License.
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>
37 <title>24 August 2006</title>
39 <li>The crawler now uses desktop login for crawling. Also, it is much more efficient since
40 it no longer needs to crawl the individual programs. This is because the channel page
41 includes descriptions of programs in javascript popups which can be used by the crawler.
42 The result is a significant reduction of the load on the KiSS EPG site. Also, the delay
43 between requests has been increased to further reduce load on the KiSS EPG site. </li>
45 The crawler now crawls programs for tomorrow instead of for today.
48 The web based crawler is configured to run only between 7pm and 12pm. It used to run at
55 <title>13-20 August 2006</title>
57 There were several changes to the login procedure, requiring modifications to the crawler.
60 <li>The crawler now uses the 'Referer' header field correctly at login.</li>
61 <li>KiSS now uses hidden form fields in their login process which are now also handled correctly by the
66 <section id="overview">
67 <title>Overview</title>
70 In 2005, <a href="site:links/kiss">KiSS</a> introduced the ability
71 to schedule recordings on KiSS hard disk recorder (such as the
72 DP-558) through a web site on the internet. When a new recording is
73 scheduled through the web site, the KiSS recorder finds out about
74 this new recording by polling a server on the internet.
75 This is a really cool feature since it basically allows programming
76 the recorder when away from home.
79 After using this feature for some time now, I started noticing regular
80 patterns. Often you are looking for the same programs and for certain
81 types of programs. So, wouldn't it be nice to have a program
82 do this work for you and automatically record programs and notify you
83 of possibly interesting ones?
86 This is where the KiSS crawler comes in. This is a simple crawler which
87 logs on to the KiSS electronic programme guide web site and gets
88 programme information from there. Then based on that it automatically
89 records programs for you or sends notifications about interesting ones.
92 In its current version, the crawler can be used in two ways:
95 <li><strong>standalone program</strong>: A standalone program run as a scheduled task.</li>
96 <li><strong>web application</strong>: A web application running on a java
97 application server. With this type of use, the crawler also features an automatic retry
98 mechanism in case of failures, as well as a simple web interface. </li>
103 <title>Downloading</title>
106 At this moment, no formal releases have been made and only the latest
107 version can be downloaded.
110 The easy way to start is the
111 <a href="installs/crawler/kiss/kiss-crawler-bin.zip">standalone program binary version</a>
112 or using the <a href="installs/crawler/kissweb/wamblee-crawler-kissweb.war">web
116 The latest source can be obtained from subversion with the
117 URL <code>https://wamblee.org/svn/public/utils</code>. The subversion
118 repository allows read-only access to anyone.
121 The application was developed and tested on SuSE linux 9.1 with JBoss 4.0.2 application
122 server (only required for the web application). It requires at least a Java Virtual Machine
123 1.5 or greater to run.
128 <title>Configuring the crawler</title>
131 The crawler comes with three configuration files:
134 <li><code>crawler.xml</code>: basic crawler configuration
135 tailored to the KiSS electronic programme guide.</li>
136 <li><code>programs.xml</code>: containing a description of which
137 programs must be recorded and which programs are interesting.</li>
138 <li><code>org.wamblee.crawler.properties</code>: Containing a configuration </li>
141 For the standalone program, all configuration files are in the <code>conf</code> directory.
142 For the web application, the properties files is located in the <code>WEB-INF/classes</code>
143 directory of the web application, and <code>crawler.xml</code> and <code>programs.xml</code>
144 are located outside of the web application at a location configured in the properties file.
149 <title>Crawler configuration <code>crawler.xml</code></title>
152 First of all, copy the <code>config.xml.example</code> file
153 to <code>config.xml</code>. After that, edit the first entry of
154 that file and replace <code>user</code> and <code>passwd</code>
155 with your personal user id and password for the KiSS Electronic
161 <title>Program configuration</title>
163 Interesting TV shows are described using <code>program</code>
164 elements. Each <code>program</code> element contains
165 one or more <code>match</code> elements that describe
166 a condition that the interesting program must match.
169 Matching can be done on the following properties of a program:
172 <tr><th>Field name</th>
173 <th>Description</th></tr>
176 <td>Program name</td>
180 <td>Program description</td>
184 <td>Channel name</td>
188 <td>Keywords/classification of the program.</td>
192 The field to match is specified using the <code>field</code>
193 attribute of the <code>match</code> element. If no field name
194 is specified then the program name is matched. Matching is done
195 by converting the field value to lowercase and then doing a
196 perl-like regular expression match of the provided value. As a
197 result, the content of the match element should be specified in
198 lower case otherwise the pattern will never match.
199 If multiple <code>match</code> elements are specified for a
200 given <code>program</code> element, then all matches must
201 apply for a program to be interesting.
209 <th>Example of matching field values</th>
212 <td>the.*x.*files</td>
213 <td>"The X files", "The X-Files: the making of"</td>
217 <td>"Star Trek Voyager", "Star Trek: The next generation"</td>
222 It is possible that different programs cannot be recorded
223 since they overlap. To deal with such conflicts, it is possible
224 to specify a priority using the <code>priority</code> element.
225 Higher values of the priority value mean a higher priority.
226 If two programs have the same priority, then it is (more or less)
227 unspecified which of the two will be recorded, but it will at least
228 record one program. If no priority is specified, then the
233 Since it is not always desirable to try to record every
234 program that matches the criteria, it is also possible to
235 generate notifications for interesting programs only without
236 recording them. This is done by specifying the
237 <code>action</code> alement with the content <code>notify</code>.
238 By default, the <code>action</code> is <code>record</code>.
239 To make the mail reports more readable it is possible to
240 also assign a category to a program for grouping interesting
241 programs. This can be done using the <code>category</code>
242 element. Note that if the <code>action</code> is
243 <code>notify</code>. then the <code>priority</code> element
250 <title>Notification configuration</title>
252 Edit the configuration file <code>org.wamblee.crawler.properties</code>.
253 The properties file is self-explanatory.
262 <title>Installing and running the crawler</title>
265 <title>Standalone application</title>
267 In the binary distribution, execute the
268 <code>run</code> script for your operating system
269 (<code>run.bat</code> for windows, and
270 <code>run.sh</code> for unix).
275 <title>Web application</title>
277 After deploying the web application, navigate to the
278 application in your browser (e.g.
279 <code>http://localhost:8080/wamblee-crawler-kissweb</code>).
280 The screen should show an overview of the last time it ran (if
281 it ran before) as well as a button to run the crawler immediately.
282 Also, the result of the last run can be viewed.
283 The crawler will run automatically every morning at 5 AM local time,
284 and will retry at 1 hour intervals in case of failure to retrieve
285 programme information.
290 <title>Source distribution</title>
292 With the source code, build everything with
293 <code>ant dist-lite</code>, then locate the binary
294 distribution in <code>lib/wamblee/crawler/kiss/kiss-crawler-bin.zip</code>.
295 Then proceed as for the binary distribution.
300 <title>General usage</title>
302 When the crawler runs, it
303 retrieves the programs for tomorrow. As a result, it is advisable
304 to run the program at an early point of the day as a scheduled
305 task (e.g. cron on unix). For the web application this is
306 preconfigured at 5AM.
309 If you deploy the web application today, it will run automatically
310 on the next (!) day. This even holds if you deploy the application
311 before the normal scheduled time.
315 Modifying the program to allow it to investigate tomorrow's
316 programs instead is easy as well but not yet implemented.
323 <section id="examples">
324 <title>Examples</title>
327 The best example is in the distribution itself. It is my personal
328 <code>programs.xml</code> file.
333 <title>Contributing</title>
336 You are always welcome to contribute. If you find a problem just
337 tell me about it and if you have ideas am I always interested to
341 If you are a programmer and have a fix for a bug, just send me a
342 patch and if you are fanatic enough and have ideas, I can also
343 give you write access to the repository.