Galleon Netflix app broken

Yes, everyone's is broken because netflix made some changes to their shipped list. They added a row to the end that doesn't have a movie in it so it was throwing an exception. I made changes to check for this and it will be in the next release of galleon. Or if you can't wait, download the 0.6.2 standalone version and copy and rename the movieRentals-0.6.2.jar over the apps/movieRentals.jar in galleon and restart galleon.

David

 

I don't know, I'd have to talk to John about it. I think there probably needs to be more development in order to justify a release of galleon. I guess I'd better do more development on galleon.

 

I'm having the same problem using the 0.6.2 standalone version on Windows XP with my TiVo Series 2. The only screen that seems to work is the "Browse by Category". The search comes back empty. I've removed portions of the urls below to get past the filters.

Here are some snips from the log file.

22:40:02,440 INFO [NetFlixService] Downloading top rentals.
22:40:02,706 WARN [RssMovieItemHandler] Could not parse out movieId from w-w-w netflix com Movie Crash 70023961

22:40:22,487 INFO [NetFlixService] Downloading new releases.
22:40:22,690 WARN [RssMovieItemHandler] Could not parse out movieId from w-w-w netflix com Movie Perfect_Stranger 70058019

22:43:30,752 INFO [NetFlixService] search Black
22:43:30,752 INFO [SearchResultsLoader] Resuming background search results loader.
22:43:30,752 INFO [NetFlixService] searchPopularResults start=0,query=Black
22:43:33,362 INFO [NetFlixService] searchResults start=0,query=Black
22:43:34,237 INFO [NetFlixService] searchResults start=0,query=Black
22:43:42,581 INFO [SearchResultsLoader] Pausing background search results loader.

Got this message too. Not sure if it is important or not.
22:39:36,456 INFO [h-t-t-pMethodDirector] Redirect requested but followRedirects is disabled

Any ideas?

 

Yep, they changed the format again. The code is already as loosely coupled as it can be. It looks for patterns in the html to find bits of information. When those patterns change, it breaks. The patterns are a basic as they can be like looking for a css class on a link tag. And then parsing the movieId out of the url on that link. Well, they've changed formats on the url many times. So the movie id isn't found. If that isn't found, it doesn't create a movie out of the bit of information. That's what's wrong with parts of it right now.

The best I can do is rewrite the service layer code so that it loads an external translation file to convert from the web site to an internal format. Then the code wouldn't need to be updated, just the external translation file. I've been thinking about doing that lately, but haven't gotten around to it yet. But it would still need to be manually updated when the site breaks. There really is no way around that unless netflix exposed the data in a way that wasn't html and was consistently parsable.

BTW, I'm going out of town for a few days so I won't be able to fix it until I get back.

 

Anyone know the status on this? I'm unable to get the software running correctly.

 

yeah, I just got back from vacation and I'm working on the translation file approach. Basically netflix made the site difficult to parse because they have so many unclosed html tags in it. So it throws the parser I'm using off.

David

 

ok, I just released 0.7 which should fix the netflix problems. I only converted a few pages into external files, but all screens should work now. I've also updated the next version of galleon to contain 0.7.

David

 

That won't work with this version of the app because it needs some libraries and the template files which aren't in previous versions of galleon. This might work with the old version of galleon: try copying the saxon and jtidy jars into the galleon lib directory, then copy the conf/templates directory under conf/templates in galleon. If that doesn't work, I would run the standalone one until the 2.4.2 version of galleon comes out.

 

That worked... thx...