View Full Version : Xbmcscripts.com needs and wants your help!
hi,
most of you probably know that i will be going away next saturday and won't work on xbox related stuff for almost a year at least. thus i have a wish that people carry on working on the site and the scripts belonging to the site, as i do feel it has come a long way and is useful to people (at least one may hope so).
so, if you have looked at the code for the installer, you might notice that there are a lot of code for a local browser in there. in fact, the backbone of the code is almost complete. i will now try to explain a bit how it works (if i can remember...coded this part in june). it first gets the directory list in q:\\scripts\\ . then it visits every directory looking for a .py file. if that is found, we know that we're dealing with a script. then we introduce the scripts specs (which are still floating in the air...but let's leave that for later). we want to know if the script is specs-compliant, so it checks for a script.xml in that dir. if that is found, it parses that xml and returns data from it. however, if no xml is found, the data is still created, but it uses directory name as script name and rest of info in the object is set to "unknown".
all code to do this is in there already, only thing needs tweaking is the xml parsing part to match whatever script spec chosen. all this returns one object in the end - a list. this list contains multiple dictionaries, one for each script. out of this dictionary you can read e.g locallist[0]['name'] to get name of first script. as you can see there isn't much work left to do, since most already is done (i believe...my memory could fool me though).
the way i had planned on doing this was making it one big script containing both a browser and an installer, which you could switch inbetween them. an notifier to notify for new versions of scripts would of course be nice, and is possible and not too hard either, but it complicates things a bit. the easiest way of handling this would be only allow updating on scripts that use the scripts specs, since then you can read date out of xml. to allow non-specs scripts to get updated this way you could save an xml with scriptd id (all scripts on site has an id number) along with the date fetched from site. then you would know what date the local copy was of.
this should provide some background to the script, as i really wish that it could develop into a full-fledged browser, with auto-updating scripts, thumbnails viewing and whatnot. please ask question and show your interest in this thread if there's any :)
i will release all graphics files i have lying on my disk related to this project shortly..(on the scriptservice site). thanks for taking your time reading all this.
wow a whole year. must be some big trip. have you considered making xbmcscripts.com a wiki style sight or are you going to hand over admin to someone else?
wow a whole year. *must be some big trip. *have you considered making xbmcscripts.com a wiki style sight or are you going to hand over admin to someone else?
not trip, school. will be taking a break from computers (on a daily basis) for a while and i won't have my xbox with me so...
the site will continue as it is now, but someone else will run the site. you'll know more about it soon :)
now, on-topic please...
CrashCat
2005-08-10, 06:02
hope someone takes up the cause, i was looking forward to this script downloader and i'm glad to see you at least managed to get a good start. if i was more experienced i'd volunteer, but as it is i don't know anything about the scripts, so it'll take me a while to even figure out what's going on in here.
BigBellyBilly
2005-08-10, 12:19
enderw,
could you publish the finalised 'script.xml' format, along with an example, on your site somewhere ? (or even post it here?)
top effort btw.
much appreciated.
CrashCat
2005-08-10, 14:37
could you publish the finalised 'script.xml' format, along with an example, on your site somewhere ? (or even post it here?)
it's not finalized yet, he left the script.xml spec up in the air deliberately so the people working on it afterward can decide how to arrange it. at least that's how i read it, i guess rather than just hand down a spec he wanted to leave it open in case someone had some good ideas on what needs to go in there.
BigBellyBilly
2005-08-10, 14:46
ok, is there an unfinished spec somewhere i can try and work too ? or is it a bit premature to do so ?
i've tried reading some of the threads on this subject but got completly confused as to the current format.
this is the one the scripts is coded for (and should be parsed):
<info>
<name>xbmclyrics</name>
<author>enderw</author>
<version>1.0</version>
<updated>20-04-05</updated>
<description>fetches lyrics from the song you are currently listening to</description>
<changelog>none at the moment</changelog>
<firstrun>this will be displayed on first run</firstrun>
</info>
not totally legal xml...
it will need some additions, but as long as it's an own element things are very easy and almost no extra code is needed. it reads the name out of the elements and creates an dictionary out of it. so if you add <runfile> it should be parsed automatically. you just need to set it to "unknown" before the parsing takes place...
a whole new parser might be needed though if the specs start using attributes and child elements.
please ask if there's anything you don't understand...
i'm currently writing the info file for flexibrowser and have just one question:
the date element seems to be expressed in "dd-mm-yy".
should't it be better "yyyy-mm-dd"?
bernd
darn americans ;) (i take it that's the american way of typing dates)
seriously though, i dunno...i don't really care as it's not important, i'll leave it up to the people continuing it to make that decision (i leave very soon...friday that is).
darn americans ;) (i take it that's the american way of typing dates)
we damn americans usually use mm/dd/yy (-:
yyyy-mm-dd is the iso standard. the string representation also sorts correctly chronolgically.
yyyy-mm-dd is the dateformat.
and as asteron correctly stated its the iso format.
and yyyy in the beginning makes it clearly distinguishable from other formats.
bernd
sure, it's now you guys' decision, not mine :)
what format it is in doesn't really matter since the script can read and write in any format...so why not use the iso-standard...
time to say good bye...thanks a lot to all of you scripters, it's been great discussing and getting help from you. thanks a lot for all your support to my site, i really appreciate it.
please read xbmcscripts.com's frontpage for my newspost.
i will drop by now and then, but not very often i think...
see you again later,
enderw
time to say good bye...thanks a lot to all of you scripters, it's been great discussing and getting help from you. thanks a lot for all your support to my site, i really appreciate it.
please read xbmcscripts.com's frontpage for my newspost.
i will drop by now and then, but not very often i think...
see you again later,
enderw
thanks for all your effort
and best wishes.
bernd
hi ,
i have a problem when i upload xbmc scripts.
and then i start xbmc and then i go to scripts and open installer.py.
when i press a then read running and goes away why doesn't start
the xbmc scripts.
sylber
can some one follow my qeustion i am not very good in english i can write one in dutch i am from holland maybe can some dutch people answer my question
Sleepless
2005-08-31, 13:53
hi ,
i have a problem when i upload xbmc scripts.
and then i start xbmc and then i go to scripts and open installer.py.
when i press a then read running and goes away why doesn't start *
the xbmc scripts.
sylber
i had this same problem (using xbmc build 22-05-05).
i then tried running the installer.py with xbmc 31-07-05 and that launched it straight away with no problems - haven't played with it yet but it's running. so i'd say either get newer xbmc build version or find out if the installer.py can be modified to run on the build you presently have!
sleepz :thumbsup:
gangsta75
2005-09-01, 01:59
hi there..
yesterday i submitted to xbmcscript.com a new script called xbmcsub for search,download and copy subtitles from divxstation.com; it's not been published yet :(.
who's the new admin?is there someone that can publish it?
thanks
g75
xbmcscripts is still up, but is someone paying attention to new script updates ? i have submitted 5 changed scripts, but see nothing happening ?
the processing time seems to be a few days or so. have you given it that long?
the processing time seems to be a few days or so. *have you given it that long?
well this is day 3, maybe it would be handy if there are multiple moderators for that site, as updated scripts will be hidden until they have been approved and that is not handy.
... as updated scripts will be hidden until they have been approved and that is not handy.
yes i don't approve of that behavior. the old versions should be kept available.
i agree with approving the initial script but updates to existing script should not need approval.
well, the problem is that there's not much i can do about it...i don't code the system myself. i will have a look at it when i get back home in a months time. as for more moderators, sure, but i have asked many and there's not many people who wants to do it. more like none actually. if you want to be a moderator please contact me at sveint@nospamgmail.com (remove nospam). recently the site has been abused badly however so things are down for the moment...will need to talk to the admin before i open it again. 650gb of data was transferred the past 2 weeks...that's just insane. i hope the site will make it, but if it doesn't stop it could be closed down in the worst case.
650 gb?!? wow... that's insane... have you characterized the behavior? anyway to limit traffic to an ip?
yeah, but it was a proxy. it is blocked now, but that doesn't mean it won't happen again. the main problem was that i was away and didn't get to check the logs fast enough. the downloads will remain disabled for some time until i get to talk to the admin of the network i get server space of. i believe things will work out though...
things are back up again now. it wasn't such a big problem as i first thought it would be. as for the update system, i'll have to deal with that later...
enderw,
if we can get several people to split the load i'd be interested in being a mod.
lets get like 5-6 people... then it will be much easier.
lets go people... buck up!
well, it's not like it's a huge load of scripts every day that needs approval. there's quite few actually...what's needed is people checking it often in order to lessen the time before a script is approved. please send me an email if you really want to be a mod and i'll add you and explain things to you.
more people are welcome...
thanks
Killarny
2005-11-17, 12:26
i agree with approving the initial script but updates to existing script should not need approval.
i disagree.
as far as i am aware, part of the reason for needing approval of scripts is to help prevent malicious scripting from being distributed to users.
automatic approval of updates to scripts might encourage abuse; ie, abuser writes benign script to get it approved, then updates it with malicious code.
i can't get this script to run. i can run the quicktime browser no problem, but this doesn't appear to do anything at all when i select it from the scripts start menu.
if i go into "scripts" and select the install.py script it runs for maybe half a second and then stops. am i missing something obvious here?
i'm using xbmc as a dash, with the home folder set up in e:\apps\xbmc and the xbe named evoxdash.xbe in c:\, if that makes any difference to things.
after running it for that half second, press the white button on the controller and write here what it says.