[WIP] MLB.TV Boxee App port (developers needed!)

[WIP] MLB.TV Boxee App port (developers needed!) - Printable Version

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[WIP] MLB.TV Boxee App port (developers needed!) - theophile - 2011-03-19 18:50

6/28 UPDATE
This project started as an attempt to port the Boxee app, but evolved into a new, native addon by divingmule based on mlbviewer. If you've come here because you want to watch baseball on XBMC, visit the MLBMC addon release thread here:

http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=104391

The rest of this post remains for historical purposes, or in case anyone feels like continuing the task of porting the Boxee app. The discussion in this thread shifts to divingmule's addon beginning just before page 5.

OUTDATED INFO BELOW
========================================================

Going out on a limb, here. Thanks to the excellent work of bartsidee, XBMC now has an mc module that greatly facilitates running Boxee apps in XBMC. So I've started trying to port the MLB.TV app to XBMC.

The result is a video plugin that loads, but doesn't actually work (yet). I need some experienced plugin developers to take a look at this and tell me whether this project has any hope of success. I'm not a developer, just a fan, so I may already be in over my head. If you could take a look and reply with your thoughts, I'd really appreciate it. Thanks!

Now on GitHub:
https://github.com/theophile/plugin.video.mlbtv/

What Works:

Plugin loads
Aesthetic elements all appear to be visible, buttons mostly work

What Doesn't:

Everything else

TODO:

Get schedule, calendar, and standings to populate with content (see this post for details)
Move settings (i.e. username/password) to XBMC database instead of Boxee servers

- theophile - 2011-03-19 18:51

Screenshots

Development Version 0.2

main.py

calendar.py

standings.py

- rbrohman - 2011-03-20 15:21

Great start - thanks for taking this on!

I can't help with the coding, but if you setup a donation account I'll help with the beer. Smile

- theophile - 2011-03-20 16:28

Some code changes by bartsidee resulted in working buttons, for the most part. He has also shed some light on what must be done to get content to appear:

bartsidee Wrote:Now the app hangs on this function:

Code:

mc.GetActiveWindow().GetList(121).SetContentURL(url)

The last part SetContentURL is not supported in my API yet. What it does is retreive a rss file and convert it into a Boxee list. To get the correct errors you sometimes have to remove the try/except functions in mlb.py

You can try to build it yourself, you have to convert the rss file to a python object using xmltree or something. And then systematically convert the items to an XBMC list. You can get some inspiration from within the mc file.

Is anyone willing to give this a shot? Alternately, if it's easier, it might be possible to avoid using the Boxee RSS entirely and use portions of mlbviewer to get schedule information.

- divingmule - 2011-03-20 16:52

Hi, can you post a link or example of said rss file.

- bartsidee - 2011-03-20 17:19

Infact the rss shouldn't be that hard to implent I think, unfortuatly i do not have that much time.

You can find the specs here:
http://developer.boxee.tv/RSS_Specification

And have a look at a example here:
http://developer.boxee.tv/LibraryExample

The 'SetContentURL' functions should be added to the class Listmc in mc.py. See also:
https://github.com/bartsidee/Bartsidee-Repository/blob/master/xbmc/com.bart.tv/resources/libs/mc.py#L281

- theophile - 2011-03-20 19:57

divingmule Wrote:Hi, can you post a link or example of said rss file.

In addition to the examples posted above, the two referenced in mlb.py are these:

rss://dir.boxee.tv/apps/mlb/feed/calendar
rss://dir.boxee.tv/apps/mlb/feed/%Y/%m (where %Y is the 4-digit year and %m is the 2-digit month)

As a side note, would it be easier/better if I set this project up on Google Code or Github?

- divingmule - 2011-03-21 16:22

As I expected, this is mostly above my skill level.

Usually for a plugin I would do something like this for the calendar rss.xml.

Code:

import urllib2,urllib

from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup

url='http://dir.boxee.tv/apps/mlb/feed/2011/07'

req = urllib2.Request(url)

response = urllib2.urlopen(req)

link=response.read()

response.close()

soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(link, convertEntities=BeautifulStoneSoup.XML_ENTITIES)

items = soup('item')

for item in items:

    try:

        title = item.title.string

    except:

        title = ''

    try:

        link = item.link.string

    except:

        link = ''

    try:

        description = item.description.string

    except:

        description = ''

    try:

        print(title,link,description)

    except:

        pass

Do we need to define all the elements from the Boxee RSS Specification?

I may be more trouble than help Smile

- bartsidee - 2011-03-21 21:26

Correct should be something like that. For completion of the api , it would be nice if most of the specification is supported. But to get the app working you can probably do less.

Code:

<title>29</title>

<link>2011:03:29</link>

<description>18 Games</description>

<boxee:property name="custom:display">1</boxee:property>

Title, link and discripton can be tackled with:

Code:

try:

        link = item.link.string

    except:

        link = ''

But the custom property tag is different. You have to get the value and the custom id tag.

- jmarshall - 2011-03-22 00:16

I believe there may be some code in our rss directory reader to handle boxee rss feeds - possibly no help to you at the moment given that the vfs module isn't hooked up though.