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moreginger / xbmc-plugin.video.ted.talks

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Some speakers are missing #14

Closed moreginger closed 12 years ago

moreginger commented 12 years ago

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=36866&pid=1028742#pid1028742

However, the Speakers selection is still rather light - I can't find Clifford Stoll for example. I think I've gone through every option at least twice to check but I may have missed something - could you tell me how I can get a list of all the speakers?

Amadeus1756 commented 12 years ago

Just had a little look and it seems that the URL (URLSPEAKERS) in ted_talks_scraper.py is just the first page of the speakers (sorted alphabetically by forename rather than surname). It looks as if the constructor (Speakers) knows that there are multiple pages but I can't see how it processes each of the pages (which I'm guessing is the bit going wrong).

moreginger commented 12 years ago

Right, seems the issue was that the "nav items" on the page weren't being detected, so only the first page of speakers was parsed. Fixed in 9a339738facf659cad22e46edea0bbf1e751ed38 and b5ec9281aad95cd78f2518f4b036a3a6462dc670.

I'll hold off asking for a pull for a little to make sure it's fine... if anyone would like to try this with a zip bundle from dharma/eden branch that would be great.

However, I'm a bit concerned that scraping 19 pages from TED is slow and not terribly well-behaved of us. Longer term I am wondering if a search facility should replace the flat list of speakers. Is that something that people have strong opinions on?

Amadeus1756 commented 12 years ago

That was quick - thanks! :-)

Happy to give it a run but not sure where to get the new zip from? https://github.com/moreginger/xbmc-plugin.video.ted.talks/zipball/master looks like an old one to me?

As for navigation of the speakers, I wondered about that myself. A search is practical, but one of the nice things about TED is that you can find all sorts of interesting talks just by browsing (I think just typing random names into a box to see if that person has done a TED presentation would be inefficient - names can have odd spelling and I use a MacMini and the apple remote to control it - no keyboard). If it was possible to scroll down a list or people, with a panel showing what they're presenting about, that would be great in my eyes. My ideal would I suppose be both.

Rgds

Amadeus1756 commented 12 years ago

Oh and I think I've found how to get a zip - just noticed the Zip button in Git. Will try to test tomorrow some.

Thanks again.

moreginger commented 12 years ago

Yep, I used the zip button, one of these two: dharma eden depending on your XBMC version. master is the dev branch and could, at any time, be broken. I should probably move development to another branch and do something with master, because it is quite confusing when you first get here.

Appreciate your feedback. I agree it is great to browse TED for interesting stuff. It clearly makes sense for categories/themes... I guess it does make sense for speakers too, a name you know might just pop out as you browse the list. Combining that with the topic/s covered basically means showing every TED talk at once - not so sure about that. Perhaps the API (see #16) will make it possible to get all speakers really quickly and speed / TED abuse won't be an issue any more?

Amadeus1756 commented 12 years ago

Right, just installed the new plugin.

First things first - the speakers all appear now - brilliant - thank you. I see what you mean about the speed of download or the speakers. It's not especially slow but the sheer quantity of them creates a certain latency. Hopefully you'll get the access to TED that you've requested and it'll provide an API which provides a solution. Is it possible to cache the list and tell whether the cached list is dirty and only reload it if necessary?

Now, onto a problem. On my machine (a Mac Mini running Lion and Eden GA), when I try playing a video (I tried Clifford Stoll and David Blaine), it took about 5 seconds to show a pic of the presenter to the right of the list, then spent another few seconds, presumably trying to download the video. Then it crashed: One or more items failed to play. Check the log for details.

I've not been able to find the log yet - could you point me towards it please?

As a more minor point, the progress bars do not change when the speakers list is loading, or when the video is attempting to buffer.

Thanks again for the update - really much appreciated.

moreginger commented 12 years ago

Yeah, 1027 speakers is quite a lot! You weren't joking when you reported the list was rather light! A caching solution is definitely an option, can't be too hard, I'll have a think about it. I just worry that it ends up with a mirror of the TED talks database scraped from their website, which seems kinda wrong :)

Those videos play fine for me on Dharma, it starts streaming them a second or two after clicking on them. I'll try and check it out on Eden later this week. On Linux the log file is at ~/.xbmc/temp/xbmc.log

moreginger commented 12 years ago

Just tried the Clifford Stoll video on XBMCbuntu Eden and it played fine. Amadeus, If you're still having issues please file a new issue with the logs, as I think it must have existed before these changes. I'm going to ask XMBC HQ to pull the changes into the main repo, will leave open until that is done.

Thanks for your other suggestions. I'll keep them in mind during future development.

Amadeus1756 commented 12 years ago

Thanks MoreGinger. Last night I discovered that my broadband is having a few (intermittent) problems so it may well be that rather than anything else. I'm still at work now so I won't be able to look at it again before the weekend now but I'll let you know what I find. Hopefully it'll just magically work once my broadband is sorted. I'm currently getting about 0.2Mbps which is a little slow for TED presentations... :-) Thanks for the info on the location of the logs.

Keep up the great work - I love XBMC and the functionality that it offers. I think all my friends and family are wishing I'd just shut up, tho a few of them have installed it and now understand my enthusiasm.

Rgds

Amadeus1756 commented 12 years ago

Right, sorry for the delay. My broadband has now been fixed and it's working fine. So the problem was at my end.

Many thanks.

moreginger commented 12 years ago

Ah, thanks. Glad it's all working now.

This was merged to the XBMC repo on 13 April http://xbmc.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=xbmc/plugins;a=commit;h=bfc79030217067bf4a9f932e211a6c23ef0fa281 http://xbmc.git.sourceforge.net/git/gitweb.cgi?p=xbmc/plugins;a=commit;h=cdb458537873949fd538b7944d16c2807495bcbb