[pr0xZen]

This is looking very interesting - Got my eye on this

[ratzofftoya]

UPDATE: pr0xZen, you gave me an idea, and this might be of interest to ozkhan1.

i looked into the BubbleUPNP server piece. i installed on my Playon machine and set up it as a proxy DLNA server.
all of a sudden Netflix came in at HD on my remote machine!

will play with this a bit more.

UPDATE #2: Confirmed that this works. Checking the "Create a proxy Media Server on this LAN" option for the Playon server in BubbleUPNP will enable HD content on Amazon VOD, HULU and Netflix!

UPDATE #3: ARRRGH. Multiple clients cannot be used at the same, even if the content provider is different. There is a known limitation that Playon can't serve Netflix to 2 devices a the same time but you could stream Hulu to one device and Netflix on the other. Setting Playon as a proxy breaks this (which makes sense, of course). Back to the drawing board.

Wow, very interesting. So if you're only using one remote client to stream (at a time), it'll still stream in HD if you set up the PlayOn server through BubbleUPnP? What if XBMC is running on the server's machine, as well, but not actively streaming? Does this actively pull anything from PlayOn such that it'll break HD streaming to the remote client? What if the server's machine runs an XBMC.MyLibrary script every 4 hours or so...Does that process interfere with HD streaming to a client?

Thanks for your work on this--super helpful!

[ozkhan1]

Hello hello

This is awesome news and the workaround will work for me because I have only one client to stream to at the moment at one time. I realize this might be an issue down the line if I have more I can't wait to try it later tonight.

Thanks for the solution

[hellohello]

Wow, very interesting. So if you're only using one remote client to stream (at a time), it'll still stream in HD if you set up the PlayOn server through BubbleUPnP? What if XBMC is running on the server's machine, as well, but not actively streaming? Does this actively pull anything from PlayOn such that it'll break HD streaming to the remote client? What if the server's machine runs an XBMC.MyLibrary script every 4 hours or so...Does that process interfere with HD streaming to a client?
Thanks for your work on this--super helpful!

I would assume that XBMC.MyLibrary running wouldnt interfere or interrupt a stream from this frankenstein BubbleUPnP/Playon setup as that tool never interfered with it before. I even have it set up so that the source on the XBMC clients point to the BubbleUPnP/Playon proxy and labeled it as "Playon" in order for the XBMC.MyLibrary to cull strm's.

(CONFIRMED: running XBMC.MyLibrary locally while Netflix playing on remote client - no uses)

[ozkhan1]

hellohello. This has been my whitewhale for a long time.

Openelc + playon with Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc is what people have been striving for a while now. Amazon Firetv is like the biggest topic over at the hardware section only because people want the best of both worlds in one box. With this on a NUC you can really have a great XBMC set up. I agree its not perfect and requires a windows PC running Playon (which is not free) but it does work. I had been enjoying standard def stuff from playon till now.. Would love to get HD Netflix on my OpenELEC box.

Playon is really a great product. I first bought it back in 2009 and at that time it was not working that great on my PS3. So I stopped using it till i built my first OE machine. Now I see the enhancements they have made and the value in it. I bought the HD package. I think they dont realize they are sitting on something of a goldmine if they can provide better integration with XBMC for all the apps they have. Imagine having playon provide HD streams from all their apps on multiple xbmc machines on a lan. I personlly would not mind paying the 60 or 70 dollars for a piece of software that does that.

[hellohello]

i think we have similar set ups, although my openelec boxes are ion based (zotac, acer & asus) and i too think playon can be great. it's a little buggy: for instance i sometimes have to click a show i want to watch twice (the first time fails). i have XBMC.MyLibrary run every 6 hours (and also triggered to run after Playon "auto" updates) to generate strm's so i can incorporate them more cleanly into our media library.

i get the appeal of OUYA and now Amazon Fire TV but i LOVE having control over a central interface that is consistent throughout the house. i hate jumping out of one APP only to go to another to find what i want to watch. so, while this frankenstein set up is good, it does seem to have it's drawbacks. while one user is on Netflix, no other XBMC client can get to Amazon or Hulu or anything else that Playon might be serving. which makes sense: from the Playon server's perspective, the requests are coming from a singular client, that being the BubbleUPnP server.

so that brings up a couple of ideas:

1. can more than more BubbleUPnP server run on the same LAN with each BUPnP farming out a separate instance of Playon as a DIFFERENT proxy?
2. does the BubbleUPnP server HAVE to be on the Playon server to serve HD content?

of course, doing that would break XBMC.MyLibrary as each strm it generates would contain the specific UPnP address of whatever proxy you're pointing your XBMC to.

but yeah, it's certainly a workaround for now. i've asked the Playon people to consider an advanced option where the end-user could whitelist the IP addresses of XBMC boxes capable of handling HD. looking into this more however, i realize that maybe that wouldnt work as there seems to be a constant back and forth between client and server in the DLNA model. i dunno.

[ozkhan1]

i think we have similar set ups, although my openelec boxes are ion based (zotac, acer & asus) and i too think playon can be great. it's a little buggy: for instance i sometimes have to click a show i want to watch twice (the first time fails). i have XBMC.MyLibrary run every 6 hours (and also triggered to run after Playon "auto" updates) to generate strm's so i can incorporate them more cleanly into our media library.

i get the appeal of OUYA and now Amazon Fire TV but i LOVE having control over a central interface that is consistent throughout the house. i hate jumping out of one APP only to go to another to find what i want to watch. so, while this frankenstein set up is good, it does seem to have it's drawbacks. while one user is on Netflix, no other XBMC client can get to Amazon or Hulu or anything else that Playon might be serving. which makes sense: from the Playon server's perspective, the requests are coming from a singular client, that being the BubbleUPnP server.

so that brings up a couple of ideas:

1. can more than more BubbleUPnP server run on the same LAN with each BUPnP farming out a separate instance of Playon as a DIFFERENT proxy?
2. does the BubbleUPnP server HAVE to be on the Playon server to serve HD content?

of course, doing that would break XBMC.MyLibrary as each strm it generates would contain the specific UPnP address of whatever proxy you're pointing your XBMC to.

but yeah, it's certainly a workaround for now. i've asked the Playon people to consider an advanced option where the end-user could whitelist the IP addresses of XBMC boxes capable of handling HD. looking into this more however, i realize that maybe that wouldnt work as there seems to be a constant back and forth between client and server in the DLNA model. i dunno.

But if I understand correctly the Playon folks have stated they can stream HD to multiple clients as long as the destination client does not advertise itself as a geneic UPNP/DLNA client, correct? And if thats the case and based on your log you posted a few posts ago, it seems to be an issue with XBMC which Ned mentioned could be a minor bug and fixed easily.

I would still like playon to be able to push HD across a LAN on any client, it does not make any sense at to why they would have a white list. Is it due to bandwidth issues or load it can handle, I dont know. I am not a hard core tech savvy guy to really comprehend that part.

But I see what you mean when you mentioned your set up is kind of like mine. I do not want to toggle back and forth between different clients and TV sources either. I have a Samsung Smart TV with crap load of apps but I hate having to use a different remote and rarely use them. Another advantage with XBMC is, you can continue to browse other addons and apps for content while one is playing in the back ground. I love that feature.

It would be great if you could share how you have the xbmc library and playon auto updates automated to synchronize. I actually never thought of that. But now I see how having stale lists could be a problem. If you dont mind, please share some instructions on how you did that, because I never actually tried to do it myself.

Thanks.

[ratzofftoya]

So how exactly do I create this Bubble UPnP solution? Any help is greatly appreciated!

[hellohello]

So how exactly do I create this Bubble UPnP solution? Any help is greatly appreciated!

Assuming you're going to run BubbleUPnP on the SAME machine you have the PlayOn server on:

1. go here and download the Windows Installer (at the very top)
2. run the installer
3. when complete, there's an option to Configure, hit Finish
4. a web page should open up: http://127.0.0.1:58050/#main, click on the 3rd tab - MEDIA SERVERS
5. you should see your PlayOn server in that list (you might also see your XBMC boxes - ignore those)
6. select your Playon instance. in the right pane you'll see the option to "Create a proxy Media Server on this LAN" check that

and that's it for the BubbleUPnP piece.

i dont know how you have your XBMC boxes talking to the PlayOn server, or if you use XBMC.MyLibrary, but here's what i did:

in XBMC:
1. go to VIDEO > FILES
2. rename your PLAYON source to PLAYON.OLD
3. click ADD VIDEOS... > BROWSE > UPNP DEVICES
4. find PLAYON [PROXY] <-----BubbleUPnP adds this [PROXY] suffix
5. when you go into it, you'll see all the same things as if you were browsing your Playon server directly
6. hit OK
7. name this instance PLAYON (or whatever the original name of your Playon server was)

that's it. if you run XBMC.MyLibrary, it should run as if there've been updates to the strm.

Hope this helps.

[pr0xZen]

Someone needs to post this UPnP identifier issue to a trac ASAP. Unlikely its going to get the needed attention without it.
Might also want to mention it here: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=184203

[hellohello]

http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/15153 opened

[Montellese]

Looking at the code I don't see how XBMC would send a different user-agent on localhost than it does on LAN. Reading the code both would be

Code:

UPnP/1.0 DLNADOC/1.50 Platinum/0.6.9.1

which is a (more or less) generic UPnP user-agent.

[hellohello]

Montellese, thanks for following up on this. not sure exactly what they are looking for but my noob attempts at looking at a wireshack dump seems to suggest that the XML portion following the user-agent ID (which contains the manufacturer info as well as what the device can receive) is sometimes missing.

then again, i'm pretty new at this. i could, if you want, run another wireshark dump if you can tell me exactly what parameters i should configure it for.

[Montellese]

I did run wireshark myself but I'm not sure what to look for exactly either. That's why I asked inthe PlayOn forum.

[hellohello]

for those of us following this thread, some insght from the Playon people (http://www.playon.tv/forum/media-devices...ment-39441):

"To be clear, the issue we see from PlayOn's side is XBMC is sending out a different user-agent (UA) between its DLNA browsing requests and it’s media requests. It’s media requests include “XBMC” in the UA string, so PlayOn can see it is XBMC.

If XBMC can be changed to similarly include the string “XBMC” in it’s browsing requests (anywhere in the UA is fine), then PlayOn can identify it is XMBC from the DLNA browsing.

If that can be it would be great! Thanks for looking into it and reaching out!"

Again, Montellese. thanks much for following up on this.