Plugin: PlayOn in Online Services (Hulu, Netflix, Amazon VOD, etc.)

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by Bandit

Hulu - Worked fine for the first movie I watched. Attempted to watch anything else and "Video download failed, video not found on server"
.

Specifically what videos does it fail on.

Also, if you go 30-60 minutes in the same video folder without re-loading the list the links go bad and are no longer valid. In those cases try leaving leaving the folder and reentering it so that the video list gets regenerated with fresh links.

[loonsailor]

I'm running sageTV on linux, watching on HD200's. I'd love to have the ability to watch hulu & netflix, so would like to add this plug-in. Two questions:

1. I'm that rarest of computer geeks, in that I don't have a PC lying around, at least not one built in this millennium. If I buy one to dedicate to this purpose, how much horsepower do I need? The playon site says minimum is a Pentium 4 3.2+ GHz, Pentium M 2.0+ GHz, or any multi-core x86 processor, 512 MB RAM. Is that really enough? Does the graphics card matter? Might a multi-core atom work (something like http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-037-_-Product, which includes a 1.6GHz atom 330 dual core)? Memory is so cheap that I guess 1GB is a no-brainer. XP, vista, or wait for w7?
   
2. How soon might this work for us linux types? Should I wait a while?

Thanks!

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by loonsailor

I'm running sageTV on linux, watching on HD200's. I'd love to have the ability to watch hulu & netflix, so would like to add this plug-in. Two questions:

1. I'm that rarest of computer geeks, in that I don't have a PC lying around, at least not one built in this millennium. If I buy one to dedicate to this purpose, how much horsepower do I need? The playon site says minimum is a Pentium 4 3.2+ GHz, Pentium M 2.0+ GHz, or any multi-core x86 processor, 512 MB RAM. Is that really enough? Does the graphics card matter? Might a multi-core atom work (something like http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-037-_-Product, which includes a 1.6GHz atom 330 dual core)? Memory is so cheap that I guess 1GB is a no-brainer. XP, vista, or wait for w7?
   
2. How soon might this work for us linux types? Should I wait a while?

Thanks!

Well, there are a few possibilities for linux...

1) If I figure out how to get PlayOn to send the un-transcoded videos, then its possible that you could just run PlayOn in a virtual machine on your Linux server.

2) If PlayOn needs to transcode the video, it'll take a reasonably beefy processor, I doubt a dual core atom would be able to cut it. But you never know, I bet someone with an Atom box could try it out.

[simonen]

I am not sure if this was mentioned already or not, but I have done a lot of editing to my feeds to bring in all available SyFy shows from Hulu into its own video section. I kept having problems with the STVi in that it would not load the videos in any section after I edited the custom online files, it would just say no videos found.

If I did a forced rebuild and reload of the STVi, it solved my problem and everything is back to normal even with the new feeds I added.

Maybe this will help anyone with a similar problem.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by simonen

I am not sure if this was mentioned already or not, but I have done a lot of editing to my feeds to bring in all available SyFy shows from Hulu into its own video section. I kept having problems with the STVi in that it would not load the videos in any section after I edited the custom online files, it would just say no videos found.

If I did a forced rebuild and reload of the STVi, it solved my problem and everything is back to normal even with the new feeds I added.

Maybe this will help anyone with a similar problem.

That was an odd issue and I wasn't able to reproduce it issue on my test PC. Good to know a reload of the STVi fixed it for you.

Can you post your SyFy feed, i'd like to add them to the list in the download.

[matt91]

Originally Posted by matt91

does the order of the items in this property determine their display order on the screen?

{From the file CustomOnlineVideoLinks.properties}

CustomSources=xPodcastAmazonVOD,xPodcastESPN,xPodcastCNN,xPodcastMovies,
xPodcastNBCTVShows,xPodcastABCTVShows,xPodcastFoxTVShows,xPodcastUSATVShows,
xPodcastComCenTVShows,xPodcastAnimeTVShows,xPodcastCBSTVShows,xPodcastHulu

I'd like to reorder the list a bit.

EP (or others) - do you know how to change the order of the links as they appear on the online services screen?

[wado1971]

Originally Posted by matt91

EP (or others) - do you know how to change the order of the links as they appear on the online services screen?

I second this 'request'. Especially for the ESPN sporting content - right now the feeds are listed alpha when what is really helpful is a date listing.

[matt91]

My question was about ordering the categories, not the content, but I guess that's a good question too.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by wado1971

I second this 'request'. Especially for the ESPN sporting content - right now the feeds are listed alpha when what is really helpful is a date listing.

I can get that going.

Originally Posted by matt91

My question was about ordering the categories, not the content, but I guess that's a good question too.

I think you just reorder that list that you quoted.

[simonen]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Can you post your SyFy feed, i'd like to add them to the list in the download.

I'll post that later today.

[chiledog]

I am at work so I have not tried this plugin (BTW, great work... I love it).

Does this support Playon plugins? (http://www.playonplugins.com/index.php/board,2.0.html)

I love all the SyFy, South Park, Adult Swim and NickJr (kids) stuff.

[m0ng00se30]

Originally Posted by chiledog

I am at work so I have not tried this plugin (BTW, great work... I love it).

Does this support Playon plugins? (http://www.playonplugins.com/index.php/board,2.0.html)

I love all the South Park, Adult Swim and NickJr (kids) stuff.

I think it will work with the plugins just fine if you can edit the CustomOnlineVideoLinks to match the output of the PlayOn server! I'm still trying to figure that part out tho! Can anyone provide a little insight?

Thanks!

[simonen]

It shouldn't be too hard at all once you understand how to successfully add feeds and group them together. You will need the UPnP inspector listed on the first post to know how to format your feed.

I find the easiest thing to do is simply test out your new feed in a section that is already present in the CustomOnlineVideoLinks.properties file. Simply copy one of them and change it to the new feed. If it successfully shows up and you can play the video, then you know you got that part right. Next you can move on and create a new group in the CustomOnlineVideoUIText.properties file and then you can associate your new feed(s) with that group.

There are lot of examples within the files that you can use to learn about how it is put together.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

The only problem you'd run into would be if they all tried to load a video list at the same time as it only writes to a single hard coded file name. I can fix that to have it append the client ID at the end of the file name.

It's not likely that this would happen in my case. I just want to make sure that if I run multiple extenders/placeshifters I will not run into problems.

[Zippster]

Originally Posted by m0ng00se30

I think it will work with the plugins just fine if you can edit the CustomOnlineVideoLinks to match the output of the PlayOn server! I'm still trying to figure that part out tho! Can anyone provide a little insight?

Thanks!

Yes it does just fine, I have been playing with Spike TV. Its easy to add just like simonen explained, the UPnP inspector is the key to getting the right links though.

Not sure if EP needs or wants another place to start going further in depth with customizations or not but how do I get folders with tons of subfolders in it to work, ie..my kids wanted the MTV plugin, playon shows it fine but problem is each letter has tons of band folders in it.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

It's not likely that this would happen in my case. I just want to make sure that if I run multiple extenders/placeshifters I will not run into problems.

Aside from what I mentioned , shouldn't be anything blocking that with my stuff. Now, I can't verify first hand that PlayON handles multiple connections like that, but someone did report that they had 4 streams playing at the same time.

[simonen]

Originally Posted by Zippster

my kids wanted the MTV plugin, playon shows it fine but problem is each letter has tons of band folders in it.

You have a lot of work ahead of you. Better yet, make your kids work for it (code writers in the making).

[Zippster]

Originally Posted by simonen

You have a lot of work ahead of you.

Or maybe not..."just go watch it on the dam computer"

[skyeclad]

I picked up the UPnP inspector and have sniffed out the available feeds but I wasn't quite sure how to format one to work with the Online Videos Custom files. Using EP's files I tried this out.

As an example I saw what info went into making this line:

xFeedPodcastCustom/NHLNews=xPodcastESPN;PlayOn:ESPN:^NHL$:+2

So I made this one:

xFeedPodcastCustom/EverydayItalian=xPodcastESPN;Playon:FoodNetwork:^Everyday Italian$:+2

then I put this line into the CustomOnlineVideoUIText.properties file:


Category/EverydayItalian/LongName=Everyday Italian
Category/EverydayItalian/ShortName=Everyday Italian

Well it worked so I think I got this figured out. Just need to create a new Podcast Directory so that I don't have Giarda in with the NHL!

One thing I don't get, what's the '$:+2' all about?

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by skyeclad

One thing I don't get, what's the '$:+2' all about?

xFeedPodcastCustom/NHLNews=xPodcastESPN;PlayOn:ESPN:^NHL$:+2

The ' and $ are part of the matching and they tell my tool to only match 'NHL' instead of 'NHL highlights'.

The +2 tells my tool that once its found the directory

\PlayOn\ESPN\NHL\

to search it... one folder deep into the directory tree for videos. That part's kind of stupid, it should just be +1, but I never got around to changing that.

I think there are a few feeds where I had to tell it to search 2 folders deep (+3 ) into the tree, so its good that there's some flexibility in there.