Can you access TivoWeb with Wap

graf · 12-09-2002, 06:27 AM

Has anyone written a version of tivoweb that produces .wml pages suitable for a mobile phone wap browser? It seems like such an obvious thing to do, I'm surprised it doesn't exists already, but my searches for it have yielded nothing.

If one does not exist, i'd be highly tempted to hack tivoweb to produce wml. It shouldn't be too tricky, although I might just implement searching and recording rather than the full tivoweb monty.

radish · 12-09-2002, 06:39 AM

Would be an interesting idea, I certainly haven't seen a wml version. Maybe it's because no one uses wap

Tony Hoyle · 12-09-2002, 01:51 PM

WAP pages are quite limited & there's not much you could do with it... I've tried setting up a WAP version of a couple of sites (you need something like Apache to do the automatic redirection, but it's not hard), however the results were so disappointing I abandoned the idea.

Given a year or two the new phones will be speaking proper HTML anyway...

graf · 12-09-2002, 05:47 PM

You could have a search box. You could type in the name of a program you wanted to record and it could go through the normal tivoweb process and setup a recording. Surely that'd be ideal for those "I'm down the pub and I really meant to tell the tivo to record..." moments.

kmusgrave · 12-10-2002, 12:37 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Tony Hoyle

Given a year or two the new phones will be speaking proper HTML anyway...

They already can - the SPV can read/display proper HTML pages

BtB · 12-10-2002, 02:59 PM

Time for encouragement...

Even a simple Search and record screen accessible via WAP would make TiVoweb 10 times more useful, go for it !

graf · 12-10-2002, 03:05 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by kmusgrave
They already can - the SPV can read/display proper HTML pages

Although allegedly it can't call numbers out of it's contacts list.

I've started coding (or at least hacking) tivoweb to serve wml pages - although so far I haven't got much further than "hello world". But at least I can get it to serve static content, now to work on dynamic content.

I've hit one snag however. I've stopped it branching off into the background, but if i Ctrl-c to stop the task, it reboots the tivo. Anyone got any ideas what might cause this?

Cheers

radish · 12-10-2002, 03:47 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by graf
Although allegedly it can't call numbers out of it's contacts list.

I've started coding (or at least hacking) tivoweb to serve wml pages - although so far I haven't got much further than "hello world". But at least I can get it to serve static content, now to work on dynamic content.

I've hit one snag however. I've stopped it branching off into the background, but if i Ctrl-c to stop the task, it reboots the tivo. Anyone got any ideas what might cause this?

Cheers

There's mention of this on the underground forum. From what I remember, TivoWeb (and some other apps) run in some special shell which doesn't like being killed (it panics the kernel). That's why TivoWeb has a shutdown option, it closes it gracefully.

graf · 12-10-2002, 07:43 PM

Progress report:

I'm still at the hello world stage, but the code's a lot better. It now operates in both html and wml, depending on the name of the module. Any modules that start "wap" are processed as wap. So now all I have to do is write some tivoweb modules that produce useful wml. I'm going to start with the info page, and work up from there...

radish · 12-10-2002, 07:46 PM

Or you could always parse the user_agent string and decide what to return based on that

if you were going to be fancy that is...

graf · 12-10-2002, 08:27 PM

I'm not fundamentally against fancyness, but surely different phones would give out different user agent strings, so you'd have to hard code a list of phone's user agent strings to check against. Which seems like a bad idea to me. As an added plus, my module approach means I don't have to mess with the existing code as much.

Progress report:-
I have the "Information" screen coming up on my phone (apart from the kernel and memory information, which I couldn't be bothered with). There is a copy of the sort of thing it produces at http://www.ninjapineapple.com/tivo.wml

Now it's time to go to bed... The next challenge is getting the search page working, which could be a lot trickier.

alanjrobertson · 12-10-2002, 08:32 PM

..that looks cool!!

I'm very impressed with all the info you've got on that WAP page - making me seriously consider a TurboNet upgrade now!

Alan

graf · 12-12-2002, 07:10 PM

Progress Report: I now have the search page working... You can enter a title, and search in categories and by title, title keyword, director and actor. The results of the search are displayed correctly.

However, when you click on the results it takes you to the series page, which is the next thing I will need to wml-ify.

mtg101 · 12-13-2002, 05:34 AM

Keep up the good work graf, there're a lot of us looking forward to this.

(especially those of us who've tried that SPV 'phone' and realise it's not an option : )

graf · 12-15-2002, 08:25 PM

Wahey - It works. I just scheduled the tivo to record "The boosh" on BBC7 using my wap phone. It can't do anything fancy yet, like cancel recordings or create season passes, but it can schedule one off recordings through the search facility.

I shall do some more testing before releasing it, but the worst that could happen, i would think, is that it will spit out invalid wml. What features do people want supported before I release it? And please don't say all of them

Milhouse · 12-15-2002, 09:16 PM

Will this work in tandem with the standard HTML TiVoWeb - I presume your WAP pages simply need to be added into the TiVoWeb configuration so that they can be accessed with an alternative URL?

Sounds like an interesting addition to the TiVo range of hacks.

As for features, off the top of my head I'd suggest that a manual recording facility (eg. enter channel, start time, duration, record!) might be the simplest means of scheduling a one-off recording that you suddenly discover is being shown while you're down the boozer.

Scheduling manual recordings through a search facility sounds good but personally I'd want to keep the call as short as possible and press as few buttons as possible (not because I'm tight you understand, but because it's diverting me away from valuable drinking time, not to mention having to focus on those little buttons...)

tkousaka · 01-02-2003, 07:58 AM

Graf,

This is awesome, looking forward for the release of the WAP. FYI, Sony is licensing Tivo technology for their PVR's in Japan, and their top end edition comes with a dyndns + NTT DoCoMo iMode navigation. Exactly what you are trying to accomplish.

Needless to say Sony is charging $800 plus for the device, and this will be GPL'ed hopefully.

You know what would be kool, is if there are any Japanese consumers browsing these web pages who could upload the scripts.

Cheers,

Tony Hoyle · 01-02-2003, 08:23 PM

WAP phones send an http 'Accept' line that includes wml when they request pages... I have Apache setup to serve WAP pages automatically using:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} text/vnd\.wap\.wml [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} wap [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} 7110
RewriteRule ^[\./](.*)$ /wap/$1

You should be able to code something fairly similar in any scripting language...

I've thought of passing the output of tivoweb through an HTML->WAP script... results would be quite varied though (google does this if you use it from a wap phone, and the results aren't brilliant, though they are useable).

The 7650 also has an HTML browser for it, but TBH I don't use it - the media-rich HTML content you see in most websites now is a complete 'mare to download over GPRS.. WAP is quite acceptable once it's on a decent size display and has colour & graphics (spend more time playing super mario though).

Vargster · 01-03-2003, 08:07 AM

Graf - what's the lastest on the WML front?

nick.perry · 01-03-2003, 09:37 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Tony Hoyle
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} text/vnd\.wap\.wml [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} wap [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} 7110
RewriteRule ^[\./](.*)$ /wap/$1

Won't that mean that people using multi-format browsers such as Opera will receive the WML content instead of the HTML?

tabascojrc · 01-03-2003, 11:02 AM

Wow i am so excited about this, i was totally about to do this myself

hehe, anyhow any idea on accessing this if your TiVo is set up behind a proxy server for security? Right now I have apache running as a proxy requiring a username and password? Will this still function under WAP?
Keep up the good work.
-Jeremy

radish · 01-03-2003, 12:23 PM

Maybe there should be an AND NOT clause in there to allow text/html to force normal mode? Not that I'm a great apache config guru

iambic · 01-03-2003, 01:24 PM

Quote:

tabascojrc:

Wow i am so excited about this, i was totally about to do this myself hehe, anyhow any idea on accessing this if your TiVo is set up behind a proxy server for security? Right now I have apache running as a proxy requiring a username and password? Will this still function under WAP?

Yep, I've got Apache set up and if I try to access via WAP I get presented with a Userid/Password dialogue. It will authenticate quite happily (and return a "not authorised" dialogue if you enter the wrong password), then you'll get a "500: Web Service Problem: Please contact the service provider" error message as you'll be returned html that your WAP browser can't handle.

Tony Hoyle · 01-03-2003, 04:13 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by nick.perry
Won't that mean that people using multi-format browsers such as Opera will receive the WML content instead of the HTML?

No, because Opera doesn't identify itself as wml capable.
I've never had a miss reported on any of my websites using the above rules, so I reckon they're about right.

graf · 01-06-2003, 10:17 AM

Progress on the wap enabled tivoweb stopped over the Christmas period. I'm going to work on wml-ifying some more pages (manual recording was requested) before I release anything. And of course it will be under the GPL (not that I have a choice as far as I know, but I'm a free software fanatic so anything I write in my free time is GPL as a matter of course)

graf · 01-12-2003, 07:03 PM

Is there any way of setting up manual recordings through tivoweb? I wanted to be able to do it via wap, when I realised you couldn't even do it by normal tivoweb.

Tony Hoyle · 01-12-2003, 08:22 PM

Yup... It's not obvious though.

User Interface
Channel Guide
Watch
BBC1
View upcoming listings (this is the non-obvious bit)
Tue 14th Jan
Neighbours
Select episode
Record

Milhouse · 01-12-2003, 10:21 PM

Shame there's no way to record a programme that's already in progress... several times I've been caught late at work and am unable to record a programme because it's already started - the worst case being footie on Sky which has upto a 1 hour preamble which I don't mind NOT recording but I'd still like the game!

Milhouse · 01-12-2003, 10:24 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Tony Hoyle
Yup... It's not obvious though.

User Interface
Channel Guide
Watch
BBC1
View upcoming listings (this is the non-obvious bit)
Tue 14th Jan
Neighbours
Select episode
Record

That wouldn't be my interpreation of a manual recording... I'd have said it was a screen where you entered the channel, start and end times (or channel, start and duration) with optional repeat (daily, weekly, etc.).

To the best of my knowledge TiVoWeb does not support manual recordings (according to my interpretation).

graf · 01-13-2003, 07:49 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by Milhouse
That wouldn't be my interpreation of a manual recording... I'd have said it was a screen where you entered the channel, start and end times (or channel, start and duration) with optional repeat (daily, weekly, etc.).

To the best of my knowledge TiVoWeb does not support manual recordings (according to my interpretation).

That's what I meant by manual recording. That's a shame - i can't seem to even find a plugin that does it.