Notification of Firmware Updates for Freeview Boxes

09:15.35 - Sunday 13th August 2006   (Link to This Entry)

Towards the end of last week I had the idea of scraping the Freeview firmware broadcast schedules and having it email me whenever my PVR (the Panasonic TU-CTH100) was added to the list. This way, I reasoned, I wouldn't miss an update.

It didn't take a huge amount of thought to realise that I could make the site download all of the details and email anybody who wanted them, so that's what I did. The site is called 'Freeview Firmware Transmissions' - imaginative, no?

Here's how it works:

• Once a day, scrape.php will download the schedules page and extract the important bits into a temporary workspace table.
• parse.php then steps through the workspace table. If it finds a new company name it auto adds them. If it matches a device name (using Regular Expressions) it checks the schedules.
• If a valid schedule exists, nothing happens, but if an expired one exists, or there's nothing for that device, a new one is created and anyone with that device is flagged.
• email.php goes through the list of users and emails anyone who has been flagged

Pretty simple, and it only took me half of Saturday to get all the tricky technical stuff done.

Because of the inconsistencies in the data format, the Freeview boxes will have to be added manually as they appear. This means that the list of supported devices will start small but will grow over time and I can tweak the RegExs for efficiency.

The site should be up soon. I'm currently waiting for a domain name to update (it's a .web.com and takes up to 3 days) and it should be on shortly afterwards. Once the domain is ready, the site should be visible at: http://Freeview-Firmware.Results.web.com/