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

[herrdude]

Originally Posted by herrdude

Great work on this plugin! It works no problems with placeshifter. But when I use it with the mediamvp the hulu videos are half-screen. I read earlier in this forum to put the quality settings in playon at high. I have done this but it makes the video about 60% of the screen.

Is there any solution to this?

PS Canadians may be interested in knowing that hotspot shield works as a free vpn solution (although it's not great during primetime).

Problem solved in Sage 7!

Full screen Hulu on MediaMVP!

[dinki]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Yep, just copy the .cache files over to be next to UPnPBrowser.exe and you'll be good to go. Truth be told, that version I sent you a while back was just UPnPBrowser re-named

Hrmff. It was working and then stopped. Odd thing is that when I tried running it the first time it didn't work and then when I tried it again it did. I noticed that it already had cache files in the SageOnlineServicesEXEs folder. The cache files were/are called UPNPBrowser*.cache rather than UPNPPodcast*.cache like the ones I had. I tried copying over the cache file for the server from the old cache version and renamed it. Still no go.

I've attached the latest log file in the hopes that you can look at it and see if you can figure out what is going wrong (again). Thanks for all the help and the great plugin.

[mbowling]

When watching hulu from around 7:00 PM through 11:00 PM the Hulu shows will stutter or briefly pause and then begin playing. During other hours of the day they play fine. The symptoms seem to indicate network overload but I'm not sure if it is my ISP or Hulu. When this happens I check my bandwidth speed using Speakeasy and it is 8 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. Exactly what it should be. Is anyone else experiencing these Hulu problems during the evening? Why are the shows stuttering during my prime-time TV viewing hours??

[mkanet]

Actually, after taking a closer look, it looks like it's not as easy as I thought to add the extra Playon channel (from the playon plugin). It looks like I need to make two files below:

CustomOnlineVideoLinks_UPnP2Podcast_Playon-plugin.properties
CustomOnlineVideoUIText_UPnP2Podcast_Playon-plugin.properties

Could someone please help me with what to put in the below file? Or, maybe some guidelines to get started?

CustomOnlineVideoLinks_UPnP2Podcast_Playon-plugin.properties.

Thanks,
Michael

Originally Posted by mkanet

Sorry if this has been covered. I tried searching around but couldnt find an answer.

I just added a Playon plugin. It's showing up under the "Plugins" tab of the Playon Settings. However, I dont see anything related to it when I look through the different channels under Online Services. Do I need to manually add an entry somewhere? If so, could someone please be kind enough to show me how to do it? I have already upgrade Playon to the latest version and restarted my PC.

Thanks in advance!
Michael

[dinki]

Originally Posted by dinki

Hrmff. It was working and then stopped. Odd thing is that when I tried running it the first time it didn't work and then when I tried it again it did. I noticed that it already had cache files in the SageOnlineServicesEXEs folder. The cache files were/are called UPNPBrowser*.cache rather than UPNPPodcast*.cache like the ones I had. I tried copying over the cache file for the server from the old cache version and renamed it. Still no go.

I've attached the latest log file in the hopes that you can look at it and see if you can figure out what is going wrong (again). Thanks for all the help and the great plugin.

EP, any idea what's going on? Should I move this to the v7 customizations thread? Thanks

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by mkanet

Could someone please help me with what to put in the below file? Or, maybe some guidelines to get started?l

If you upgrade to v7 beta and start using the UPnP Browser Plugin from the new built in plugin manager you don't need to mess around with . properties files anymore.

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by mkanet

Could someone please help me with what to put in the below file? Or, maybe some guidelines to get started?

<Shameless Plug>

If you do not want to upgrade to Sage7, check out my EZOnline Definitions. If it takes you more than 1 minute to understand then I did not do a good job.

</Shameless Plug>

[sdsean]

Hey Evil:

Is there a way in the Sage7 beta that we can create a shorcut directly to the main screen for this plugin? I ask b/c now my GF is complaining that she has to hop down like n-level of screens to get to streaming content. . . previously it was a lot easier.

She is also confused that she now has to go to "Hulu" 1st then find a network, rather than just having all the networks available on the main screen.

[zakrzep]

I was wondering the same thing.

[evilpenguin]

I think I kind of shot myself in the foot by spoiling all of you with my meticulously hand organized/optimized/hacked version of the PlayON tree in v6 because now that I've actually written the proper plugin you want the hacks back

No worries though, I anticipated this and have the code in place to support bringing back the old, optimized, .properties files like before (read: network shortcuts), but i'm too swamped right now to get everything working.

In the meantime, if you want them back, here's some manual steps you can do...

1) Copy both the CustomOnlineVideoLinks_UPnP2Podcast_Hulu.properties and CustomOnlineVideoText_UPnP2Podcast_Hulu.properties files from

STVs\SageTV3\OnlineVideos\

to

STVs\SageTV7\OnlineVideos\

2) Copy UPnPBrowser.exe to the base SageTV\SageTV directory and rename it UPnP2Podcast.exe.
3) Go to the More Online Content menu and the Networks should be back and working.


FYI, What you're seeing now is how PlayON is actually organized. It's a bit of a mess and I recommend you let them know that you'd like it to be easier, especially if they expect people to start paying a yearly fee.

[sdsean]

Great!
I'll let those guys know and file some bugs. . .in the mean time thanks for the help. .
and yeah the gf is definitely spoiled ;-).

I hope you'll be able to simplify it more when you get a release build going. . .

[joe123]

Originally Posted by kha

Hello,

I have notied that when viewing online videos (from Hulu) a temporary file is copied to "C:\Documents and Settings\<userid>\Local Settings\Temp" directory. Also temporary files can be found in "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\MediaMall\Media\<ip>\" and "C:\Documents and Settings\LocalService\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\" directories. Over time these files (which are large in size) can completely fill drive C.

According to PlayOn support, the files are them moved to C:\temp (or whatever your environment is setup for) and it will leave the full copy movies there for a few days in case you want to continue (see it again).

So the next step is, to be able to run ShowAnalyzer on that file to detect the commercials, but does SA recognize that file extension?

[jpaddock3000]

EP,
I'm just curious if there is anyway to make different requests appear that they are coming from a different device? I just canceled pay TV since I mainly only watch local channels anyways, but for the few network shows I do watch, PlayOn and your plugin work great. I just tried having PlayOn streaming a show to my living room, then I went upstairs and tried to start another show. The show upstairs started playing, but the downstairs TV stopped playing and went to a black screen. Per PlayOn, the server will stream multiple streams as long as they are being sent to different devices. For example, PS3 and Xbox 360. Is there a way that your Perl script can adjust a device ID randomly and every time we request a video, the PlayOn server thinks a new device is requesting the video?

Thanks

[jpaddock3000]

I just got more information from PlayOn. I guess the device ID only tells the server how to transcode the video, but the way to get the PlayOn server to serve up multiple streams is to have multiple IP addresses requesting the videos. Is there anyway that we could request the video via the IP addresses of the client instead of the server?

Thanks

[mkanet]

Hi Evilpenguin, thanks for replying. I'm already using sageTV 7. However, I'm using sageMC for my STV. How would I load this plugin? All I want to do is see the channel that's added by the Playon plugin.

Thanks!
Michael

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

If you upgrade to v7 beta and start using the UPnP Browser Plugin from the new built in plugin manager you don't need to mess around with . properties files anymore.

[joe123]

Question regarding stopping and resuming a PlayOn recording.

When watching a stream like SG1, PlayON has the nice feature (if checked) to let you resume the stream later on if I stop it. So later on I can start the stream again and fast forward to where I left off.

Now, if I start to stream a different show it forgets about the other stream I had in progress. According to PlayOn support, they let you stream more than one recording at a time, so this begs to ask, what is causing the second stream to kill / stop the first stream from completing? Is it this plugin?

Can this be changed?

[jpaddock3000]

Originally Posted by joe123

Question regarding stopping and resuming a PlayOn recording.

When watching a stream like SG1, PlayON has the nice feature (if checked) to let you resume the stream later on if I stop it. So later on I can start the stream again and fast forward to where I left off.

Now, if I start to stream a different show it forgets about the other stream I had in progress. According to PlayOn support, they let you stream more than one recording at a time, so this begs to ask, what is causing the second stream to kill / stop the first stream from completing? Is it this plugin?

Can this be changed?

Joe,
My post above explains why the first stream is stopping. PlayOn can send multiple streams to different devices. Since all your requests to PlayOn are from the SageTV server, this results in only 1 stream at a time. PlayOn determines a different device by a different IP address. This is why I asked the question to see if we could make the requests come from the clients or extenders instead of the server. This would allow you to stream 2 different shows to 2 TV's in your house.

[joe123]

Originally Posted by jpaddock3000

Joe,
My post above explains why the first stream is stopping. PlayOn can send multiple streams to different devices. Since all your requests to PlayOn are from the SageTV server, this results in only 1 stream at a time. PlayOn determines a different device by a different IP address. This is why I asked the question to see if we could make the requests come from the clients or extenders instead of the server. This would allow you to stream 2 different shows to 2 TV's in your house.

Ah ok thanks for the clarification.

So what about if we add a second NIC (Network Card) to our PVR so that it will have two network connections.

Or is the IP device the HD200 (for my case) and it is not the PVR IP address?

[jpaddock3000]

Originally Posted by joe123

Ah ok thanks for the clarification.

So what about if we add a second NIC (Network Card) to our PVR so that it will have two network connections.

Or is the IP device the HD200 (for my case) and it is not the PVR IP address?

Either way, EP will need to update the plugin so the script makes the request from different IP addresses.

One thing that may be an idea, make a few virtual network adapters on the server with different private IP addresses, but all communication will route to localhost. Then have the plugin just send the request from each adapter in a round robin fashion. If you want to have 5 streams at a time, create 5 virtual adapters and so on.

Anyone think this is doable?

Thanks

[joe123]

Originally Posted by jpaddock3000

Anyone think this is doable?

Thanks

Sounds like it will work, but let's think about this.

You are suggesting virtual IPs on the PVR server, but the end point (HD200 in my case) has only one IP and cannot be changed without major SageTV mods. No?

Your idea on the surface looks good however