[Sheezwack]

Hi all,

Weather.com is unfortunately very innacurate for us in Australia. The forecast on the same day is often 10 degrees wrong! I don't understand how it is so inaccurate.

But anyhow what I was thinking of doing is finding out what it's scraping to get the weather information, then redirecting this locally to something I create that generates a matching feed with accurate weather. (For example even redirecting weather.com in my hosts).

This way I don't need to mess around with xmbc, and can scrape my own weather from wherever.

Does anyone know where/how the weather is scraped? Is it done from the weather.com rss feeds? Such as: http://rss.weather.com/weather/rss/local...ar=LWO_rss

Thanks.

[Sheezwack]

Anyone know about this? Weather.com has been 10 degrees Celsius under the actual temperature for reasons I just don't understand.

Do I need to look at sourcecode somewhere to find out how it works so I can change it or create my own weather plugin?

[Prizm4]

Yeah I posted about this the other day....I'm in Perth and I can't understand how weather.com can be incorrect, but it is. I wonder if the scraping mechanism is wrong.

Right now, I'm looking at weather.com and comparing it to weather.com.au. Weather.com is consistently lower by 1c for each day - but at least that's more accurate than the 8c difference or so that I've been seeing.

It leads me to think the scraper is reading the wrong information.

[jhsrennie]

The weather.com link is part of the XBMC.exe app i.e. it's written in C++ and compiled in.

The code uses an interface provided by weather.com for applications to use, and XBMC have an account (userid and password) with weather.com to permit this. So it's not scraping in the usual sense of the word. It's easy to see what info weather.com is sending by just pasting the following into your browser:

Code:

http://xoap.weather.com/weather/local/UKXX0033?cc=*&unit=m&dayf=4&prod=xoap&link=xoap&par=<userid>&key=<password>

where UKXX0033 is the code for Chester UK (where I live). You need to replace this by the code for your city. An easy way to get the code is to go into the city selection bit of the weather settings and search for your city. The results list shows the codes.

Later: I had a crisis of confidence about posting XBMC's weather.com userid and password, though you can find them in the source file Weather.cpp if you're reasonably determined.

JR

[Sheezwack]

Considering this is built into XBMC, does that mean it wont be easy to make a plugin that changes that URL?