PlayOn Premium vs Basic

[drewg]

They do need to keep Playon up to date. The program on your PC parses the content provider's site, and those sites change. So they need to update their app so that it can still parse the site. Some months there are one or two updates a week, as Hulu plays cat and mouse, and they issue a quick fix to something Hulu broke, and then they improve that fix..

On a somewhat related topic, how does a non-netflix subscriber find out exactly what titles netflix offers for streaming? I might subscribe, and get a roku or boxee box, and ditch playon if netflix has the content I want. The last time I checked their site, it was not at all obvious to a non-subscriber what was available for streaming.

Drew

[Suntan]

Originally Posted by drewg

On a somewhat related topic, how does a non-netflix subscriber find out exactly what titles netflix offers for streaming? I might subscribe, and get a roku or boxee box, and ditch playon if netflix has the content I want. The last time I checked their site, it was not at all obvious to a non-subscriber what was available for streaming.

Don't really know how a non member looks over their stuff, but if nothing else, you can post a couple of typical things you'd want to watch and I (or someone else) can tell you if they are available.

-Suntan

[chmilar]

Since I can get my first year of PlayOn Premium for $4.99, I'll try it out for one year, and then decide if I want to renew it for $19.99 per year.

My main use of PlayOn is to watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The PlayOn folks seem to be aware that these shows are one of the primary uses of their system. I only occasionally use PlayOn for other viewing. There are other ways to watch these two shows, such as using the web browser directly on the computer. However, I prefer to watch on my TV. If the only thing PlayOn delivers to me that I want to watch is those two shows, then I will probably stop using it.

My TV setup consists of OTA + PlayOn + Netflix, and that suffices to meet most of my viewing needs. It is rare that I wish I had a cable/satellite system, and as long as I can wait for a while, all of the content eventually shows up in a place where I can access it.

Keep in mind also that PlayOn has no control over whether the sites it accesses, such as Hulu, decide to change to a subscription model. So it may end up that you end up paying $20/month for Hulu or some other sites. This may also drive people away from PlayOn and towards other methods of access.

[jm987]

Originally Posted by brandypuff

I've been running the latest playon software under a virtual machine and capturing the URLs which i then use a download manager to save the MPG files which i then copy to my SageTV server. It's ugly but at least it works and while i'm sitting at my computer i can let it run and capture several shows at once.

Can you elaborate on how your doing this a little more? I have playon running in a VM but wasn't sure what the best route was to tell me when a new show I care about is available and to download that stream.

Thanks

[drewg]

Originally Posted by jm987

Can you elaborate on how your doing this a little more? I have playon running in a VM but wasn't sure what the best route was to tell me when a new show I care about is available and to download that stream.

Thanks

I have a small perl podcatcher script that uses EP's upnp2podcast script. I have Playon installed in a VirtualBox VM. The script wakes up the VirtualBox VM, then grabs the feeds it wants, saves them to an imported videos directory, runs comskip on them, saves the show info, and imports them into sagetv. This is nice because I have a slow machine, and I can still get the highest quality video (a 22 minute show might take 40 minutes). I meant to run this from a cron job at 5am or so, but I never got around to automating it that far.

Due to the changes last winter (Jan or Feb) to Hulu, playon started having to render the video from hulu, then re-encode it to mpeg2, rather than just stripping the flv container, and transcoding from mpeg4 to mpeg2. Ever since then, I've had horrible quality issues with hulu. I'm not sure if this is virtualbox, or just that my CPU is so slow (amd 4850e). I was actually happy when the Daily Show was removed from hulu, as it prompted somebody to write a plugin to get the video from comedy central, where it is much easier to transcode..

Drew

[jm987]

Thanks for the info.
Going to see if I can somehow use the hulu queue to automate show downloads.

JM

[Bikeman]

@Drewg,

Go to the Netflix website and on the top line there is a Browse button that then takes you to a DVD by Mail and Streaming genre list.