[curlyboi]

Hi there fellow developers.

I have just recently developed a TV backend designed to fit custom major IPTV provider in Czech Republic.
It has streaming, recording and EPG abilities and is written in C# and PHP, the streaming itself is provided
by spawning multiple VLC processes.

Only problem is, I can't code in C or C++.

Therefore I am asking, if you know (or are planning to develop) any PVR addon, that would be based purely on
XML over HTTP.

My vision is like this:
http://host/channels.xml would provide channels in some pre-agreed format
http://host/shows.xml would provide EPG in a pre-agreed format
etc for recordings
You could create new recording by calling http://host/record with POST or GET parameters being channel id, start time and end time
(preferably defined as unix timestamp). The watching itself would be solved by passing the direct stream URL in the channels xml,
watching recorded files would be basically equal (passing either URL or full path and filename).

This plugin could be released with the URLs configuration and little documentation so everybody could make their own XML based backend.

What do you think? Does this sound interesting to you?
(Actually, the PVR demo addon is halfway there, it just doesn't support creating recordings and getting the files from HTTP).

[opdenkamp]

there's nothing implemented to download files from a webserver in add-ons.
you'd either need to expose XBMC's methods to do this, or implement it in an add-on. both require coding C++

[curlyboi]

I guess it is not possible to write the add-on in C#?

[FernetMenta]

It may be possible using interop for unmanaged/managed code but it doesn't make any sense. You would need to distribute .NET runtime with this plugin.

[curlyboi]

Well the backend is also written in C# so the user has to get it at some point. I know it is not the best way to do it, but it's a start. I don't fancy the idea of learning to develop in a different programming language just to see, if it will work at all. But if I succeed in doing this in C#, I will of course publish the source so anyone else could rewrite the plugin. Maybe once it's done, I might even try to do it myself, they are both c-based languages after all.

I must add that I am not a very good programmer, I can code, of course, but I tend to make a dirty code full of nasty hacks. I am more of a network analyst and reverse engineer. But when I use some simpler language (I believe we can agree that C# is much simpler to code in than C++), it gives me less space to do such things.

[opdenkamp]

even if you manage to do this in C# and get XBMC to load it, then your code would be limited to platform(s) with .Net

[curlyboi]

I understand that, but it's still better than nothing, isn't it? )

[curlyboi]

Just info: IPTV Simple PVR Plugin does this.

It can't service recording and scheduler but watching works, channels listing works, the whole epg works...