Description¶

TVScraper runs in the background and collects metadata (posters,
banners, fanart, actor thumbs and roles, descriptions) for all
available EPG events on selectable channels and for recordings.
Additionally the plugin provides the collected metadata via the VDR
service interface to other plugins which deal with EPG information.

TVScraper uses the thetvdb.com API for collecting series metadata and
themoviedb.org API for movies. Check the websites of both services for
the terms of use.

Important: To avoid unnecessary traffic, only activate these channels
to be scraped which are reasonable. After plugin installation all
channels are deactivated by default, so please consider this point when
you activate the channels you are interested in ;)

Additionally you are invited to contribute to the used web services with
providing missing data for your favorite movies and series.

Requirements¶

To run the plugin the following libaries have to be installed:

• libsqlite3
• libcurl
• libXML2
• libjansson

Installation and configuration¶

To clone the Git repository, use:

git clone git://projects.vdr-developer.org/vdr-plugin-tvscraper.git tvscraper-git

Just install the plugin depending on your used distribution. During VDR
startup the plugin base directory can be set with the following option:

-d <CACHEDIR>, --dir=<CACHEDIR> Set directory where database and images
are stored

If no directory is provided, the plugin uses VDRCACHEDIR as default.
Please care about that the user who runs VDR has full read/write access
to this directory, otherwise the plugin will not start.

As already mentioned, after first installations no channels are activated
to be scraped. Please configure these channels in the plugin setup menu.
Additionally you can trigger that your already existing recordings are
scraped, so that also for this recordings metadata is available.

With a "make install" the file "override.conf" which provides the
possibility to define scraping behaviour manually (see description
below) is created in <PLGCFGDIR>. An existing override.conf will
not be overwritten.

The plugins uses a sqlite3 database to store the necessary information.
If /dev/shm/ is available, the database is kept in memory during runtime
which improves performance. In the configured plugin basedir only a
persistant backup of the database is stored then. If /dev/shm/ is not
available, only the database file in the plugin base directory is used.

Usage¶

After the initial configuration the plugin runs completely independent in
the background, you don't have to care about anything. The plugins checks
at least every 24 hours for new EPG events and collects the metadata for
these events automatically.

Before each run the plugin performs a cleanup, all images for movies which
are not available in the current EPG are deleted. Series and actors thumbs
are kept to avoid unnecessary traffic for the web services, because the
propability that this data is needed in the future again is rather high.

If a running recording is detected, the plugin marks the corresponding movie
meta data so that the information for this movie will be kept permanentely.

Usage of override.conf: even if tvscraper tries to do everything correct on
it's own, in some cases scraping delivers wrong results. Some EPG Events are
not reasonable to scrap, because they reoccur constantly but deliver wrong
results everytime, or tvscraper searchs for a movie instead of a series
(for instance german "Tatort"). In such cases it is possible to use
<PLGCFGDIR>/override.conf to adjust the scraping behaviour. Each line in
this file has to start either with "ignore", "settype" or "substitute" or
"ignorePath":

• Ignore specific EPG Events or recordings: just create a line in the format
  ignore;string
  to ignore "string".
• Set scrap type for specific EPG Event or recording:
  settype;string;type
  "string" defines the name of the event or recording to set the type manually,
  "type" can be either "series" or "movie"
• Substitute Search String:
  substitute;string;substitution
  "string" is replaced by "substitution" in every search.
• Ignore all recordings in a dedicated directory:
  ignorePath;string
  "string" can be any substring of a recording path, e.g. "music/"