Comments on: Getting Xbox Live Achievements Data: Part 2 – The AppleScript Solution

By: Ben Dodson

Ben Dodson — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 15:13:42 +0000

Hi Dan,

I'm in the progress of rebuilding this blog – I intend to be finished at the beginning of October at which point I'll post up an article on how to do the whole thing with PHP.

By: Dan

Dan — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 08:22:29 +0000

Do you still plan to post the full breakdown of this using php?

By: Sharpshooter761

Sharpshooter761 — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 22:18:48 +0000

Well, I was fooling around with the xbox homepage and found that the gamercard in the top righthand corner is generated through https://live.xbox.com/ShellGamercardV2.ashx?cul... .

So if your logged in to xbox.com it will fetch your gamer tag, membership status, and gamer score. A little bit less work
im fooling around with trying to find where the achievements summary/games played page gets it information from.

By: Ben

Ben — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:26:54 +0000

Any idea when part 3/4 will be published?

By: Jamie

Jamie — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:58:29 +0000

Yea, testing between Snoopy and the Python script I assumed they were doing some sort of browser detection to show the form ‘fmHF’ somehow because no matter what I was trying I couldn’t get to that, even when playing around trying to fake the user-agent. Thanks, I’ll try out this method of using SimpleBrowser()

By: Ben Dodson

Ben Dodson — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:43:44 +0000

I was able to get it to work by using the following with SimpleBrowser (but should give you some stuff to go on)

$browser = new SimpleBrowser();
$browser->get($url);
$browser->setField(’login’, self::USERNAME);
$browser->setField(’passwd’, self::PASSWORD);
$browser->clickSubmitByName(’SI’);
$browser->submitFormById(’fmHF’);
return $browser->getContent();

Where $url is a link to a game page something along these lines:

http://live.xbox.com/en-US/profile/Achievements/ViewAchievementDetails.aspx?tid=%09%5d%3acn*i7%05%01&compareTo=BenDodson

If you follow that URL, it takes you to a Microsoft login page in which you can fill out the login and passwd fields. If you submit that, it should take you to a HTML page which has an empty form (with an id of “fmHF”) which when submitted will log you in. I don’t think that form shows up if you are using a web browser so probably employing some sort of browser detection. If you do it from a server using cURL or something similar then you should be able to get it working

By: Jamie

Jamie — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:33:22 +0000

awesome, I can’t wait to read the article, but would love to discuss your methodologies in the mean time.

I’ve been trying to use Snoopy to page scrape but the authorization with live.xbox.com has been a road block either due to SSL or the JS requirement block of code on the login page.

By: Ben Dodson

Ben Dodson — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:25:18 +0000

True, it’s not viable in a production environment. I’ve actually got a PHP script running now which uses a class called SimpleBrowser to post to the hidden form and log me in successfully. I’ve also built a Facebook Application which uses it so my achievements (along with my overall gamerscore, achievement title, description, and image) are all posted to my wall. Unfortunately it is still not scalable as I’d need to crawl as many peoples Xbox Live pages as there were people using the service which quickly becomes unviable.

I’ll be posting a full breakdown of how it’s done on the blog soon though

By: Jamie

Jamie — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 22:19:36 +0000

Great article, but it’s not a viable solution in a production environment, even though the method is rather neat. Reading the article Mike posted gave me some insight and I was able to successfully log in. Now I just need to find a way to make the python script work elegantly enough in PHP.

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 18:23:34 +0000

It’s actually pretty easy to log in and automate screen scraping without javascript. After your script fills out the login form, you’ll end up with an error page, but there’s a hidden “no javascript” form on that page which you can submit to complete the login process. Take a look at http://www.damonkohler.com/2007/10/scraping-xbox-live.html … that’s what I used as a base for my Rails app to do similar things to what you’re looking to do.