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

[mzup]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Update PlayON to the latest version then use the newest feeds.

That seems to have done it. I always update it when notifcation pops up, but this last time it never did.

thanks

[jpimlott]

I reinstalled 2.59.3669 playon on a faster machine I7 intel and the commercial problems seems to be gone. All of crackle is still not working.
I am able to go to their site and watch a video though.

The double letter boxing of videos is anoying. Do you know what is doing it
It was perfect last week.

Thanks , killer plugin

John

[sungod]

In case this is useful information, I have a lower end computer :

amd 3700+, only 2 gb of ram, 1.5 MB (at most) download speed from my ISP. This all runs on XP Home Edition.

I get the time out statement that others have been getting on my HD-200, but on my HD-100, it works just fine.

To avoid conflicts with other plugins I went to the default STVI in each unit to see if that made any difference. It did not.

I am not looking to trouble shoot my problems at the moment because I think a majority of the issue is my PC and my download speed are just too slow to keep up, which would explain the timeout I receive.

What I do not know is, why it works on the HD100 and not the HD200.



Edit: I forgot to mention. My HD100 is running on a standard def tv and the HD200 is running in the Sage HD mode on a HD television. I am starting to wonder if its the screen size and high def size that is the problem, because playon would have to download a larger size movie to fill that screen up. I could be totally wrong, but it seems to make sense at the moment.
Just putting it out there in case that is helpful to anyone. Cheers!

[bclenney]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

Getting TV shows to show up in Netflix is actually kind of difficult. Sage only allows you have to format your Online Service feed like

Category -> Sub Category -> Content

And of those item's Category and Sub Category have to be hardcoded into your customOnlineServices feed and then Content is pulled out of an RSS feed.

Right now the only way i'd be able to do it would be to dump all of the episodes individually into the list with movies which, if you have a lot of TV show's in your Queue like I do, could flood it and make it a pain to navigate.

Ideally, to really get things working in a usable way, i'd need the ability to dynamically generate N levels of subcategories.

For example...

Netflix -> Queue TV Shows

Would download an RSS feed that, rather than having content, contained additional subcategories and their RSS feed links. Then i'd be able to organize like

Netflix -> Queue TV Shows -> Shows -> Episodes

And i'd also be able to do neat things like...

ABC -> Lost -> Seasons -> Episodes

Anyone come up with a work-around for this? I would love to be able to watch Episodes of TV shows on my DVR. (As I know a lot of us would). It could be another year before Sage 7 comes out. Hate to wait that long!

[evilpenguin]

I've got a plan to make it work for TV shows in your Queue, but not for general browsing. No ETA though.

[bclenney]

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

I've got a plan to make it work for TV shows in your Queue, but not for general browsing. No ETA though.

I love you man.

[doncote0]

Uses too much:

The PlayOn service seems to use way too much of my system resources to play nicely with Sage. I assume that is because I am only using a Pentium D 3.2GHz processor (never thought I would say that 2 years ago) and also because I have set it to auto. I think that if I set it to a lower resolution format it would use far less resources. Seems that the service is too active when set to auto.

Delivers Very Little:

I am using this on SageExtenders (MVP's), so I typically get only the top half of the screen filled or some other very small viewing option depending on the streaming movie format set by Netflix.

NOTE:
I am sure that using the Sage HD Theatre would make this better, but I am going to set my $ aside to upgrading to an i7 QPI 64 bit system, before I go there. (Should take me 4-6 months to save and build the new system.)

Why a 64-bit system? Simple--speed. There is also the added benefit of being able to utilize more memory which in turn makes the system even faster (Windows 32 bit systems max out a 4GB of system memory [or slightly less for some systems]) .

[Thomas Wischgol]

You can probably still fine tune your system a little to make the playon server and Sage play nice together. I am using an Athlon 3200, which is below the minimum requirements of playon. I set the quality for playon to high and increased the priority for Sage so that it has precedence all the time. This used to work fine until Hulu decided to change. All other plugins I installed in playon still work perfectly fine with very decent video quality. But with Hulu I am now getting the usual choppy playback that most people are experiencing. Hopefully this changes with the next playon update.

[evilpenguin]

The flash 10.1 beta might help for Hulu now as it'll allow hardware accel

[doncote0]

My Sage system has 6 recording devices. I previously noted problems when recording from 2 or more devices (or 1 device in HD) and trying to watch through an extender.

I'll give those changes a try. Thank you!

[mkanet]

Hmmmm... I dont know if this comparison will help you in any way or not, but I dont have any resource related issues even when all 12 recording devices (11 of them in HD) recording/active at the same time. I use my server as a full time workstation as well; with Outlook, Firefox, Skype, Trillian Astra always open and II7 webserver serving ASP.net apps (including Jetty) and several other network based services (ie SSH and FTP) always running in the background.

As a stress test, I can record 12 different sources WHILE watching a 1080p Bluray disc via PowerDVD 1080p full screen on the same machine WHILE my wife is streaming Hulu, Netflix through this PC to the HD-200 in the living room; WHILE having a skype phone conversation via bluetooth earpiece (they can see me via my webcam); WHILE another friend is on my IIS based website downloading/uploading files. BTW: Playon detects MAX CPU and MAX Bandwidth.

What kind of PC can handle being a super-heavily used server and workstation?... a 3 year old HP Pavilion Windows Vista 32 bit PC with 4GB of RAM with Intel 2.4GHz quadcore CPU.

Im not sure how much of a difference your 3.2GHz CPU is than my 2.4Ghz quad core; but the 4 cores come in handy for doing many things at the same time without glitches. I spent a lot of money on sick fast logical disks; which is the reason I think I can get away with doing so much at the same time..... one of which is a 256GB SSD disk (no movable parts) (for OS, Apps, network based services, and temp/scratch/pagefile) ...basically loading non-cached files almost as fast as if they were already in RAM and a RAID 0 partition using using for recording TV and USB disks for misc multimedia like mp3s, jpgs., Doc, PFD, fax, etc. I dont think RAM or 32/64bit OS is the issue.

Originally Posted by doncote0

My Sage system has 6 recording devices. I previously noted problems when recording from 2 or more devices (or 1 device in HD) and trying to watch through an extender.

I'll give those changes a try. Thank you!

[mkanet]

EvilPenguin: BTW, Even with the latest version of Playon and this addon. I'm still having to press play twice sometimes (on any client) to give it a little nudge to start the video. I know this was a known issue; but, cant you do a rubberband and chewing gum import by making a little STVi/XML that pushes "PLAY" automatically a second time automatically a few seconds after the playon stream has started; whether it's necessary or not?

This issue and the aspect ratio issue on the PC clients are the only two issues I have. I'm guessing you cant fix the aspect ratio issue in studio no matter what you do since its a sageTV core issue?

What do you think?

Thanks,
-Michael

[Thomas Wischgol]

Originally Posted by doncote0

My Sage system has 6 recording devices. I previously noted problems when recording from 2 or more devices (or 1 device in HD) and trying to watch through an extender.

I'll give those changes a try. Thank you!

If you have not done yet you should enable proper write caching. By default Windows uses write through caching only which means everything needs to be written right away and is only cached for subsequent reading. Switching to write back resolves that (you will need a little program to do that named dskcache). I used to have 3 digital and 2 analog tuners (I switched to all digital by now and hence removed the analog ones) and it worked fine without any issues with just a single hard drive for the recordings (a WD green) so it should work with 6 recording devices as well.

[doncote0]

Wow...I feel like I just woke up and realized that I was standing in the middle of the highway with vehicles zooming by me at crazy fast speeds. I am shocked, amazed an at the same time distressed to realize that I never noticed this before now.

Gonna get (2)64GB for a raid zero config (main hard drive and caches).

Kingston 64GB 2.5" SSD (SNV225-S2)

Okay so one thought:

SSD drive has 220MB/sec read 140MB/sec write...looks like no latency or read write times (so instant access?!!)
now if a 3Gb/sec SATA2 HD can get 105MB/sec maximum sustained transfer is this where the performance difference comes from? Seems like the SSD drive is more than twice as fast for sustained reads and 1.4 times faster for sustained writes (with no latency or seek times), but I imagine that the major differences is that the maximum transfer rates for the SSD are immediately available. Is that correct?

What are you seeing performance-wise? Twice as responsive, four times as responsive or "holy heck this system is freaking out of control"?

Thank you, Mkanet

[mkanet]

Evilpenguin: Okay, I actually tried to watch Hulu today whole episodes with my wife. However, the video just goes blank around the middle of the shows. This happened on two separate chuck episodes. The sad thing is this is the first time me and my wife actually sad down to watch full episodes via this addon on my PC client.

Does it have to do with me installing Flash 10.1 beta 2?

BIG CLUE:
This happens when during the 2nd - 3rd time Hulu tries to do a commercial interruption; and doesnt recover from it. It seems to stop right where there might be a break... but nothing happens after that... no OSD counting down with a timer or anything. The sageTV green OSD timebar keeps counting and moving forward, but just blank video and no sound all the way to end.

Is this a known issue and any way to get it to go all the way through? Heck I dont even know if the hardware acceleration gets used from flash 10.1 beta 2; or if flash is even needed for this to work.

Any ideas or suggestions would greatly be appreciated. I definitely need to get this working; especially after paying for Playon. What do you guys do when this happens? I havent tried watching full episode on my HD200 yet either.

-Michael

[mkanet]

Yeah, this is by far the biggest performance enhancement you can do on a machine that does does a lot of concurrent disk activities at the same time. The the Corsair P256 wasn't cheap, but worth every penny. Have fun.

Originally Posted by doncote0

Wow...I feel like I just woke up and realized that I was standing in the middle of the highway with vehicles zooming by me at crazy fast speeds. I am shocked, amazed an at the same time distressed to realize that I never noticed this before now.

Gonna get (2)64GB for a raid zero config (main hard drive and caches).

Kingston 64GB 2.5" SSD (SNV225-S2)

Okay so one thought:

SSD drive has 220MB/sec read 140MB/sec write...looks like no latency or read write times (so instant access?!!)
now if a 3Gb/sec SATA2 HD can get 105MB/sec maximum sustained transfer is this where the performance difference comes from? Seems like the SSD drive is more than twice as fast for sustained reads and 1.4 times faster for sustained writes (with no latency or seek times), but I imagine that the major differences is that the maximum transfer rates for the SSD are immediately available. Is that correct?

What are you seeing performance-wise? Twice as responsive, four times as responsive or "holy heck this system is freaking out of control"?

Thank you, Mkanet

[evilpenguin]

Originally Posted by mkanet

Any ideas or suggestions would greatly be appreciated. I definitely need to get this working; especially after paying for Playon. What do you guys do when this happens? I havent tried watching full episode on my HD200 yet either.

-Michael

One thing to check would be if the .flv file in the %TEMP% to see if that pause is actually in the video or if the download froze there. I'm guessing its in the video, in which case, its a PlayON issue and you can submit a bug to them after you repro it.

[mkanet]

Thanks for the quick and very helpful reply Evilpenguin. Now I know it had something to do with me. I vaguely remember something about Playon forgetting to erase flv files. So coincidentally, just yesterday, I decided to do a little bit of temp folder cleaning. It would be great to know what files are safe to delete and which should never be deleted manually (including in subdirectories or other folders) which are needed for Playon and this plugin. I keep getting a bunch of:

*.od
*.cvr
.rsslib4jbug2fix*.tmp

Should I just let those files keep collecting indefinitely? Will they eventually go away? The stv*.img I know is an issue with sageTV's spinning circle; which I clean out once in a while; and appears to be safe to delete.

PS: Is there an easy way to repopulate the missing files needed (ie, via command line)?

Thanks again for your time,
Michael

Originally Posted by evilpenguin

One thing to check would be if the .flv file in the %TEMP% to see if that pause is actually in the video or if the download froze there. I'm guessing its in the video, in which case, its a PlayON issue and you can submit a bug to them after you repro it.

[doncote0]

That makes much more sense now, mkanet. Thanks for explaining. The speed, power usage, projected life already seemed superior, but the concurrent access makes it amazing...

Sounds like this is the single most important thing anyone can do to add power and performance to a PC that is starting to show that it might be time to upgrade. (Upgrades such as dedicated video cards with more memory and additional system memory aside.)

This would make Netflix, Hulu and HD streaming and transcoding on the fly all that more achievable.

This would also help those that are using Orb or similar to stream their Sage recordings to their cell phones. (I hope Sage creates a cell phone app soon.)

[jperquin]

I have a few seasons of The Office in my Netflix Instant Queue that do not show up in the menu.

When I manually change the properties file and change out +2 for +3 these item DO show up.

Is there a more elegant solution?

Joost