STV Import: NetFlix for SageMC (v2.1) 28-Feb-09

[Steve125]

Originally Posted by mkanet

Steve, last I heard, Morgan went on a business trip. I could be wrong, but I think he should be getting back about now.

Thanks for the update on that.

I have noticed that when I select "Download for later" it seems to cache the file on the drive where the plugin is installed versus the destination drive path selected in the plugin. Is there anyway to change this? I have my OS w/ Sage on a small partition and if the file won't fit the download hangs and seems to cancel. Thanks!

[dmakkuni]

Originally Posted by aflat

I can see video, if I tune to my svideo channel on the extender I can see the desktop, I can even see the mouse moving when I move it. It's just the netflix video I don't see.

I guess I never looked to see if the video is playing on the primary display, even though all the controls are on the svideo display, that would be odd, I'll try to check that tonight.

I'm having an issue with loopback, maybe a little different flavor. SageTV server is headless, I've currently got it linked via s-video output from the video card to the s-video input on a Hauppage PVR-1600 tuner card. Running NetFlix plugin with SageTV in service mode since I don't use UNC paths and the "Allow Service to interact with desktop" is enabled on the service.

When I run Sage from my HD-100 extender and tune to channel 1 (s-video input on tuner and same as the NetFlix loopback channel) it shows my desktop with the system login prompt. Sometimes it will display the XP pro logo which usually indicates a session where the user is not currently logged in. If I run the Sage UI on the server, WatchNow on NetFlix runs with sound, no video at all.

Based on aflat's description and what was already recommended for his scenario, I tried to force output of s-video from the video card to be primary. I've got an MSI RX-2400 Pro Series video card with Catalyst Control Center running and already have seen issues with getting it to do anything for multi display output. I'm not even sure where to look and find out how/if I can get the s-video to output as primary and am hoping I don't need to invest in a different video card.

Any ideas on how to get past the login when viewing the loopback channel from the extender? I'd really like get the loopback working for NetFlix and for other streaming over loopback now that I got this far. Thanks in advance.

[gplasky]

You need to have your server auto-login as the SageTV user. Then when you are on the extender you should see your desktop without the login prompt and Netflix should work for you.

Gerry

[tahoetim]

Ok, I read through this and saw one request for an answer but no real response.

How does one enter the @ in an HD200? is there a way to type the user name and password at the server so all HD200's share the info? I've tried but can't seem to get it to work...

[mkanet]

There should be some kind of underground handbook for the HD200. I'm still learning the secrets of operating the HD200, like pressing the STOP button on the remote control to act as the "Del" key on the PC keyboard. I'm trying to figure out lower case letters and the @ symbol (and other special characters).

Originally Posted by tahoetim

Ok, I read through this and saw one request for an answer but no real response.

How does one enter the @ in an HD200? is there a way to type the user name and password at the server so all HD200's share the info? I've tried but can't seem to get it to work...

[tahoetim]

To toggle between uppercase and lowercase, hit the guide button on the remote. I can't believe that the loopback feature is discussed but no way to set up the HD200 account!

I MUST be missing something.

[mkanet]

You probably should just set it up on the server. I think thats how everyone else does it. But, it would be nice to know the @ symbol. Thanks for the tip for changing upper/lower case. You might have better luck asking about the @ character for the HD200 in the sageTV hardware forum.

Originally Posted by tahoetim

To toggle between uppercase and lowercase, hit the guide button on the remote. I can't believe that the loopback feature is discussed but no way to set up the HD200 account!

I MUST be missing something.

[tahoetim]

I saw on page 2 or 3 of this thread that you have to push the 1 key several times to get the @. I gave up and edited the client properties file directly. After a couple of hours playing around I finally found another hint to also set up my username and password in the sage properties file.

The author of this plugin needs to take a serious look at editing the install instructions. Half of the tricks needed to actually get netflix running are buried in this thread.

I'm installing IE8 on my WHS server now to complete what I hope is the final step of the install process.

[tahoetim]

This is a no go for my WHS server!

I've followed these terrible install instructions to the point where I can play netflix movies on my WHS server but now the HD200 is slooooow because I'm logged into the server. Even logged in, the plugin won't launch ie as advertised.

I guess this is the first plugin I am going to abandon after 2 days of messing with it and the expense of a video card and loopback cables.

I'll say it again - the author needs to write a better install guide for headless WHS and HD200 users. WHS is popular and should be supported better by this plugin.... (There are many pages and threads of install snippets that need to be moved to the install guide.)

Maybe this forum should add a ranking on the difficulty of installing plugins. This one would be a 10 out of 10

Sorry for the rant - I'm just an average Joe trying to add this plugin

[robogeek]

Originally Posted by tahoetim

This is a no go for my WHS server!

I've followed these terrible install instructions to the point where I can play netflix movies on my WHS server but now the HD200 is slooooow because I'm logged into the server. Even logged in, the plugin won't launch ie as advertised.

I guess this is the first plugin I am going to abandon after 2 days of messing with it and the expense of a video card and loopback cables.

I'll say it again - the author needs to write a better install guide for headless WHS and HD200 users. WHS is popular and should be supported better by this plugin.... (There are many pages and threads of install snippets that need to be moved to the install guide.)

Maybe this forum should add a ranking on the difficulty of installing plugins. This one would be a 10 out of 10

Sorry for the rant - I'm just an average Joe trying to add this plugin

Just a couple of things to mention that may not be in the first post or maybe buried elsewhere in the thread....

When using extenders, the NetFlix properties need to be set in the Sage.properties on the server. And if you want to use the NetFlix plugin from an extender, you should make sure those settings are also in the extender properties file located in the SageTV/clients directory.

To get SageTV to launch the NetFlix viewer (when running SageTV as a service), you have to open the Windows Services control panel, double click the SageTV service, click the Log On tab, put a check in the 'Allow service to interact with desktop' option if you are running SageTV under the LocalSystem account, and then restart SageTV. You'll have to repeat this step each time you upgrade SageTV because the SageTV installer resets the 'interact with desktop' back to the default with no check in the box.

Not sure why your extender is slow when you are logged in to WHS. Could be a misconfiguration somewhere, not enough memory, processor not fast enough, etc... I had to upgrade my SageTV server (was running an old Athlon 2000 CPU) to get this plugin to work on my MediaMVP extenders because the NetFlix viewer would bog down the server. Now running with an Intel quad-core CPU, and no problems with NetFlix loopback performance.

[tahoetim]

Thank you for the help. I was frustrated reading 50 pages of discussion. The author should paste your reply into his install notes under a heading WHS.

It still doesn't work. It shows the WHS login screen... do I need to log into the server? Thats where my speed died yesterday.

I also found the issue about the fake monitor using resistors. So far, I've had a monitor plugged in to set this up but I would have gone nuts later when I set the server to headless again.

I'm still not clear on the stv version thing either. My wife discovered that the netflix plugin killed my imovies plugin. I reverted back to an older stv version and was surprised to see netflix still on the menu and working!

[robogeek]

Originally Posted by tahoetim

Thank you for the help. I was frustrated reading 50 pages of discussion. The author should paste your reply into his install notes under a heading WHS.

It still doesn't work. It shows the WHS login screen... do I need to log into the server? Thats where my speed died yesterday.

I also found the issue about the fake monitor using resistors. So far, I've had a monitor plugged in to set this up but I would have gone nuts later when I set the server to headless again.

I'm still not clear on the stv version thing either. My wife discovered that the netflix plugin killed my imovies plugin. I reverted back to an older stv version and was surprised to see netflix still on the menu and working!

Yes, you'll have to be logged in locally (not remotely) to the desktop for the NetFlix viewer to work. I was in the same boat you're in when I first set this up. I set it up as described in the first post and it didn't work. I spent days reading this thread and trying different things before I finally got it working on the extender.

I'm running the latest beta version of SageTV, the latest prerelease version of the SageMC STV, and v2.1 of the SageMC NetFlix plugin. There may be some issues with the SageMC NetFlix v2.1 plugin regarding queue management, but I've only been using it for the Watch Now feature for movies and so far it's been pretty smooth. I'm not using the iMovies plugin, so maybe somebody else can comment on that. Maybe if you reload your plugins (starting with a fresh SageMC xml file), but swap the order the NetFlix and iMovies are loaded...so if you loaded iMovies before NetFlix, swap it and load NetFlix first and then iMovies.

[tahoetim]

Thanks for the quick reply. When I login into the server, everything is real slow. Even menu changes take a long time.

Any idea why this might be happening? It seems like a local login hogs all the resources.

[tahoetim]

BTW - Do I just start the original mc and then add the plugins or do I need to uninstall the plugins and reinstall them?

[tahoetim]

I found the speed issue. When I log into the server, the Sage program loads automatically. How do I stop it from launching at login?

[robogeek]

I think there is an option in the SageTV Detailed Setup where you can tell it to not load at Windows Startup. Otherwise, click the Windows Start Menu->Run, type msconfig, click the Startup tab, and look for an entry for SageTV in the list and uncheck it.

For the SageMC STV, yeah, just load the original and reimport the plugins. To keep the STV directory clean, I remove the extra xxxxxxx-#.xml files before reimporting.

[tahoetim]

That did it! Thank you very much. I will reinstall my plugins tomorrow starting with netflix.

One more question - how do I clean up all 13 of my copies as you mentioned?

Tim

[lazysean]

Originally Posted by lazysean

Episode descriptions still loaded up, but every one was marked "Not Available" ... I can still watch movies ... but I can't watch specific episodes of anything.

OK - this has been broken for a month. I have no idea what happened to Morgan, he seems to have fallen off the face of the earth. Hopefully everything's ok and he'll be back soon. In the meantime, here's an unofficial fix for it. Just shut sage down completely, rename the attached "netflix.zip" to "netflix.jar" and use it to replace the one you have. No need to uninstall etc. You might want to backup the original first in case you have any problems...

Hopefully this works for those few of us that seem to be watching tv shows and doesn't create any new problems. The source included with Morgan's last update was not complete and did not exactly match the binary release, so I changed as little as possible and just copied the one class file I changed into Morgan's jar so nothing else would hopefully be messed up.

[robogeek]

Originally Posted by tahoetim

That did it! Thank you very much. I will reinstall my plugins tomorrow starting with netflix.

One more question - how do I clean up all 13 of my copies as you mentioned?

Tim

To clean up the STV files, go into SageMC setup and load the original SageMC xml file. Then just delete all of the extra SageMC*-#.xml files. So if you use SageMC_6_3_9a_23.xml, then delete all of the SageMC_6_3_9a_23-#.xml files, and then reimport all of your imports. Besides keeping the STV directory clean, it also helps when you have multiple extenders...if you don't add or remove any imports when reimporting, then the last xml file will be named the same as before the reimport so you won't have to change which STV is loaded on all of the other extenders.

[tahoetim]

I get the concept (I'm on mc169-15) but exactly where do I delete the copies 2 thru 14?