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On the TWiT API


G+_Aaron Bishop
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On the TWiT API...

I stopped using the Kodi TWiT addon a couple weeks ago and switched to using a pod catcher. After the 3rd or 4th time that it stopped working (presumably because the author's server stopped for some reason) I was done. RSS feeds work just fine, and that's what the addon used to use before the API came out and the old feeds stopped working.

 

This is all an assumption, but I assume that because the API requires a developer to setup and maintain a server to cache API requests instead of letting clients talk directly to TWiT, it makes TWiT apps more fragile. Sure TWiT may be up, working, and releasing data regularly but if your particlar app's cheap-o-matic brand cloud service provider's bandwidth ran out for the month you're stuck in the water. Now labors of love cost money or simply don't work well. It's great that you can get way more information, search by all kinds of criteria, etc, but if all you want is to watch your shows as they come out then set up a pod catcher and use the RSS feeds. Maybe the API users should just use it to get the RSS feed links.

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The RSS feeds still work and there's no reason apps can't continue to use them if the data provided is enough.

 

The issue with Kodi was that they were using unofficial feeds generated directly from Drupal, not the public ones that were officially maintained and carefully monitored during the site switch to ensure minimal downtime.

 

I'm not sure which method Kodi uses now. The TWiT API isn't that hard to cache but I'd imagine they would have switched to the official RSS instead. While I don't know of any downtime on TWiT's end, I would check with Kodi first...

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Jeff Brand You care correct. I looked through some of the code for the plugin and it appears they first get the shows list by screen scraping the html for active/retired shows and then get the RSS feeds from screen scraping a show's web page. Odd then that I don't have issues with a pod catcher when I do have issues with the Kodi plugin. Perhaps the problem is with how the plugin caches the feeds or maybe even an upstream Kodi issue. BTW, I'm not a fan of adding RSS feeds to Kodi as a video source. It has a tendency to forget which episodes I've watched.

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Jeff Brand I was using https://github.com/divingmule/plugin.video.twit as the reference. I've created an issue before because it crashes when it can't connect instead of giving an error message and gotten a reply (though no results) from the author. Also it was updated about a month ago so I guess it is the actual plugin. I believe the plugin's namespace has divingmule in it.

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