RSS Feeds *from* the Tivo

[davew666]

Hi,

I've been using a UK Series 1 for years and use TivoWebPlus - and very nice it is too

Recently I made some scripts for creating RSS feeds of the Now Showing and To Do information.

You can download my latest versions from my web site - (updated URL's - June 2005)
http://dave.wild.name/downloads/zz_todo.itcl
http://dave.wild.name/downloads/zz_nowshowing.itcl

They're not perfect yet - the main irritation I have left is that sometimes Tivo titles and descriptions contain the & character which means that the feeds don't validate - they need replacing with

&

I'm going to give this a go to make sure the feeds are more robust and validate successfully all of the time.

I'd just like some pointers in string manipulation in TCL so that I can search and replace the title and description for invalid characters.

[davew666]

It's sorted now and the feeds validate. I added them to My Yahoo as a test and that worked fine, even after I put a & character in a program title.

The fixed scripts can be downloaded from http://blog.dave.wild.name if anyone wants them

If anyone's got any ideas for further improvement please post a message

[cspot]

Dave,

Are you pointing yahoo at the /include??? script, or another file? I can't get yahoo to accept as an rss feed.

i.e. http://mysite.there.tv/includenowshowing

Thanks!

[davew666]

Well, my setup isn't straightforward because my Tivo is sitting behind a reverse proxy that I have to log on to, so in order to get access to the RSS feeds without having to log on, I have a machine that uses the WGET scripts every 10 minutes to get the feeds from the tivo and save them as files called todo.xml and recordings.xml - these are then uploaded to a server and it's these that I access so they're not live, but then my Tivo remains secure.

Yahoo's RSS reading is still in beta, maybe it's fussy that the web addresses don't end with .rss or .xml ? It might be worth trying the RSS feed validator to make sure that validates them ok too.

[spaceman1013]

Dave, your links points to a flickr site. I am very interested in this script, can you or someone else post it.

Thanks.

[davew666]

I had some web site trouble. I should be able to put the scripts back this weekend and I'll post new links.

[davew666]

These can be downloaded again...

http://dave.wild.name/downloads/zz_todo.itcl
http://dave.wild.name/downloads/zz_nowshowing.itcl

[spaceman1013]

Thanks got them.

Dave, can you also post the below script so I can see how I might do the transfer. Can this machine that gets the scripts be my main Windows PC which is connected to the same router on the network as the Tivo? Do I need anything installed on my PC, like a TCL interpretor?

I have a machine that uses the WGET scripts every 10 minutes to get the feeds from the tivo and save them as files called todo.xml and recordings.xml

I think I am going to write a directory monitor for my PC that will look for these files in a specific directory and email them to me at work. Or could I maybe just modify the script you post to do the same?

[davew666]

This is a batch file that I ran on a timer...

d:\tivoxml\wget\wget http://tivo/rss -O d:\tivoxml\tivo_current.xml
d:\tivoxml\wget\wget http://tivo/includenowshowing -O d:\tivoxml\tivo_recordings.xml
d:\tivoxml\wget\wget http://tivo/includetodo -O d:\tivoxml\tivo_upcoming.xml
d:\tivoxml\wget\uploadxml.vbs

The wget program was downloaded free from sourceforge
The http://tivo works because I added the IP for Tivo to my hosts file in windows.

The uploadxml.vbs at the end is a script to upload my resulting xml files to my web space - this was generated by CuteFTP - but there must be loads of better was of doing this automatically. It wasn't very understanding when errors occurred and the whole process would stop until a dialogue box was ok'd and some cleaning up was done.

I don't use this upload any more so I didn't develop it further.

These days I just feed the feeds directly in to my local copy of Newsgator in Outlook so I can see any new programs that have been recorded while I'm using the computer -