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

[tmiranda]

Some of you monitoring this thread might be interested in this.

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=45067

I really like the work EvilPenguin and Opus4 have done making a lot more online content available, but I wanted a user interface consistent with the default STV with the "hidden extras" enabled.

[tmiranda]

I posted this in the past but I thought it might be useful if you are using online content. There is a "secret" way to have Sage test all of your podcast links.

Turn off Sage / stop the service.
Add the following to the .properties file: online_video/allow_URL_tests=true
Restart Sage
Go to the Online Services menu and press "Don't Like" 5 times in a row.

Sage will go through all of your podcasts and tell you which work and which do not. If you have debug logging on it will also put the results in the logfile.

Tom

[jsonnabend]

Still have green bars top and bottom when watching Hulu shows. I'm using a Sage client, not an extender.

Anyone?

- Jeff

[Mitch G]

Maybe this has been answered, but I don't see it - besides I'm not 100% sure which posts are about the new "integrated" solution.
So, how does one add programs to a channel?

If I go to the NBC channel I see only a subset of programs - for example Community is missing.
I looked at the various video properties files, etc. but I don't see an obvious pattern which I could emulate and simply add "Community" to and have it show up.

Thanks,


Mitch

[paulbeers]

Just throwing out some love for this plugin. After I heard about this plugin, I convinced my wife (took me a couple of weeks) to drop Blockbuster Online and go with Netflix. This morning it took me all of 15 minutes to get this up and running (I already had playon, so that we could watch Hulu thru the HD200's upnp option). I couldn't be happier!

Thanks to all for their hard work on this. To have a full integrated option (that didn't require using the loopback option) is just awesome. This totally justified the switch from Blockbuster Online to Netflix to my wife.

[evilpenguin]

Updated plug-in to v1.5, enjoy!

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...90&postcount=4

[HuMan321]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Updated plug-in to v1.5, enjoy!

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...90&postcount=4

Thanks!!!

Do you need to stop Sage to install?

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by HuMan321

Thanks!!!

Do you need to stop Sage to install?

Nope, that's not necessary anymore.

[tmiranda]

EP,

If I just want to call the .exe to update the feeds do I need to pass any special parameters to it? I want to put an option in my custom STVi allowing the user to update their feeds.

Are any of the return codes documented?

Thanks,

Tom

[sic0048]

Originally Posted by sic0048

Do other people get slight studders while watching Netflix? I seem to get studders frequently (but not in an exact pattern). I have a quad core 2.4ghz machine and a mid speed cable internet connection - so I don't think it is my system specs being to low. All the playon tests come back green (speed and CPU test). Plus all the other Playon material plays perfectly.

Any ideas or is it the same for everyone.

PS - I'm using the HD-100 as my playback machine.

Originally Posted by simonen

I see this too, but only when I have skipped as far as I can go into the movie, so I think it is more of a buffering issue. If I just let it play, there is never a problem.

OK - I watched another NetFlix movie last night and determined it isn't so much of a studder that I see, but the pans are not smooth. So anytime the camera pans accross the screen, I get less than perfect movement. So obviously there are missing frames. I'm not sure if it is Netflix compression doing it or my setup. I'm still leaning towards Netflix compression, but if that is the case, then others should be seeing similar things. If everyone else gets perfectly smooth pans, then it must be something on my setup.

So what does everyone else see when watching Netflix movies - perfectly smooth pans (like you would expect on the DVD version) or something which is less than perfect pans?

[Taddeusz]

Originally Posted by sic0048

OK - I watched another NetFlix movie last night and determined it isn't so much of a studder that I see, but the pans are not smooth. So anytime the camera pans accross the screen, I get less than perfect movement. So obviously there are missing frames. I'm not sure if it is Netflix compression doing it or my setup. I'm still leaning towards Netflix compression, but if that is the case, then others should be seeing similar things. If everyone else gets perfectly smooth pans, then it must be something on my setup.

So what does everyone else see when watching Netflix movies - perfectly smooth pans (like you would expect on the DVD version) or something which is less than perfect pans?

Without looking at the original video via a web browser I can only guess that's probably more the result of a poor 2:3 pulldown. The source is probably 23.976fps and is being converted to 29.97 fps which results in a judder during horizontal pans.

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by tmiranda

f I just want to call the .exe to update the feeds do I need to pass any special parameters to it? I want to put an option in my custom STVi allowing the user to update their feeds.

Super simple.

UPnP2Podcast.exe update

[mbowe]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Updated plug-in to v1.5, enjoy!

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/show...90&postcount=4

EP, You are AWESOME...

[tmiranda]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Super simple.

UPnP2Podcast.exe update

Thanks!

[jpaddock3000]

If anyone is interested in watching TV streams, here is the source. I'm just starting to play with it now. (Allows access to P2P streams and VLC: Sopcast, StreamTorrent, TVU, VLC)

http://www.playonplugins.com/index.php?topic=2157.0

[mistergq]

EP:

Thank you for this plugin. This is what I have been waiting for the Extender. My HTPC is almost complete! Now I need to get around to archiving my DVDs onto my server.

[robogeek]

For those of you with kids, here are a few scripts for some cartoons and Nickelodeon shows. Ducktales, Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers, Talespin, SpongeBob SquarePants, The Fairly OddParents, iCarly, Drake & Josh, and some others. The content is scraped by various LUA scripts that run under the Scripts Plugin for PlayOn. This content comes from various sources, most of which have fairly low to poor quality video feeds...so most (if not all) will look horrible on HD sets but should be more than tolerable (for kids anyway) on SD sets.

Assuming you already have PlayOn and UPnP2Podcast installed and working, go to the playonplugins.com forum (you'll need to create an account to be able to download attachments from their forum) and download the Scripts Plugin. Scripts Plugin .0.4.0.3 is the minimum version required, so if you have an older version already installed then you'll need to update it. I haven't tested the scripts with the recently released Scripts Plugin .0.5.0.0, but there shouldn't be any problems.

Once the Scripts Plugin is installed, download the attached 'LUA Scripts.zip' file and extract the Ducktales, Chip and Dale, Talespin, ToonJet, and Nickelodeon LUA scripts to the MediaMall\plugins\scripts folder. Then restart the MediaMallServer service. Finally, download the attached 'Custom Online Properties.zip' file and extract the Ducktales, Chip and Dale, Talespin, ToonJet, and Nickelodeon properties files to the SageTV\STVs\SageTV3\OnlineVideos folder. That should be it. You should now have a Cartoons and Nickelodeon category listed in the Online Services menu.

Credits go to mopenstein on the playonplugins.com forum for creating the original LUA scripts. I made some mods to the scripts so they would work better with UPnP2Podcast and display better in SageTV. The modified scripts are attached to this post and, for easy reference, the orginal unmodified scripts can be found at the following locations:

Ducktales, Chip and Dale RR, Talespin: HERE
ToonJet: HERE
Nickelodeon: HERE

Known issue: "The video list is downloading." message takes a long time (3 to 4 minutes, maybe longer, depending on your Internet speed) for Ducktales, Chip and Dale RR, and Talespin. The long delay is the result of the episodes being scraped from YouTube. Each episode is broken in to two or three parts so 50-80 episodes means anywhere from 100 to 240 YouTube web pages must be scraped to generate a video list for SageTV Each cartoon LUA script could probably be broken down into smaller scripts and additional subcategories could be created to speed up video list generation process. And I think the new .0.5.0.0 Scripts Plugin adds URL caching that might also help if someone else wants to take a stab at it.

[JDJinTX]

Wow. Just Wow. I've used Sage for several years, but it was just this weekend that I finally built a dedicated Sage PC and stumbled across the Playon plug-in while I browsed the forum to solve many migration-related issues. It took several days to get Sage up & running (mostly because I skipped Vista when I went from XP to Win7 and was completely unfamiliar with UAC), but after that was done it only took 15 minutes to get EP's plugin working flawlessly.

If anyone is wondering...

1. I installed Win7 x64, and everything seems to run perfectly.

2. Playon is running on the same machine as the SageTV software.

3. Viewing quality of Netflix on an HD100 through EP's plugin was comparable to watching Netflix through my LG DVD (and the HD100 is connected through a wireless bridge so I think that's pretty impressive).

4. If this post is disjointed & rambles, it's because I celebrated my success by watching "The Big Lebowski" and drinking with The Dude throughout the movie. It's great to actually use this system instead of endlessly tweaking it, so I thought a quick "Thank-you" was appropriate before I crash for the night. Thanks EP!

jdj

[pjpjpjpj]

Originally Posted by jpaddock3000

If anyone is interested in watching TV streams, here is the source. I'm just starting to play with it now. (Allows access to P2P streams and VLC: Sopcast, StreamTorrent, TVU, VLC)

http://www.playonplugins.com/index.php?topic=2157.0

Without being at home to see how this actually functions... any luck? I would think this would have the same issues as "PlayOn Live" (see posts 517, 521), where you would need some sort of dynamic scraping of available content. Last night I tried manually adding the PlayOn Live "Basketball" (just as a test, it was one of the subcategories that showed up with content on UPnP Inspector last night). The Inspector found like 4 NBA games, but Sage did not see them ("no videos found"). It may have been a mistake on my end, but I have a feeling it has more to do with not being able to play live streams...

Part 2: how does avastream work, anyway? I see it has an .exe file... is this similar to Michael Cox's webfeedencoder plugin? Meaning, it starts playing the stream through a separate program, encodes it to something Sage can handle, and then sends it to Sage?

Sorry to ask all these questions while at work and not at home where I can test the stuff myself....

[pjpjpjpj]

I tried fooling around with the custom files last night for the first time. I eased my way into it by adding a few more subcategories in the already-existing ESPN category. In my UPnPInspector, I saw lots of subcategories that were not in the download, and tried to add a few. I added Racing, NASCAR, Page 2, and College Basketball. The lines I added to the links file were like this:

xFeedPodcastCustom/NCAABasketballNews=xPodcastESPN;external,UPnP2Podcast,PlayOn:ESPN:^College Hoops$:+2
xFeedPodcastCustom/Page2=xPodcastESPN;external,UPnP2Podcast,PlayOn:ESPN:^Page2$:+2
xFeedPodcastCustom/NASCARNews=xPodcastESPN;external,UPnP2Podcast,PlayOn:ESPN:^NASCAR$:+2
xFeedPodcastCustom/RacingNews=xPodcastESPN;external,UPnP2Podcast,PlayOn:ESPN:^Racing$:+2

I did this with no real knowledge of what I was doing; just copying other (existing) lines and changing text. Of the four above, College Basketball and Racing worked. NASCAR and Page 2 did not.

Question:
Where do you find the name that goes in the first part of the line (i.e., where I have "RacingNews") before the "=xPodcastESPN..."? In UPnpInspector, all it shows is the name at the end, i.e. "Racing". How do you know what it should be called? I am assuming that the first name is somehow what the website where you are getting the podcast is calling it? I also tried NASCAR without the "News" after it, and that didn't work either, but does that particular one use something else? Does "Page2" use "Page_2"?