{"id":1363,"date":"2012-03-09T09:48:24","date_gmt":"2012-03-09T09:48:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.agm.me.uk\/blog\/?p=1363"},"modified":"2012-03-09T09:48:24","modified_gmt":"2012-03-09T09:48:24","slug":"onfilm4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.agm.me.uk\/blog\/2012\/03\/onfilm4.php","title":{"rendered":"On Film4"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>On the quiet there are a lot of good movies on Film4. This is now available for free through the UK on Freeview, on satellite and on cable. The problem is that I keep missing so many good films or turning on just at the end. Because of this I decided to come up with an over engineered solution to this problem. Ladies and Gentlemen I give you my hack On Film 4<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What this hack does is to take the Film 4 TV listings and tweets on @OnFilm4 10 minutes before the film starts<\/a>. I also check if the film will be repeated and include that information in the tweet. This has already proved most useful and there have seen a few films that I would otherwise have missed, albeit on in the background while working.<\/p>\n

I then decided that I needed a way of summarising the listings so I could easily scan the for good films coming up and set the PVR to record them. I did this by setting up the On Film 4 Google Group<\/a> that sends an email a couple of times a week with the films that are upcoming on the channel. I try and sort these with the most popular first.<\/p>\n

There are several sources of Film 4 programme listings but I have opted to use Andrew’s web site<\/a> as it is simple and reliable. So I don’t put a load on Andrew’s server I only pull down any days I don’t already have listings for at random times of day. I also update listing for the day ahead in case it has changed. The result of this is I should have a complete weeks listing, accurate for the next day at least, but by only pulling a few KB in two files.<\/p>\n

The system also looks up each film on The Movie DB<\/a> and caches the film information. TMDB is a great community supported resource and I am now helping support it by identifying errors and unlisted films as part of this process. Currently I am not doing much with this information but I intend to do more with it in the future. I am experimenting with using the data to order the films in the email although I have found that going by user vote alone tends not necessarily identify the popular films.<\/p>\n

I feel I should also say that this is not intended to be a replacement to the Film4 Twitter stream that is a far more rich and interactive service.<\/p>\n

If you find this useful or have any suggestions on how I can improve it then please get in touch<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the quiet there are a lot of good movies on Film4. This is now available for free through the UK on Freeview, on satellite and on cable. The problem is that I keep missing so many good films or turning on just at the end. Because of this I decided to come up with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-apps","category-tech"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s4t60H-onfilm4","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.agm.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.agm.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.agm.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.agm.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.agm.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1363"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/blog.agm.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1377,"href":"https:\/\/blog.agm.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1363\/revisions\/1377"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.agm.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.agm.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.agm.me.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}