Schedule recordings based on email

[jonb1974]

It would be quite cool to email gbpvr and get it to record when not at home. A guy I work with has a TIVO (I'm in the UK and haven't seen these before) and he gets an email in the morning with programs on it, he ticks which ones he wants to record and sends it back for it to record that evening.. very cool.

[sub]

It wouldnt be the sort of thing I'd build, but it would be relatively easy for a another developer to implement this as a plugin/utility.

[bgowland]

It would be quite cool to email gbpvr and get it to record when not at home. A guy I work with has a TIVO (I'm in the UK and haven't seen these before) and he gets an email in the morning with programs on it, he ticks which ones he wants to record and sends it back for it to record that evening.. very cool.

TIVOs can do this? Are you sure it's not just an email from his wife and she sets up the recordings based on his response?

As sub says, it's fairly trivial to do.

It's not quite what your friend has but I put together a basic framework which would allow me to set recordings by SMS/email. My mobile phone provider has an SMS to email gateway - I just start the SMS message with an email address then follow with subject, message body etc. then text to the gateway number. I wrote a little application that checks my POP3 account once a minute for messages with a specific subject (e.g., RecRequest) then processes the message body to add the recording. It never made it past the testbed stage though.

If your friend has tickboxes it would suggest HTML email which would require more processing than my plain text system.

You could always just use EWA - probably just as easy to browse the TV Guide with that than looking at an email with X channels worth of Y hours of programmes. I suppose the tickbox approach would be faster for selecting them though.

Cheers,
Brian

[jonb1974]

Yeah, his Tivo seems to do it, I've never seen one myself. He says it's linux based, maybe it's a hack or something. I do a bit of scripting, but the whole email/sms is a little beyond me. The main program is inporting it into the program. And exporting for that matter for sending the email. I'm sure I could write a script to create the html and process it afterwards, but it's importing it into GBPVR, is there a commandline thing that would work?

[sub]

I'm sure I could write a script to create the html and process it afterwards, but it's importing it into GBPVR, is there a commandline thing that would work?

There isnt currently a command line for this, but there is a scheduling API that could easily be used by a developer in the creation of this. Just tell it the channel number, filename, start/end times etc.

[bgowland]

I'm sure I could write a script to create the html and process it afterwards, but it's importing it into GBPVR, is there a commandline thing that would work?

Not sure - have a look on the wiki at the Utilities section - I know there have been several command-line utilities created by people here but I can't remember if there was one that allowed scheduling recordings.

Cheers,
Brian