Thetvdb.com
#16
Yeah, no, that's not gonna happen. It would also be overkill, as ad revenue from that much exposure would be massive, far more than they need for operating costs.
Reply
#17
Another alternative has to be considered and that is bittorrent. Why not build bittorrent capability into XBMC and have all metadata sources distributed globally and shared between each XBMC user? It might even increase the speed if geoip targeting was included. There could be a rule set that nobody would ever have to share out more than X amount of content per month nor store more than Y amount of metadata on their local setup.

If this concept was built into XBMC and was a simple yes/no tick box users opt into when assigning the content type of a media source, it would be trivial. I expect people might be more willing to 'pay' for metadata services like fanart and thetvtb in upload bandwidth and/or hard drive storage terms, as this idea would allow them to, than have to view ads.

This is a new model that would need some thinking through however it has the potential to solve these funding problems in a non-invasive way for good. A media centre app is relatively useless without metadata so the issue needs a permanent solution that scales. No matter how cheap the hosting is, as more movies are published every year and more people use XBMC and other non-commercial HTPC software, metadata solutions will need to keep scaling. A distributed solution, perhaps with a central hosted web service solution as a backup, would provide this.

I wonder what the XBMC devs would have to say about the possibility of incorporating a distributed file sharing solution, such a libtorrent, into XBMC. It's kinda surprising that this hasn't been done already for general file sharing needs. However I wonder how much work it would take?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libtorrent
Reply
#18
imho put focus on other services like tvrage or tv.com etc getting scrapping info from there is already what boxee is doing so it shouldnt be a huge deal if there where proper scrappers for tvrage and tv.com the traffic towards tvdb wouldnt be as much either
Reply
#19
(2013-01-05, 20:49)swetoast Wrote: imho put focus on other services like tvrage or tv.com etc getting scrapping info from there is already what boxee is doing so it shouldnt be a huge deal if there where proper scrappers for tvrage and tv.com the traffic towards tvdb wouldnt be as much either

Those sites even have a larger timeout than tvdb.
Read/follow the forum rules.
For troubleshooting and bug reporting, read this first
Interested in seeing some YouTube videos about Kodi? Go here and subscribe
Reply
#20
Really havent noticed since im using daily with my boxee box besides i rather take a timeout then no connection any day of the week (no pun intended) again shifting balance is whats it all about
Reply
#21
...
Reply
#22
"non of us admins have 500-1000$ laying around to put into it a month"

Where did they get these figures from?
Yeh if you only look at the big name hosters, then you'll pay up the rear for it.
coolhousing.net has dedi servers from about 50-100, unlimited bandwidth, and 4 TB of storage.

I used a VPS from them a couple years ago, they were pretty desent

If you shop around you can find pretty good deals
Reply
#23
(2013-01-05, 23:15)PobjoySpecial Wrote: Hand scraping metadata and handcrafting .nfo files is tedious, but not hard. I guess I'm biased since It's already my preferred way. Smile
I guess you haven't discovered couchpotato and sickbeard yet....

"PPC is too slow, your CPU has no balls to handle HD content." ~ Davilla
"Maybe it's a toaster. Who knows, but it has nothing to do with us." ~ Ned Scott
Reply
#24
Doesn't SickBeard rely on sites like thetvdb.org to pull its .nfo files? I don't remember exactly which sites it uses to pull data, but we're in bad shape if they *all* go down. Over the long term the XBMC community may need to find a way to fund these scraping sites, otherwise XBMC will quickly lose a lot of its functionality.
Reply
#25
The distributed bittorrent model has some initial attraction, but that is a huge number of torrents you are going to be handling. And all it takes is for users to decide to change the files names of their metadata and it all falls over.

However some form of distributed hosting could work well, what if fanart.tv and thetvdb.com actually shared data so a download url would randomly take you to either site? Others could link in too. Many users contributing a little bandwidth could do a lot for this.
If I have helped you or increased your knowledge, click the 'thumbs up' button to give thanks :) (People with less than 20 posts won't see the "thumbs up" button.)
Reply
#26
...
Reply
#27
(2013-01-05, 20:45)raspberry_pd Wrote: Another alternative has to be considered and that is bittorrent. Why not build bittorrent capability into XBMC and have all metadata sources distributed globally and shared between each XBMC user?

No idea how hard it is to implement, but thats actually a brilliant idea IMO. Rather than finding a way to make users pay donations or watch ads, let them contribute by providing a tiny trickle of upload capacity.
Reply
#28
Of course, wouldn't the Bittorrent solution basically be broadcasting your IP address and the exact contents of your video library to the entire world? The MPAA might be very interested to find out that information.
Reply
#29
That's not how bittorrent works at all...
Reply
#30
Maybe the images could be mirrored by different servers contributed by community members, then only the database content would be hosted on the site. Or something could be done to make most of the data accessible via free torrents. Most of it is unchanging/static so it should be publishable in some format.

Really depends on if they're willing to loosen control of the content, because even though they're in danger of shutting down, I'm sure the ads they publish directly benefit them in a way.
Reply

Logout Mark Read Team Forum Stats Members Help
Thetvdb.com1