Running as Root

Brandon had another cool idea which he posted on his blog. In short, he thought it'd be cool to be able to automatically schedule recordings on your DVR for the titles in your Netflix queue. I've been playing around with Yahoo! Pipes recently and this seemed like an ideal candidate project. Pipes is a GUI scripting tool for doing things with RSS feeds, like mashups.

After many false starts I finally arrived at the following:

1. Grab personalized Netflix queue RSS
2. Loop through each feed item
3. Construct a TiVo search URL
4. Grab the results via Feedity, which will make it an RSS feed (Pipes needs that)
5. Display the unique results, which should have been a link to upcoming showings in TiVo's guide for each matching title from your Netflix queue

Sounds good in theory. Unfortunately my final stumbling block was that Netflix currently includes the queue position in your queue RSS and Pipes provides no way to parse out the substring of the DVD title. This title gets sent to TiVo which finds no results. Feedity then includes the "Guru Guide FAQ" in the result set (which it seems to do whenever your search returned no results). Filtering that out would be trivial, by the way.

There seems to be some interest on the Pipes discussion boards for adding additional scripting power to the interface so I may revisit this in the future. Of course you could do this some other way, but I felt like playing with Pipes. In the meantime, here's a view of my final non-working composite pipe:

Update:

I decided to play around with this idea a little more (still using Pipes). If I use a feed that doesn't have numbered items, such as the Netflix recommendations or new releases, then the problem just moves a little upstream. Feedity isn't very good at extracting the relevant information from the TiVo search page. On top of that, most of the other free HTML to RSS hosted solutions have equal problems. So, I'm still thinking about it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 18th, 2007 at 5:33 pm and is filed under Business, Programming, Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.