Empty categories: API has changed AGAIN

[TScheen]

Unfortunately, less than 24h after the last issue #1286 was closed by Mediaminister, the exact behaviour, empty categories, has returned.🤨
I'm getting the feeling, some coder from VRT, reading this GitHub, is doing these constant API changes on purpose just to nail us on a continuous base.😠
Anyone else?

[Stavr0sStuff]

I can confirm. Categories or series come up empty again.

The amount of changes VRT makes to their site structure is insane. I assume they don't provide an API and you need to scrape/parse individual pages, hence the brittle nature?

[screenagerbe]

I concur

I'm getting the feeling, some coder from VRT, reading this GitHub, is doing these constant API changes on purpose just to nail us on a continuous base.😠 Anyone else?

it sure starts to look that way

[IveBracke]

Don't know who is changing that API all the time, but he's not making himself popular around here. And probably not at the VRT side either; the VRT MAX app also had to be updated 9 days ago.

[aGreatDay]

I assume the official Android app uses the same API as this kodi plugin, which is https://www.vrt.be/vrtnu-api/graphql/v1. But how come that my Android app that was only updated 9 days ago, still works after this change? Is there some kind of versioning maybe.

[mediaminister]

The VRT MAX add-on for Kodi requires episode metadata in order to build a menu listing of episodes that can be played directly in the Kodi player.

The official Android app works differently: you select and play a single episode from its episode page. As a result, the required API queries are different.

VRT has now removed the episode object, which previously contained most of the relevant metadata. The metadata that can still be queried via the API is now limited and is primarily associated with pages instead.

I quickly fixed some of the functionality, you can use the following package for now:
plugin.video.vrt.nu-2.5.50+matrix.1-movies-c77d441.zip

[Stavr0sStuff]

This works again now, thank you so much!

[IveBracke]

Thanks for the quick update and for sending over the ZIP file. Just some feedback to help with your debugging: it looks like some sections still aren't populating and are showing up empty. For instance, 'TV-Gids' is still blank.

[ErwinBaeyens]

This patch works, but only the categories view. When using the TV-guide or channel views the overview is still empty.
thank's anyway for the work you do.

[mediaminister]

I didn't find the time to fix the TV guide view yet, the channels view should work with this: plugin.video.vrt.nu-2.5.50+matrix.1-movies-c77d441.zip

[mediaminister]

New "work in progress" test version:

plugin.video.vrt.nu-2.5.50+matrix.1-meta-2b9d7df.zip

[TScheen]

New "work in progress" test version:

plugin.video.vrt.nu-2.5.50+matrix.1-meta-2b9d7df.zip

Works fine for me. I just had to re-create the shortcut of my two TV-listings again, Een & Canvas. Many thanks!