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[BETA] XBMB3C - Media Browser AddOn for XBMC
#1
Hello All!

As some of you know, I have been working on a MediaBrowser3 AddOn for XBMC.
This will allow for complete database sharing between XBMC and other MB3 clients.

If you are not familiar with MediaBrowser3 - it is a great cross-platform server/client solution with extremely good library management and meta-data collection.
More info here: http://www.mediabrowser3.com/
Note that MB3 already has great support for XBMC meta-data management - check it out even if you don't check out the AddOn!

As of now, the plugin is mostly functional for basic use. There is still a lot of work to be done though!

The AddOn is available in the official XBMC repo - XBMB3C

If you would like to help test (or even better - develop!) you can find my Git here with alpha/beta releases:

https://github.com/xnappo/plugin.video.x...mb3c-0.6.5

Note that that link is pointing to the latest 'stable' version - you can go to the 'master' branch to see the latest.

See YouTube Video here (including how to integrate the AddOn with the main menu):


Below are some screenshots:
watch gallery


Regards,
xnappo

P.S. Thank to Hippojay for the PleXBMC AddOn this started from
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#2
Nice work xnappo.
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#3
Thanks for your work on this.

Just curious, would this ever work with xbmc ios app. I use xbmc ios app often to browse my library, if using this solution would my media be populated in xbmc app, or is that an entirely different situation.
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#4
Looking really good!
Is it reporting plaback progress as well, so that I can watch half a movie on XBMC and then resume watching it on my tablet when I'm out the door?
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#5
(2013-11-17, 09:15)zetterlund Wrote: Looking really good!
Is it reporting plaback progress as well, so that I can watch half a movie on XBMC and then resume watching it on my tablet when I'm out the door?

Not quite yet - that is certainly on the list. I am trying to get all the meta-data done this weekend and then will work on that.

It is actually a bit complicated - I could use some help here if there are any devs with experience. From this thread:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=163638
sounds like I need to have an XBMC service running to monitor playback.

xnappo
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#6
Thanks you so much for working on this! FWIW, I think this is one of the most exciting plugins happening right now. If this can reach feature parity with the standard XBMC video library view, then I'll move my backend to MB3. I've been playing around with MB3 for the last day or so and it's excellent.

It adds a few things that round out and compliment the XBMC solution:
1) Excellent transcoding for streaming to remote viewers and/or clients with limited codec support.
2) Very good web-based interface for library management.
3) What seems to be a very robust scraper.

Cheers and thanks again. Looking forward to the resume/watched functionality!!
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#7
Couldn't agree more. MediaBrowser 3 seriously complements XBMC - it shares the basic philosophy (ie open-source), has a really helpful/friendly community (and development team), has been around for ages and has a nice 'designed-from-the-ground-up' feel to it (I believe version 3 was a massive overhaul). And the Web UI just works (and looks) incredible.

Plus, as you say, support for 'thin clients' like phones/tablets (of the unjailbroken variety) plugs a significant gap we have here. Exciting indeed.

I tested out this addon and it worked great first-time on my Windows box with XBMC (although I too am looking forward to resume/watched being synced!)
Fantastic job, xnappo!

On my Pi (running OpenELEC 3.2.3), I ran into two problems which I solved as follows:
  1. I first had to resize my Storage partition since I was running out of space on the default 1GB image (the addon uses quite a bit of space for image caching). This manifests itself as an error loading the list of TV Shows/Movies; along with a Disk Space error in the log.
    I did so following the procedure here. (Back up SD card first, of course!).
  2. The upper-case/lower-case of the server name of my library 'Media Locations' didn't match the case of the server name that XBMC had previously stored for credentials.
    As a result, authentication failed connecting to the file to stream when attempting to play a video via this addon.
    With the debug log enabled (and 'Debugging' in the addon active), I saw:
    Quote:INFO: FileSmb->Open: Unable to open file : 'smb://servername/tv shows/video.mp4'
    unix_err:'d' error : 'Permission denied'
    ...in the XBMC log. I set guest access on the share itself (didn't work); I then attempted to specify file-sharing credentials in 'sources.xml' (also didn't seem to work) - as per here; and also in 'mediasources.xml' (also didn't seem to work)...
    Finally, I took a look at 'passwords.xml'. I noticed that the network path specified in the error above was all lower case; where in 'passwords.xml', it was all uppercase from when XBMC had specified it when browsing to the path before. So what did the trick was specifying another set of credentials, with the correct username/password as well as matching case for the servername, in 'passwords.xml' (all three of these files are in the Userdata folder) - and, after a reboot, this solved the issue.
    The syntax of passwords.xml is:
    Quote:<passwords>
    <path>
    <from pathversion="1">smb://servername/</from>
    <to pathversion="1">smb://username:password@servername/</to>
    </path>
    <path>
    <from pathversion="1">smb://SERVERNAME/</from>
    <to pathversion="1">smb://username:password@SERVERNAME/</to>
    </path>
    </passwords>
    Because I'd captured my server name lower case in MB3's Media Library paths, the 'servername' in passwords.xml needed to be all lower-case as well in order for this addon to work. (So I ended up with two password entries: one with 'upper' case for the servername from XBMC from before; and one completely lowercase for this addon.)

    As a workaround, if you run into authentication issues and don't want to mess with the above, setting your 'Media Library' sources in MB3's setup to uppercase server-names in their network paths will probably solve this (if you've browsed to the path in XBMC before).


    Also, as mentioned above, none of this affects XBMC running under Windows: only OpenELEC (and presumably other Linux flavours)

So in short: whilst browsing the library on on the Pi is rather slow (for now!), this addon definitely does work on it!

This presumably will work the same on any OpenELEC instance of XBMC as well.

Once again, thanks xnappo! Can't wait to see where this goes!
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#8
So far its fairly quick and responsive which is great.

I do have a few concerns though.

I use aeon mq5, entry points as far as i know cannot be added like aeon nox can, i guess i can talk to marcos but this might be an issue with some skins.

Also i dont get any discart, or any director info, run time, stuff like that in skin, should it be working? If not no worries

I guess down the line my other concern is using skins when you playback the media in xbmc when you hit info in mq5 during media playback, a poster, clearart, and discart pop up, along with cast, synopsis, ect.... its a very nice looking skin, would any of this artwork using this plugin work in that situation when a movie is actually being played back in xbmc native player? Right now when I hit info its pulling up artwork and synopsis and cast information scanned by xbmc itself and artwork downloader, so Im concerned none of this will work or show up with the plugin.

This would be the perfect solution and i thank you for the work, im just a bit concerned about possible shortcomings that maybe cant be overcome.
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#9
(2013-11-19, 13:48)Ghostdivision Wrote: I use aeon mq5, entry points as far as i know cannot be added like aeon nox can, i guess i can talk to marcos but this might be an issue with some skins.

Sure - hopefully there is a work-around for aeon mq5 - but yeah, it requires a skin with menu modification in order to integrate cleanly - not much I can do about that.

Quote:Also i dont get any discart, or any director info, run time, stuff like that in skin, should it be working? If not no worries
Meta-data is in progress. See the Issues list on my Git for what I plan to work on:
https://github.com/xnappo/plugin.video.X...state=open
You can also see my work in progress here:
https://github.com/xnappo/plugin.video.X...default.py

Now DiscArt is another story. I don't believe discart is a 'native' XBMC thing - instead is it skin specific (don't quote me on that). At any rate - if you can do some leg-work to figure out the API call I can easily add it. For example to add fanart the API is:
Code:
liz=xbmcgui.ListItem(details.get('title','Unknown'), iconImage=thumbPath, thumbnailImage=thumbPath)
liz.setProperty('fanart_image', fanart)

Quote:I guess down the line my other concern is using skins when you playback the media in xbmc when you hit info in mq5 during media playback, a poster, clearart, and discart pop up, along with cast, synopsis, ect.... its a very nice looking skin, would any of this artwork using this plugin work in that situation when a movie is actually being played back in xbmc native player? Right now when I hit info its pulling up artwork and synopsis and cast information scanned by xbmc itself and artwork downloader, so Im concerned none of this will work or show up with the plugin.

This would be the perfect solution and i thank you for the work, im just a bit concerned about possible shortcomings that maybe cant be overcome.

At some point we will be limited by what an AddOn can do - and then the only option will be to open up the hood and change the engine (which is not something I am going to do BTW).

At this point though, the limitation is my time and skill.

Thanks for testing,
xnappo
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#10
The first screens of our upcoming iPad app are now being released:

Image

It will be great to pair these two together once they're available!
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#11
Looks like it's going to be AWESOME!
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#12
All,

FYI I have determined that moving forward with watched status and other status symbols are going to require skin modifications.

It will still be usable with all skins, but to get all the 'recently added'/'watched' etc symbols will require a custom skin. This is also true for other artwork types such as banners.

I will be making modifications and providing diffs for the skin I use (Aeon Nox). It will be up to others to contribute diffs for other skins.

xnappo
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#13
Version 0.3.0 has been released: https://github.com/xnappo/plugin.video.X...MB3C-0.3.0

This adds Meta-data and fixes Boxsets. Note that there is a bug in XBMC Frodo preventing 'Cast' from working - it will be fixed in Gotham. I am looking into a work-around that will require a skin mod.

Uninstall the old version first. In you made 'root' menus, you will need to delete them and add them again to get metadata.

watch gallery


xnappo
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#14
(2013-11-21, 18:30)xnappo Wrote: All,

FYI I have determined that moving forward with watched status and other status symbols are going to require skin modifications.

It will still be usable with all skins, but to get all the 'recently added'/'watched' etc symbols will require a custom skin. This is also true for other artwork types such as banners.

I will be making modifications and providing diffs for the skin I use (Aeon Nox). It will be up to others to contribute diffs for other skins.

xnappo

Hey

Just wondering, will you stick to PleXBMC infolabels in this? It would be nice if I could re-use existing code in Amber.
My skins:

Amber
Quartz

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#15
(2013-11-24, 19:34)pecinko Wrote: Hey

Just wondering, will you stick to PleXBMC infolabels in this? It would be nice if I could re-use existing code in Amber.

Yes - I will wherever possible.

xnappo
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[BETA] XBMB3C - Media Browser AddOn for XBMC5