Anime lookup scraper for anidb.net and/or animenfo.com

I'd be pretty interested in this feature as well ... even if it's only for having a nice thumb for the series, and an item in the library for every episode. That way I can remember where I was in a certain series.

Right ... I jump in the topic, and I hope my post will fit ...

So I had nearly my whole week-end coding the scraper for anidb ... and the proof of concept says ... it work perfectly ...

BUT ... and that's why i don't post it yet ...

My scraper is an early beta which has several problems :
1)The problem of gzipped page at anidb ... well I made a dirty hack : a perl script on my webserver is called with the anidb you want as a parameter ... the script only performs a "wget <url> |gunzip" ... dirty but it works like a charm ...however if i was to release the scraper everyone would use my IP to access anidb ... and there comes the real problem ...

2)AniDB, does not allow scraping, because it is seen as crawling/mirrorring their website ... and considering all the work it took to build such a database, I understand. So the scraper works, but you get banned after too many requests, updating your anime series.

I would have loved to release this scraper, because it seems some people wanted it, and because I was proud to see it work that nicely ...

The only valid way of interrogating AniDB, would be via their API, which is not web based, but UDP based ... I have to see what would the cost for me to code and UDP-to-XBMC interface ...

Anyone got their hands on the UDP API ?

hey,

interest again. i will whip up a solution for 1) asap

Great ... however, the gzip problem isn't really the current issue

It will take time to developp the UDP interface .... Maybe it could be done via a python script ... but can a python plugin be used as a scraper ?

Anyway writing the scraper was really interesting ... and seeing it working (before I got banned twice by anidb) was really beautiful

PS : If I have some time I should go on and edit the scraper wiki page to add the GetEpisode, etc functions ...

why can't they just offer a sane xml-based interface :/

no, there is no support for python based scrapers currently

Well ... xml interface is in "progress" ... or at least there is a draft in their wiki ...

I guess the best to get one would be to code it via their API and offer it to them ...

But I do agree, in 2009, proprietary API is weird ... :/

OK ... their API is quite restrictive ... and the laws are really strict ... (yes law not rules, I chose my words) ...

I'll see if I can do something OR if I can find another website ... But it seems anidb is the most detailed website around ....

gzip support is in svn (untested). please, if you could be so kind..

<url gzip="yes">...</url>

Sorry to bring you down by the message below ...

I won't be needing gzip support in the scraper I plan to write ... I am actually going to write the missing xml-api ... so I won't be accessing directly via web to anidb.net ...

and ... I don't use the xbmc svn ... I went for the windows version on my media pc ... However, I could possibly try to find a *nux box to test ...

just check out the community builds in the windows section, i'm sure jester have already built atleast twice after r17389.

but sure, i'll test it myself then