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Full Version: Local News Livestream in XBMC?
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Hello, i've did a bit of browsing and couldn't find anything...

I have not watched cable for... 10 years? a very long time.
My mother and father have recently decided to drop the cable because the overall quality of the channels is complete crap. lol

All of their favorite channels have been removed, so they asked me what to do.
I have had an XBMC HTPC for quite awhile, so i suggested that, and let them know that i could get it setup as best i could.

So far, they have everyting they could ask for. I even set them up a small NAS for Family Videos and Photos, and hooked it up to be viewed in the front room.
They are somewhat bewildered by technology, so it's like magic to them. lol

Anyway, the one thing that is missing is the News....
Mom misses her local news dearly. I have some other news plugins setup, CNN being her favorite, But she wants the local news.

Our local news, WSAZ streams live from the same url at the same alloted times every week.
http://www.wsaz.com/livestream

Because it is on the same site, i figured maybe there is a way to implement it into XBMC...
So i thought i would ask the community, maybe someone has done it before?

Thanks for any and all suggestions.
If i cannot implement the stream directly into XBMC, i can settle on using a launcher to open it in a browser.
I just think the less confusing it is for my parents, the better.
You need to find the streaming URL for that video. There are some links on that website that may work, but they may be just app links. Google "find a web stream URL" or similar for other ways to figure it out.

Once you get the stream URL, you should place it in a .strm file.

Check the wiki on .strm files for details on how. You can add that file folder as a source, then mark the file as a favorite for easy access.
Alright, great.
I'll look into it!
An OTA antenna and tuner could do it as well using XBMC's PVR features.

What kind of box are they using (OpenELEC w tvheadend would be pretty simple to setup)?
Ok. i thought i found the right link, whilst using FireFox' Firebug addon.
http://v9.anv.bz/plugins/anvatoplayer.mcp.9.0.swf

Clicking this link gives me a buffer symbol.
I thought that it was the correct link, so i added it to a .strm file, added that to xbmc. but when i run it i only get a bunch of random flashes and nothing actually happens.

Makes me think that it is probably the wrong link.
I will keep looking.
I took a quick look, it appears they call up some javascript page that passes a key. It might be a futile effort, but I really know little about how to tackle the more difficult streams. The OTA tuner suggestion above is a good one if they are in a decent reception area.
I got curious and checked on wireshark, I can't figure out if you can create a working strm with this or not. Its possibly HLS, which I don't think XBMC supports. My guess is it is a no go.

Code:
GET /z/nwWSAZHNT_1@77195/888_b363fc61db5db3e7-p.bootstrap?g=ISWTOAKFZBFG&hdcore=3.2.0&plugin=aasp-3.2.0.77.18 HTTP/1.1
Host: graywsazlive-lh.akamaihd.net
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:30.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/30.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Referer: http://v9.anv.bz/plugins/anvatoplayer.mcp.9.0.swf
Cookie: _alid_=yG+cMuayaEQMVx1xG+0Ddw==
Connection: keep-alive
If-Modified-Since: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 07:00:19 GMT


HTTP/1.0 200 OK
Server: AkamaiGHost
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: video/abst
Content-Length: 383
Last-Modified: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 07:00:19 GMT
Expires: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 12:19:31 GMT
Cache-Control: max-age=0, no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Date: Sat, 26 Jul 2014 12:19:31 GMT
Connection: keep-alive

Maybe someone here can advise.
Well.
I think i'll just use a launcher to open chrome in full screen, on the stream

Its really no different, other than having to close chrome once the news is over.
I think that they can handle that. =P


Thanks for the good efforts fellas!
Its appreciated.