As mentioned above, JSON just has lower overhead than XML, possibly at the cost of being less readable by humans - but that's usually not a big concern.
@StoicM: Is your Giant Bomb username different from your Whiskey Media multipass login? I think you have to use your multipass credentials. Try logging out of GB in your web browser and clearing all cookies, and then try accessing the following link (it should prompt you for a username/password): http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/feed/hd/5/ If you can access that feed, then it 'should' work in the channel. I'll take another look to make sure nothing weird is going on though.
With my own app, I've actually run into a major issue when trying to use my multi-pass credentials. The app uses my multi-pass username ("sully") and password, which works on Giant Bomb, Screened, Tested and AnimeVice. However, the username "sully" on ComicVine is in use by someone else, so on that site I'm "yllus". As a result I cannot retrieve the feeds for that site - so it appears that the feeds for each site authenticate against each specific site's user database, not the multi-pass DB. I'm writing something up to send to Dave now.
I'm almost exclusively a consumer of the podcast and video content on the site, so I've not got much use for a mobile app - I listen to the podcast on my Zune and watch video content on my laptop / TV.
After taking a deeper look last night I think you have it as optimized as it'll go, actually - a slightly faster version might be produced using the video feeds instead of the API, but that seems questionable too. I really like what you did with the categories, by the way - having it hosted externally where it can be centrally updated is very smart.
I'll give implementing an add-on using the XML feeds a try today, mostly just to get re-acquainted with Python.
There may be some issue with the script writing to /private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences/XBMC/userdata/addon_data/plugin.video.giantbomb/video.dat , but even with that solved the script appears to parse through 3000+ (at the moment, 3676) video items every time it runs, with a resulting long load time. I think I'll take a crack as a mildly revised version of the script that alters how the categories and files are pulled down? Maybe we can optimize the checks for new content.
It looks like the Apple TV 2G's mappings of special://whatever/ are different from the Apple TV 1G, so the Python add-on looks to the wrong directory for files. I drew that conclusion after looking at this page: http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Special_protocol
So to fix the issue, you can simply replace the file located at /private/var/mobile/Library/Preferences/XBMC/addons/plugin.video.giantbomb/addon.py with this file, or you can manually replace these lines in addon.py:
This solution does indeed hard-code the directory mappings, but until XBMC releases an update that fixes the auto-mapping using special:// it'll have to do.
@Buggex: I am seeing an error in the log that reads "NOTICE: ERROR IN DATA FILE" at startup but I'm not sure it's actually causing any problems?
I picked up an Apple TV 2 today and immediately shoved XBMC onto it. :) Was surprised and happy to see a Giant Bomb video add-on and installed it, but unfortunately there seems to be an issue: I get the following issue (sent to xbmc.log):
I've written Python code in the past so I'll take a look at the issue, but I suppose it's likely that all I need to do is install the missing module - probably from http://code.google.com/p/whimais/ ? How's that sound?
As a Tank I pretty much always won battles with Assassins - as long as I've got upgraded health and don't get backstabbed, I absorb their first hit and kill them in one shot in response. I imagine they could be quite annoying to other classes.
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