Netflix, Tivo, and Greasemonkey
I wasn't very satisfied with my last attempt at merging Netflix and Tivo. I'm sure it can be done using just Pipes eventually but I think it'll take a while for Pipes to mature enough.
Barring that, I got curious this weekend and decided to see if I could do the same kind of thing directly on the Netflix queue page via a Greasemonkey script. So I wrote a quick little script over the weekend:
The quick overview is that the script takes each movie title in your queue and searches for the text on TiVo's site. If it finds a match it puts a link after the movie to TiVo's search page. I used a link so you can open the matches in other tabs. This is especially handy since it takes a while to search TiVo for all the movies in your queue. I also tried to make the link stand out a little so it would be easy to spot while scrolling through the page. Besides being a slow loader, the other downside is that any match will cause the link to appear. This is a little bit annoying but seems bearable. In theory you would then schedule the recording online via TiVo's site.
If you're interested, go install Greasemonkey followed by this script. Feel free to modify the hell out of it if you like. I realize it's still not a perfect solution, but seems a bit useful for now. Also, please excuse the crudity of the code. Like I said, it was a quickie and Javascript is not my forte.
Update: Here's a Blockbuster version.
Update: I added the quotes to the embedded search. I no longer have a Netflix account, so it's not the easiest thing for me to test out. Let me know if there are any problems. The script is now hosted at userscripts.org.
February 28th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
nice, works great! thanks for making this.
February 28th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
Thanx tons, with a quick pass I took 8 things out of my queue.
March 1st, 2007 at 8:45 am
Fantastic. I'm glad someone else has found it useful.
March 1st, 2007 at 2:07 pm
Any idea what it would take to modify this script to work with blockbuster.com instead of netflix?
March 1st, 2007 at 2:51 pm
How confusing. A multi-Robert comment thread.
I haven't looked at the Blockbuster site as of yet. The Netflix version just looks for all div elements with their class attribute set to "stc". It then grabs an anchor within that div and assumes that the text of the anchor will be a movie title that can be plugged directly into the Tivo search.
Assuming that Blockbuster has marked up their movie listings in a similar "semantic web" kind of way, I don't think it would be all that hard to get it working. If no one else does it, I may sign up for the demo account and take a crack at it this weekend.
March 1st, 2007 at 10:25 pm
A Blockbuster equivalent would be wonderfully appreciated by several of us who don't use NetFlix, but love the capability you've enabled. Please announce details if/when you get around to trying out this alternative.
March 2nd, 2007 at 1:24 am
[…] Netflix, Tivo, and Greasemonkey Using Greasemonkey to hook up NetFlix web pages to recording in TiVo. (tags: greasemonkey hacks netflix tivo) […]
March 2nd, 2007 at 6:59 pm
[…] Someone asked for a Blockbuster version of the Netflix Greasemonkey script I wrote. I signed up for the free two week trial and got it working, I think. It's not very different from the original Netflix version, just some stripping of extra characters like "|WS|" or "|Unrated|" that Blockbuster adds to the title. Feel free to download it from here. […]
March 3rd, 2007 at 4:20 pm
[…] Update: Robert posted a Greasemonkey script that lets you search Tivo or Blockbuster right from Netflix. Check it out. […]
March 3rd, 2007 at 8:21 pm
I use my pc to record tv. How about Netflix to TitanTV or Zaptoit?
March 3rd, 2007 at 8:30 pm
Sorry, I'm not all that familiar with either of those so I don't have any immediate plans involving them. You're more than welcome to try and adapt either of the greasemonkey scripts on this site to that purpose though.
March 5th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
[…] The Netflix to Tivo Script – This script takes each movie title in your queue and searches for the text on TiVo’s site. If it finds a match it puts a link after the movie to TiVo’s search page. Use the link to open the matches in other tabs. This is especially handy since it takes a while to search TiVo for all the movies in your queue. Warning: Besides being a slow loader, the other downside is that any match will cause the link to appear. […]
March 15th, 2007 at 7:45 am
Is anyone else experiencing the issue that the Tivo links appear, but disappear when the page is refreshed? I have to shut down firefox and retry to get it to work again. Maybe I'm missing something, I'm new to greasemonkey.
May 29th, 2007 at 7:51 pm
[…] An easy way to record shows in your NetFlix queue. […]
August 13th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
looks like the script might have stopped working I can't seem to get it working
maybe the change to the queue changing broke it
has anyone been able to get it to work again?
August 16th, 2007 at 4:52 am
To fix, just edit the script to replace "//div[@class='stc']" with "//span[@class='title']" in the second line following the comments.
August 26th, 2007 at 2:47 pm
I changed that and it looks like it still isn't working for me
September 25th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
Is this merge happening or is it all talk?
December 2nd, 2007 at 1:54 am
As of 1-Dec-2007, the following modification will work with the netflix queue.
allItems = document.evaluate("//table[@class='qtbl']//a", document, null,
XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null);
December 9th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
You call this blog "Running as Root," but do you really do it? I do, and it seems that greasemonkey won't work when I'm running as root. It says it's enabled, but when I click the Install button on a script, instead of the load dialog, I just get a new tab with the script source displayed.
December 9th, 2007 at 2:41 pm
No, I don't run as root on my machine.
January 13th, 2008 at 10:08 am
I still can't seem to get this working on my netflix using my vista laptop
February 23rd, 2008 at 12:55 am
Stating the obvious here, but bear in mind that if you are copying and pasting the fixes from this page, you need to change the pretty-print curly quotes back to straight quotes.
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:55 pm
hmm. just installed it and it doesn't seem to be working. it's the only netflix-related GM script i have installed. i'd edit it up myself to work, but i know little to nothing about the mechanics of GM, even though i know javascript quite well. any advice? thanks!
March 3rd, 2008 at 7:58 pm
sorry for double posting, but i have tried all the fixes in the comments here with no success.
May 23rd, 2008 at 11:52 am
I *love* this script, but I kept getting lots of false positive hits because Tivo was searching for ANY of the words in the title, rather than the exact title string. For anyone interested, I found that if you add quotes to the search string, the end result will be more accurate.
tivoSearch = "http://www3.tivo.com/tivo-tco/search.do?tsn=&dispatch=advancedsearch&searchTitle=" + "%22" + escape(thisItem.text) + "%22" + "&searchDesc=&searchCastCrew=&searchCategory=&searchGenre=&searchWhen=14&advanced_button.x=0&advanced_button.y=0";
August 26th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
This works great! Of course, that is with the changes posted above for the script to work. Does anybody know what syntax this needs to prevent the script from tagging the "genre" labels in the Netflix q?
thx.