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

[321liftoff]

Hey Guys,

I'm brand new to SageTV, SageMC, and the Netflix plugin. I've been using BeyondTV for over 5 years and just found out about the Netflix plugin for SageTV. I can't believe the customization possible with SageTV! Don't see any reason to switch!

I can't get Watch Now to work. There are a couple of problems:

1) Clicking on "Browse Watch Now Titles" from the main Netflix menu lists Genres. Clicking on a Genre goes to an empty list. Clicking on a sub-genre goes to an empty list

2) Clicking on "Browse New Titles"->"New Non-TV Watch Now" (or TV Watch Now) lists a bunch of movies, each with a yellow TV icon and its picture. Selecting a movie goes to a screen. After the movie information is loaded, the "Add InstantQ" and "View Trailer" buttons disappear. There is no "Watch Now" button.

How should the Watch Now function work? I'm able to view my personal queue, so some of the configuration is correct...

[robogeek]

Couple of things that might be causing this:

Does your NetFlix account package have the Watch Now feature? If you can't access Watch Now content for your account through the web browser, then you'll need to upgrade your NetFlix account to a NetFlix package that offers Watch Now content.

If you are setting this up from an extender, try setting it up initially on the server and get it all working there first. When setting this up from the server with SageTV running in service mode, make sure the NetFlix configuration lines in the sage.properties and sageclient.properties files match. Double check that the NetFlix ID, Username, and Password are correct in both .properties files.

Once it's setup and working on the server, if you have extenders, then you have to copy the NetFlix configuration lines from the sage.properties file into the .properties files for each of your extenders. The extender .properties files are located in the sagetv\clients directory. Delete any NetFlix config lines in each of the extender .properties files and paste in the lines from the sage.properties file. Restart SageTV and see if it works.

Just be sure to have SageTV Service and/or SageTV Client closed (not just put to sleep) before making changes to the .properties files otherwise the changes won't stick.

Originally Posted by 321liftoff

Hey Guys,

I'm brand new to SageTV, SageMC, and the Netflix plugin. I've been using BeyondTV for over 5 years and just found out about the Netflix plugin for SageTV. I can't believe the customization possible with SageTV! Don't see any reason to switch!

I can't get Watch Now to work. There are a couple of problems:

1) Clicking on "Browse Watch Now Titles" from the main Netflix menu lists Genres. Clicking on a Genre goes to an empty list. Clicking on a sub-genre goes to an empty list

2) Clicking on "Browse New Titles"->"New Non-TV Watch Now" (or TV Watch Now) lists a bunch of movies, each with a yellow TV icon and its picture. Selecting a movie goes to a screen. After the movie information is loaded, the "Add InstantQ" and "View Trailer" buttons disappear. There is no "Watch Now" button.

How should the Watch Now function work? I'm able to view my personal queue, so some of the configuration is correct...

[mage_tiko]

Originally Posted by mtyme

2. When I do set it to use local system account and click the allow service to interact with desktop check box, the movie will open and start playing. However, it only displays the very center of the movie (on the extender) in small square box. If I tune to the loopback channel manually I see the full desktop in 4:3 as I would expect it. Just not when I do watch now.

Bump on this. I am having the exact problem, with no resolution yet :|

This isn't a scaling thing.. the movie is actually cropped to the size of the spinning waiting indicator in the center of the screen.

Running Sage v6.5.9, SageMC 6.38a

[321liftoff]

Originally Posted by robogeek

Does your NetFlix account package have the Watch Now feature?

I was using a secondary account which doesn't have access to the Instant Movie as does the primary account. So, changing accounts in SageTV now allows the Watch Now button to appear. I switched the option to "Silverlight" and selected the default bitrate. Now the videos launch and play!!!

BUT the remote doesn't work in netflix (Hauppauge 45 button). The remote works fine in SageTV. When I select Watch Now, SageTV switches to window mode with "Netflix Player Open", something minimizes, and the red netflix fullscreen appears (all really fast, of course). After video quality check and buffering, the video plays fine but the remote doesn't work. Spacebar on the keyboard doesn't work. Ctrl-G to exit out of the Netflix player doesn't work either.

To exit out, I have to CTRL-ALT-DEL and use Task Manager to kill the IE Silverlight window, NetFlixViewer (probably what is minimizing as described above), netflix_silverlight_control.exe, and SageTV (because it's stuck on "Netflix Player Open").

I saw someone a while back had a remote issue. For me, the netflix_silverlight_control.exe IS launching automatically.

Any other ideas?

[Peter_h]

I have the same exact problem.

Space bar doesn't work. SageTV commands do not work and the silverlight commands do not work. If I hit Alt+f4, it will exit out of full screen mode and then I can hit Alt+F4 to close it.

I also see the silverlight control in the taskbar so it is running.

[321liftoff]

Regarding the remote not working...

If I load up netflix_control.exe and goto netflix.com in IE (without SageTV), the remote does work. So it appears to me that it's a problem either between Sage sending commands to NetFlixViewer.exe or NetFlixViewer.exe forwarding those commands to netflix_silverlight_control.exe.

[robogeek]

Have you guys with the Silverlight player seen this thread:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=38969

I'm not sure if this works with extenders or if it's only for the SageTV server and PC clients. I'm fortunate enough to have the old NetFlix player so I haven't had to mess around with any of that Silverlight stuff.

[HeadHodge]

I just purchased SageMC for Windows the other day (Version 6).

I found this Netflix plugin for SageTV that I would really like to use.

But I'm having problems getting it installed trying to follow the install steps, quoted below.

Step 1) I successfully downloaded and unzipped Netflix_SageMC_2.1b.zip to the SageTV\SageTV directory in my VISTA program files directory.

Step 2) I tried to import the STVI, but no items were listed in the SageTV3 directory. So manually looked there and there was a file named Netflix_SageMC.xml. I renamed the file to Netflix_SageMC.STVI. After doing that it showed up in the import list. I selected and added it ok.

Step 3) No matter how hard I tried, I cannot find the Settings->SageMC nor Settings->SageMC->Extras options. I tried everything I could think of doing to find it. No Luck

Step4) I could find no Netflix main menu

I tried to get to the "Main Menu Options" using the instructions below. When I hit the escape button from the Main Menu all I get is the options (shown in the attached JPEG file). So I was not able to Select New nor create a New Internal Screen.

Any help from anyone, would be much appreciated.

Regards

Originally Posted by Morgan111

1) Download the import files from here and unpack the contents into your SageTV directory ( normally C:\Program Files\SageTV\SageTV) taking care that the file paths are preserved. This will create STVs/SageTV3/neflix.xml, JARs/netflix.jar and JARs/netflix/src, README, etc

2) My Menu -> Settings -> Import STVi (choose NetFlix_SageMC.xml)

3) Settings-> SageMC-> Extras-> NetFlix (Enter account information)

4) Add the link into the "NetFlix Main Menu" menu.

• Select the Options menu by pressing the options remote button while on the main SageMC menu (or ESC key on keyboard or right mouse click).
• Select Main Menu Options.
• Select New...->New Internal Screen->NetFlix Main Menu
• Then select File...->Save menu file

Configuration:
_______________________________________________________________________
Before you can utilize the plugin, you will need to configure it
from: Main Menu My Menus -> Settings -> SageMC -> Extras -> Netflix -> Setup
(or bring up the configuration on the main NetFlix screen (options remote button or ESC key on keyboard or right mouse click)).

[robogeek]

This has always been a confusing area for new SageTV users. The SageMC you purchased is SageTV. The SageMC that this subforum and this NetFlix plugin is for, refers to the 3rd party SageMC STV which is a user interface for SageTV that replaces the default user interface.

What you need to do is download and install the full SageMC STV v6.3.9 from the downloads area:
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/down...do=file&id=141

Then update to the latest pre-release STV from this post:
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...77&postcount=8

Then install the NetFlix plugin.

Hope that helps clear things up a bit.

Originally Posted by HeadHodge

I just purchased SageMC for Windows the other day (Version 6).

I found this Netflix plugin for SageTV that I would really like to use.

But I'm having problems getting it installed trying to follow the install steps, quoted below.

Step 1) I successfully downloaded and unzipped Netflix_SageMC_2.1b.zip to the SageTV\SageTV directory in my VISTA program files directory.

Step 2) I tried to import the STVI, but no items were listed in the SageTV3 directory. So manually looked there and there was a file named Netflix_SageMC.xml. I renamed the file to Netflix_SageMC.STVI. After doing that it showed up in the import list. I selected and added it ok.

Step 3) No matter how hard I tried, I cannot find the Settings->SageMC nor Settings->SageMC->Extras options. I tried everything I could think of doing to find it. No Luck

Step4) I could find no Netflix main menu

I tried to get to the "Main Menu Options" using the instructions below. When I hit the escape button from the Main Menu all I get is the options (shown in the attached JPEG file). So I was not able to Select New nor create a New Internal Screen.

Any help from anyone, would be much appreciated.

Regards

[HeadHodge]

Originally Posted by robogeek

This has always been a confusing area for new SageTV users. The SageMC you purchased is SageTV. The SageMC that this subforum and this NetFlix plugin is for, refers to the 3rd party SageMC STV which is a user interface for SageTV that replaces the default user interface.

What you need to do is download and install the full SageMC STV v6.3.9 from the downloads area:
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/down...do=file&id=141

Then update to the latest pre-release STV from this post:
http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...77&postcount=8

Then install the NetFlix plugin.

Hope that helps clear things up a bit.

Holy Moly.... What a difference that piece of information made. The last 100 posts, or so, I read are now making sense.

Got it running!!!! Never would have figured it out without your help. It's too bad that in the downloads forum there isn't a "Pre-Requisite" box like there is a "Description Box". If it would have said something like "Requires the SageMC Application ver xxx.xxx or higher", I may have gotten a clue. However, I do have to admit that the info the author of the Netflix plugin provides is alot better than what I've seen so far for other items in the download list.

The only glitch I ran into was when I was adding a new internal screen to the main menu. There appears to be no scroll bar next to the list of screen options. So it took me awhile to figure out to hit the "N" key to jump down the list to see the Netflix option.

The only other thing I found was that the Button Icon is named "Hoover....." instead of "Hover......". No big eeee.

Do you know if I will be able to get this to run on my new HD200?? I thought I would ask first, before trying to burn hours trying to figure it out. Any tips would be appreciated.

Thanks Again for your help!!

[robogeek]

Originally Posted by HeadHodge

Holy Moly.... What a difference that piece of information made. The last 100 posts, or so, I read are now making sense.

Got it running!!!! Never would have figured it out without your help. It's too bad that in the downloads forum there isn't a "Pre-Requisite" box like there is a "Description Box". If it would have said something like "Requires the SageMC Application ver xxx.xxx or higher", I may have gotten a clue. However, I do have to admit that the info the author of the Netflix plugin provides is alot better than what I've seen so far for other items in the download list.

The only glitch I ran into was when I was adding a new internal screen to the main menu. There appears to be no scroll bar next to the list of screen options. So it took me awhile to figure out to hit the "N" key to jump down the list to see the Netflix option.

The only other thing I found was that the Button Icon is named "Hoover....." instead of "Hover......". No big eeee.

Do you know if I will be able to get this to run on my new HD200?? I thought I would ask first, before trying to burn hours trying to figure it out. Any tips would be appreciated.

Thanks Again for your help!!

To get it to work on the extender (with Watch Now movies), you'll need to use the loopback hack described in the first post of this thread. That means you'll need a composite or s-video output on the video card and a sound output on the sound card of your server, and then connect those to the appropriate inputs on a TV tuner card. Follow the steps to set up the loopback and that should get you started. Getting SageTV and the NetFlix plugin to work with the Silverlight player is another story though, so hopefully your NetFlix account is still using the old NetFlix player.

Once the server side of the loopback hack is taken care of, you can setup the extender. On the extender, you'll load the same STV file that you server and then you can configure the NetFlix settings on the extender.

[HeadHodge]

Originally Posted by robogeek

To get it to work on the extender (with Watch Now movies), you'll need to use the loopback hack described in the first post of this thread. That means you'll need a composite or s-video output on the video card and a sound output on the sound card of your server, and then connect those to the appropriate inputs on a TV tuner card. Follow the steps to set up the loopback and that should get you started. Getting SageTV and the NetFlix plugin to work with the Silverlight player is another story though, so hopefully your NetFlix account is still using the old NetFlix player.

Once the server side of the loopback hack is taken care of, you can setup the extender. On the extender, you'll load the same STV file that you server and then you can configure the NetFlix settings on the extender.

I started my SageTV server on my Laptop computer.

Then I selected "SageTV Servers" on the main menu of my HD200.

The HD200 discovered the SageTV server running on my Laptop.

On my HD200, I selected the server, and it says "SageTV Media Extender is starting up". After which it successfully connected to my Laptop server and then the HD200 displayed the Main Menu of my Laptops SageTV server.

I was able to navigate (using the SageTV remoted supplied with my HD200) on my HD200 to the Browse Watch Now titles option and used this option to select a Watch Now movie. After which a "Watch Now" button then appeared on the HD200 and I selected it to watch the movie. It caused the movie to start playing on my Laptop. But on the HD200 it is now stuck on a screen that says "NetFlix Player Open".

And so now I'm stuck again too. I was very excited because it looked like it was going to work. But didn't.

If anyone has any thoughts, I'd appreciate it very much.

Regards

Edit: I went back and read more of the earlier posts on this thread. It doesn't seem very likely I will be able to watch Netflix with my HD200. It looks like I'll have to buy a ROKU box to do it. Which is too bad, because I bought the HD200 to watch movies from my uSB connected drive and watch streaming movies from the Internet. The HD200 works fine with the USB drive. The ROKU box works with streaming movies, but not with USB drives. Oh Well..........

[robogeek]

If you can't use the loopback hack on your laptop, then you'll either have to find a PC that will allow you to do the loopback hack or hold out hope that the SageTV developers will add a NetFlix player to the HD200 extender sometime soon. With the current NetFlix plugin, when playing a NetFlix Watch Now movie, the movie is launched on the server because the server has the NetFlix player required to play the DRM content. That's why you need the loopback hack to output the server desktop via s-video output and pipe it into a TV tuner card so it can then be recorded in an unprotected mpeg2 format that the extender can play.

Originally Posted by HeadHodge

I started my SageTV server on my Laptop computer.

Then I selected "SageTV Servers" on the main menu of my HD200.

The HD200 discovered the SageTV server running on my Laptop.

On my HD200, I selected the server, and it says "SageTV Media Extender is starting up". After which it successfully connected to my Laptop server and then the HD200 displayed the Main Menu of my Laptops SageTV server.

I was able to navigate (using the SageTV remoted supplied with my HD200) on my HD200 to the Browse Watch Now titles option and used this option to select a Watch Now movie. After which a "Watch Now" button then appeared on the HD200 and I selected it to watch the movie. It caused the movie to start playing on my Laptop. But on the HD200 it is now stuck on a screen that says "NetFlix Player Open".

And so now I'm stuck again too. I was very excited because it looked like it was going to work. But didn't.

If anyone has any thoughts, I'd appreciate it very much.

Regards

Edit: I went back and read more of the earlier posts on this thread. It doesn't seem very likely I will be able to watch Netflix with my HD200. It looks like I'll have to buy a ROKU box to do it. Which is too bad, because I bought the HD200 to watch movies from my uSB connected drive and watch streaming movies from the Internet. The HD200 works fine with the USB drive. The ROKU box works with streaming movies, but not with USB drives. Oh Well..........

[mkanet]

When I asked sageTV support if they are going to add native Hulu and Netflix support. The answer I got was they can't comment on what's in (or not in) the works; or, something to that effect. I dont want to get anyone's hope's up. But to me, that response sounded like they may be already trying to do what is obviously a good idea; or, maybe I'm just hearing what I want to hear

Originally Posted by robogeek

If you can't use the loopback hack on your laptop, then you'll either have to find a PC that will allow you to do the loopback hack or hold out hope that the SageTV developers will add a NetFlix player to the HD200 extender sometime soon. With the current NetFlix plugin, when playing a NetFlix Watch Now movie, the movie is launched on the server because the server has the NetFlix player required to play the DRM content. That's why you need the loopback hack to output the server desktop via s-video output and pipe it into a TV tuner card so it can then be recorded in an unprotected mpeg2 format that the extender can play.

[mtyme]

Originally Posted by mage_tiko

Bump on this. I am having the exact problem, with no resolution yet :|

This isn't a scaling thing.. the movie is actually cropped to the size of the spinning waiting indicator in the center of the screen.

Running Sage v6.5.9, SageMC 6.38a

Crickets...chirp chirp

[tahoetim]

crickets to my issue too.

no longer able to add movies to the queue. it works online but not thru Sage anymore. I guess I'll have to uninstall other SageMC features and try to figure it out myself.

this is why the plugin developers get bashed once in a blue moon. nonresponsive to problems with their creations...

[Morgan111]

Originally Posted by tahoetim

crickets to my issue too.

no longer able to add movies to the queue. it works online but not thru Sage anymore. I guess I'll have to uninstall other SageMC features and try to figure it out myself.

this is why the plugin developers get bashed once in a blue moon. nonresponsive to problems with their creations...

Sorry for the disappointment there. It's one of many hobbies and responsibilities that I have.

I have a fix in progress. It is a little more than a format change for this one, there is additional information I have to keep for each item in the list and then pass that on when sending the AddToQueue request. It will probably be tomorrow that I have an update to the jar file.

[Peter_h]

Hey Morgan,

Would you be able to provide any insight in to why the key commands are not working for me with the silverlight player? Watch now plays fine but I can't stop pause, exit, nothing. The only thing that works is Alt+F4 to close out the screen.

[alfi33]

Originally Posted by tahoetim

this is why the plugin developers get bashed once in a blue moon. nonresponsive to problems with their creations...

Man, if I were a plugin developer, I'm not sure how willing I'd be to share my stuff if I was to get bashed by people who didn't approve of how much time I had to spend or wanted to spend on an (unpaid) hobby.

Thanks for sharing all your hard work, Morgan111!

[tahoetim]

alfi,
I have been patient and I wasn't derogatory. I have posted the issue three times without ANY response. I respect all the developers here.

Having said that, the developers assume an implied responsibility when they create a plugin - keep it running or take it off the plugin list. I have played with a lot of plugins and some of them are totally unsupported (I won't name names). Netflix is not one of them. Morgan has been responsive until recently. With my three kids out of school for the summer, I would like to have the queue feature available.

I don't follow your logic of unconditional support, regardless of the circumstances.