Make VOD Source Trump Live Recordings

Have NHKDVR scrape the NHK VOD list and trump any live recorded show with the VOD content.

Summary

Starting somewhere around a year ago, NHK World has made select titles available on their website for on demand viewing. Only the latest two episodes of the title are watchable at a time.

Now this doesn't offer a full replacement for recording shows from the live stream but it does give the DVR another consistent (higher quality) source for shows a user would want to watch.

If the VOD has a program before it's set to record, then the live recording should be cancelled. If a show is made available on VOD after it has been recorded, then the live recording should be replaced.

Background Information

The on demand titles currently available are listed in JSON format with full metadata at https://api.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/vodpglist/v1/list.json?apikey=EJfK8jdS57GqlupFgAfAAwr573q01y6k

It looks to use the same API key as the livestream JSON information but a different (yet still consistent) JSON layout.

Thankfully, someone has already written a scraper for NHKVOD content for youtube-dl so utilizing it within NHKDVR should be somewhat trivial. More info on how to use yt-dl within another python script can be found here.

Technical Challenges

How often and when the VOD episode list is updated with new programs is unknown. Since there could be a race-condition with one source having a program recorded before another, the tracking of what programs have been recorded and from what source needs to be robust.
Whether or not the JSON entries within the VOD contain metadata that can afford us an apples-to-apples comparison with live schedule metadata is yet to be seen. Hopefully the episode/show ID are consistent between the two.

This feature was presented to me by a kind person who stumbled across this project after some googling. Thanks Justin!

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