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I have written a video add-on. It is provides a local webdav server mapping local webdav requests to a remote distributed "cloud", including crypto, erasure codes and local caching.
Currently I create a DAV mapping in Kodi and configure a scrapper there. It is slow and manual, but it works.
I currently thinking about replacing the DAV mapping with STRM files, hoping that it would be faster, fast enough to configure it as "update after boot". My add-on would keep those STRM up to date. But I still see this as a hack, since the user should need to create DAV mapping, enter passwords in several different places, etc.
Investigating the JSON-RPC interface I see I can request a new scan, get info about films stored in the library, etc. But looks like I can't "request" a new film name to be indexed.
Am I missing something?.
Any suggestion?.
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Kib
Team-Kodi Member
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Sounds like you need to write your own scraper.
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Would be nice if new entries could be added/deleted in the index programatically.
I would like to be able to submit a "name" and an URL (via RPC) to a service for the name to be "scrapped" and added to the index.
Current scrappers manage the mapping "name" -> "film details" but they have no control about how "names" are detected, added and removed.
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Kib
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2015-08-08, 18:03
(This post was last modified: 2015-08-08, 18:04 by Kib.)
It's to vague for me to understand, sorry. Could you give an example ?
ps. scrapers, scraping, scraped.
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I explain my personal use case.
I have written an addon to stream content from my personal shared (with friends) "cloud", using encryption, OAUTH2, X.509 client identities, etc, etc. The addon provides a webdav like local server for kodi consumption (It would be amazing if I could stream audio/video content to Kodi directly without parsing HTTP/Webdav headers/requests) . That is, Kodi sees a webdav server (running in the very same raspberry pi), but that webdav is quite a clever proxy to the real thing, wrapping it with encryption, local caching, distributed hashtables and tons of cute features.
This thing have been working great for a couple of years.
My problem is the scrapper. Kodi scrappers, when indexing a webdav server with thousands of files, takes a LONG time (hours) and just doing an incremental update takes ages. This thing is running in a first generation raspberry PI with a medium speed SD memory card.
Since my addon code already has cached/background updated info about the films in the (remote) store, I would like to be able to push ("name", "url to local webdav proxy server") pairs to the scrapper for additions, delete URLs for deletions. My intuition is that keeping the index updated pushing incremental changes locally should be "cheap"... if that feature could be available.
The closer thing I can possibly do now would be for my addon to store "ghost" STRM files in the local SD memory card mirroring the remote content. That is doable but then I have to manually add that directory to the scrapper configuration ("directory to watch").
I think this problem is shared with other addons. For instance, an hypothetical netflix addon should be able to interact with the scrappers to keep the index up to date. Same for a podcasting addon.
