[1080pete]

I assume the games that don’t show live and should have started already are blacked out. Will those games be playable in the future? I’m grateful for your plugin and work TimeWasted, just a bit spoiled from Carb0s addon. Thanks for the work

[timewasted]

I just added your repository to install the addon but it just says Downloading 0%. Not sure what I'm doing wrong here. Thanks.

I'm not sure you're actually doing anything wrong. Oddly enough, I have a handful of add-ons that refuse to update at the moment. They sit at "Downloading 0%" for a couple seconds before switching back to "Update available". All my files are hosted on GitHub though, and I trust them to keep the files available for me.

I assume the games that don’t show live and should have started already are blacked out. Will those games be playable in the future? I’m grateful for your plugin and work TimeWasted, just a bit spoiled from Carb0s addon. Thanks for the work

The games that should have started already but aren't tagged as "(In progress)" have either been postponed (one game was postponed the other day), or it could just be a slow update on the feed. I know some games sometimes keep their "(In progress)" tag long after they should have moved to an "(Ended)" tag.

Blacked out games should be tagged as "(Blacked out)". It's somewhat unlikely that they will be playable in the future. I do have the option to use a proxy for the add-on though, if you happen to have access to one that's outside of the blacked out area. You could also use the proxy feature that XBMC/Kodi provides. In theory, I could work around the blackouts without having to rely on a proxy, but that'd require making 100+ HTTP requests until I found the right one. Which is to say, not terribly feasible.

However, both you and binder420 have mentioned/implied that Carb0's add-on is able to work around the blackouts. I'm guessing this is the add-on you're talking about? I just looked at it, and games are still blacked out for me. Is there something that I'm missing?

As for the people saying thanks, you're very much welcome. I absolutely enjoy working on this.

[xDetoursx]

"I'm not sure you're actually doing anything wrong. Oddly enough, I have a handful of add-ons that refuse to update at the moment. They sit at "Downloading 0%" for a couple seconds before switching back to "Update available". "


Just chiming in to confirm this. Noticed the same thing today. I manually updated and forced a refresh a few times and it appears to have updated all but one addon. Something's up with the servers I suspect

[MetalChris]

As for the people saying thanks, you're very much welcome. I absolutely enjoy working on this.

You can count me in as one of the many people who greatly appreciate your work on this addon. timewasted seems to be somewhat of a misnomer.

However, both you and binder420 have mentioned/implied that Carb0's add-on is able to work around the blackouts. I'm guessing this is the add-on you're talking about? I just looked at it, and games are still blacked out for me. Is there something that I'm missing?

In previous seasons Carb0's original addon seemed to ignore blackout restrictions. Not sure if he intended this or not, but it was a nice "feature". When he fixed the addon for this season the blackout restrictions were applied.

I can understand the reasoning behind the blackouts of local games and to a certain extent the nationally televised games that are shown on the NHL Network and over-the-air on NBC. But it really sucks hard during the playoffs, when most of the games are shown on NBCSN, CNBC, and MSNBC. Even when I had satellite, it simply was not worth nearly tripling my bill to upgrade to a package that included those channels. I would be more than happy to pay an additional fee to extend my Gamecenter subscription through the playoffs, but the NHL just does not seem interested in making some sort of playoff package available.

[binder420]

Thanks for all your hard work Timewasted. It was crabo's addons from last season that would work without any blackouts and I was able to use the plugin to watch my flyers for the whole season. I was really hoping it would work the same this season but sadly my flyers are blacked out and I'm paying for others games which I don't care about much. Your addon would be great if it could somehow pass the blackouts. There is some hack for vlc going on around for nhl games and I think people are able to watch every game with no blackouts for free. I'm paying and hoping I can watch the flyers again in xbmc. Thank Timewasted and go flyers

[[brick]]

It's my understanding that Carb0's add on was not doing anything to actively get around blackout restrictions. Last year his method had the accidental benefit of bypassing blackout restrictions. After adjusting to this year's changes for accessing the streams the blackout restrictions are not being bypassed. Personally, I'd vote the plug in making no attempt to circumvent these restrictions. Individuals can, and imo should, work through a proxy.

To chime in re: buffering issues, I've tried a lot of things and the only thing that seems to affect matters more consistently than chance is this: if you want to see a game with the least amount of buffering, pick one you don't care about. Those all play great!

I would love to be able to say: buffer me X minutes worth, and for that buffer to be as long as I want, from a minute to 120 minutes. I've tried changing to googleDNS, which seemed to help a bit, but, the buffering I experience comes in fits and starts. I can watch 15 minutes without any problems, and then go 5 minutes with brutally slow buffering, and then go 15 fine and then it'll just be herky for the rest of the time. There's really no consistency to it. Sometimes changing feeds from home to away helps, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes restarting the feed fixes it for a long time, sometimes it doesn't.

Personally I think if I could buffer 10 minutes ahead, I'd be golden.

[ricky834]

WOW stream FR nice

[chester77]

I love it. Thanks a lot!

[MetalChris]

It's my understanding that Carb0's add on was not doing anything to actively get around blackout restrictions. Last year his method had the accidental benefit of bypassing blackout restrictions. After adjusting to this year's changes for accessing the streams the blackout restrictions are not being bypassed. Personally, I'd vote the plug in making no attempt to circumvent these restrictions. Individuals can, and imo should, work through a proxy.

I concur. As much as blackouts suck, I see no reason for this addon to go down the road of attempting to defeat them.

[timewasted]

I've been slacking on this lately, but my plan is to push out an update for the main version tonight, and to kill off the development version relatively shortly (maybe within a week? I don't know yet). Don't worry though, those two things are related. If anyone has happened to look at my repository inside XBMC lately, they'd see that a couple more things have popped up on it. This is because I've been trying to make everything more modular. As a result of that, the update that I'll be pushing out is able to check to see if the HLS proxy add-on is available and working. If it is, you'll have the option to start the game at the beginning. If not, it won't prevent the main add-on from functioning.

Also, the update will contain yet another attempt to fix the script errors when there's only a single game for the day (such as tomorrow). I'm honestly not sure if it'll actually fix anything, but I guess we'll find out soon! I may be in a position to debug the problem if it pops up tomorrow, though. I'm hoping for the best, but we'll see how it goes.

Edit: Pushed the update and... I broke it. For some reason it's not installing the required m3u8 module. Working on fixing it now, but the immediate fix should be to install m3u8 from my repository -> Add-on Libraries.

[timewasted]

Double posting since this is likely to get more attention than another edit. I pushed out v0.0.20, but my repository manifest file failed to list m3u8 as a required module (despite the manifest for the actual add-on listing it). This caused m3u8 to not be installed on an update, which caused the add-on to fail spectacularly. I fixed the repository manifest and pushed out v0.0.21. There are no changes between v0.0.20 and v0.0.21, but required modules are installed on updates, so this was the easiest way to fix the problem.

Pretty dumb mistake on my part, but oh well, it was easily fixed.

[sdsnyr94]

One of the most frustrating things with these NHL addons is the buffering. Unlike the Roku or AppleTV, XBMC/Kodi cannot automatically change playback quality on the fly.... so if there is any type of network lag you will get buffering.

This was also a problem with MLBMC, except when using the HLS version of the addon. The HLS version used an external binary which would pull the feed and create a video file, which then XBMC would begin to play. The nice part of that is you could tell it to start building the file and wait X seconds before beginning playback, creating a buffer.

Any way you can implement a way to create a buffer?

[timewasted]

One of the most frustrating things with these NHL addons is the buffering. Unlike the Roku or AppleTV, XBMC/Kodi cannot automatically change playback quality on the fly.... so if there is any type of network lag you will get buffering.

This was also a problem with MLBMC, except when using the HLS version of the addon. The HLS version used an external binary which would pull the feed and create a video file, which then XBMC would begin to play. The nice part of that is you could tell it to start building the file and wait X seconds before beginning playback, creating a buffer.

Any way you can implement a way to create a buffer?

I've been giving this a bit of thought. The short answer is: I'm not sure I have the time to do this, even if I figure out a nice way to do it.

The slightly longer answer is that I sort of have an idea how it can be done. I should point out that I haven't looked at what MLBMC actually does. A typical playlist contains 6 video segments with relative URLs pointing to the video files. Part of what I do for live rewinding is change those relative URLs (/path/to/video.ts) to absolute URLs (http://nhl-cdn-server/path/to/video.ts), so that my HLS proxy doesn't have to worry about how to deal with the video segments.

So, my idea is simply to not make the URLs absolute so that my HLS proxy serves them. When it gets a request for a video segment (we'll say that file is named 0000.ts), it downloads that file plus the next X seconds/minutes worth of files before returning 0000.ts to XBMC. So, when XBMC gets 0000.ts, the HLS proxy has already downloaded 0000.ts to, say, 0010.ts. It would maintain a sliding window of buffered files. A request for 0000.ts would download up to 0010.ts, 0001.ts would download up to 0011.ts, 0002.ts would download up to 0012.ts, etc. It'd also maybe save 1 minute of video before the current segment, and maybe 10 minutes after the current segment.

There are three problems that are immediately apparent to me with this solution:

1) HTTP timeouts. I would need to make sure XBMC doesn't think that initial connection has died while the HLS proxy is creating the buffer. I'm far from the first person to have to figure out how to keep a connection alive while waiting for a large chunk of data, so I'm sure this can be solved relatively easily.
2) Memory usage and/or storage space requirements. I have some 5000kbps/60fps video segments saved, and each 10 second segment is at least 5MB in size. So, a 10 minute buffer would use at least 300MB of memory and/or disk space. This could be problematic on mobile devices.
3) I feel like I'm constantly strapped for time lately. I expect (hope) this to change sooner rather than later, but it is currently a factor.

Also, I really don't want to have to deal with using external binaries for functionality in the add-on. I love that everything that the add-on does currently is platform agnostic. Once external binaries start getting added into the mix, maintenance and releases becomes a lot more challenging.

[sdsnyr94]

One of the most frustrating things with these NHL addons is the buffering. Unlike the Roku or AppleTV, XBMC/Kodi cannot automatically change playback quality on the fly.... so if there is any type of network lag you will get buffering.

This was also a problem with MLBMC, except when using the HLS version of the addon. The HLS version used an external binary which would pull the feed and create a video file, which then XBMC would begin to play. The nice part of that is you could tell it to start building the file and wait X seconds before beginning playback, creating a buffer.

Any way you can implement a way to create a buffer?

I've been giving this a bit of thought. The short answer is: I'm not sure I have the time to do this, even if I figure out a nice way to do it.

The slightly longer answer is that I sort of have an idea how it can be done. I should point out that I haven't looked at what MLBMC actually does. A typical playlist contains 6 video segments with relative URLs pointing to the video files. Part of what I do for live rewinding is change those relative URLs (/path/to/video.ts) to absolute URLs (http://nhl-cdn-server/path/to/video.ts), so that my HLS proxy doesn't have to worry about how to deal with the video segments.

So, my idea is simply to not make the URLs absolute so that my HLS proxy serves them. When it gets a request for a video segment (we'll say that file is named 0000.ts), it downloads that file plus the next X seconds/minutes worth of files before returning 0000.ts to XBMC. So, when XBMC gets 0000.ts, the HLS proxy has already downloaded 0000.ts to, say, 0010.ts. It would maintain a sliding window of buffered files. A request for 0000.ts would download up to 0010.ts, 0001.ts would download up to 0011.ts, 0002.ts would download up to 0012.ts, etc. It'd also maybe save 1 minute of video before the current segment, and maybe 10 minutes after the current segment.

There are three problems that are immediately apparent to me with this solution:

1) HTTP timeouts. I would need to make sure XBMC doesn't think that initial connection has died while the HLS proxy is creating the buffer. I'm far from the first person to have to figure out how to keep a connection alive while waiting for a large chunk of data, so I'm sure this can be solved relatively easily.
2) Memory usage and/or storage space requirements. I have some 5000kbps/60fps video segments saved, and each 10 second segment is at least 5MB in size. So, a 10 minute buffer would use at least 300MB of memory and/or disk space. This could be problematic on mobile devices.
3) I feel like I'm constantly strapped for time lately. I expect (hope) this to change sooner rather than later, but it is currently a factor.

Also, I really don't want to have to deal with using external binaries for functionality in the add-on. I love that everything that the add-on does currently is platform agnostic. Once external binaries start getting added into the mix, maintenance and releases becomes a lot more challenging.

Thanks for at least considering it. You have done a fantastic job with this, and the ability to play from the start of the game is very appreciated.

As far as MLBMC... hopefully one day you would like to look at the code, since it appears to no longer have a dev (original dev has not been on forums for about a year). Eliminating the binary there also would be fantastic (platform agnostic)

[Kib]

You might want to consider submitting your add-on to the official repository.