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+--- Thread: Tips on new weather radar plugin (image, slideshow or video?) (/showthread.php?tid=99423)
Tips on new weather radar plugin (image, slideshow or video?) - bossanova808 - 2011-04-16
I'm just starting my first XBMC plugin which will - with any luck and a bit of graft - pull accurate data from the Australian Beaurea of Meteorology....as weather.com data for downunder is sucky.
The first stage is a basic plugin to pull the rader image loops. Basically, this is a group of cycled images, say 4 of them 15 minutes apart to make a little radar loop.
The images can be pulled from the BOM site via FTP/HTTP as PNG images. They need to be overlayed to construct the final full rafar image (basically map + radar + range guides + whatever). This can be done via urllib to pull and the PIL library to do the merging...doesn't look too crazy.
This will give me 4 finished PNG images I want to loop and display to the user.
My question is this - is the best way to somehow build a movie out of these 4 images to make a loop, or would it be better to trigger a slideshow or something? Basically, how do I get these 4 PNGs into something animated and on screen - either full screen or a window, doesn't matter for now.
This is the very first part of what I hope to make a quite comprehensive weather plugin eventually...but I just need a basic proof of concept to myself that I can get this going.
- DiSTURBED_oNE - 2011-08-12
Hey bossanova808,
Us Australians desperately need a weather scrapper that will get the data from BOM.
It would be great if you could build an add-on for this.
I’m not a developer so I can’t give you any advice on how to get the radar maps to display, but I thought I would give you some encouragement.
If possible, even having the temperature accurate would be sweet, maybe release the first version of the add-on without radar maps?
Keep up the good work.
- bossanova808 - 2011-08-12
I got stuck - I don't have much time and the XBMC documentation is a quagmire of out of date rubbish, so I really didn't get as far as I'd hoped. I plan to get something working outside of XBMC first, in terms of just pulling the images, and then use the XBMC slideshow to show a radar map loop as a first run at it. But for someone new to XBMC addons/python it's not easy - normally I can jsut pick up and run with this sort of thing but I really haven't encountered such a mess of (& lack of) good docs for something like this before....
I should find a similar add on and rip it apart, I guess. But I suspect I'd run into problems quickly and without docs to fall back on....