2013-06-10, 04:11
Frustrated with getting XBMC Flicks to work, it strikes me that its main feature -- allowing XBMC to let me use my remote control to find and initiate playing back content -- is never going to be as fast or easy to use as opening netflix.com in my laptop's browser.
The drawback there is that the content is not playing on my TV.
However, there seem to be three ways around this:
1) just run an extra hdmi cable from my tv to my laptop and let my laptop be the media center for the duration of the film. this works fine but is not exactly elegant. and id rather not be plugging in and out all the time or tripping over cable runs.
2) AirPlay. my iPhone can stream youtube videos right to XBMC using airPlay. works great! I wonder whether this concept can be hijacked to allow my osx laptop to stream the playback without using wires. this would be great; downside would be that my laptop needs to be running the whole time. also i doubt this is possible as it would require silverlight (a microsoft product) to be airplay-ready. i guess osx 10.8 has this ability built in but im running 10.7 stable enough that i dont want to switch. there's airparrot but it doesnt work on my machine for some reason...
3) Simply pass the netflix URL on to the mac running XBMC and allow it to open the URL in a browser. as i understand it, this is the approach XBMC Flicks uses. Isnt it possible to replace xbmc flicks with this? I click on a video and maybe a browser plugin converts the URL to a webloc file and saves it to a watched folder on the remote mac, which is set to open any file dropped into it. after that point the laptop is no longer needed and can be set aside.
any thoughts? suggestions? anyone done this (or option 2) before?
The drawback there is that the content is not playing on my TV.
However, there seem to be three ways around this:
1) just run an extra hdmi cable from my tv to my laptop and let my laptop be the media center for the duration of the film. this works fine but is not exactly elegant. and id rather not be plugging in and out all the time or tripping over cable runs.
2) AirPlay. my iPhone can stream youtube videos right to XBMC using airPlay. works great! I wonder whether this concept can be hijacked to allow my osx laptop to stream the playback without using wires. this would be great; downside would be that my laptop needs to be running the whole time. also i doubt this is possible as it would require silverlight (a microsoft product) to be airplay-ready. i guess osx 10.8 has this ability built in but im running 10.7 stable enough that i dont want to switch. there's airparrot but it doesnt work on my machine for some reason...
3) Simply pass the netflix URL on to the mac running XBMC and allow it to open the URL in a browser. as i understand it, this is the approach XBMC Flicks uses. Isnt it possible to replace xbmc flicks with this? I click on a video and maybe a browser plugin converts the URL to a webloc file and saves it to a watched folder on the remote mac, which is set to open any file dropped into it. after that point the laptop is no longer needed and can be set aside.
any thoughts? suggestions? anyone done this (or option 2) before?
