Request for help and Call to Arms: TV streaming on the Xbox threatened
#1
Rainbow 
Gentlemen, Ladies, Users of the xbox,

It is a woeful news indeed that stage6 has closed. This leaves streaming of tv-programmes and movies from online on the xbox a glorious thing we <i>used</i> to be able to do.

stage6 was what powered the two remaining working tv-sreaming plugins.

DivxLive and Joox.

Xbox tv-streaming is now, to the best of my knowlege, gone. There are sites out there, and, I hope that it is within the abillity of the community to make them work.

I'm starting this thread to request the help of the many great programmers in our community to solving this problem. And to ask if there is any way the masses of us who can't actually code python well enough can help.

Here is my personal collection of sites like this:

http://www.surfthechannel.com
http://www.powerflv.com
http://www.sidereel.com
http://www.tv-links.cc
http://www.peekvid.com

Could anyone else who knows any other good sites append them here to help community members who may be willing and capable of writing the plugins/scripts to scrape these sites.

I'll add any more I can think of as they occur to me. Remember folks that Stage6 based ones will nolonger work! Sad

Lets beat this problem people!
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#2
for some wacky reason powerflv.com doesn't like 'www.' so please use http://powerflv.com instead Smile
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#3
I'm having a go at fixing powerflv now. It seems to just be a change in page structure which broke the plugin, and I have it mostly working. Can't test right now as I don't have access to an Xbox.
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#4
http://fools.bigbudden.com/nickspoon/PowerFLV.zip

Fixed version of the PowerFLV plugin, will list all videos and play some of them.
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#5
Rainbow 
Thanks bro.

Loks like tdou is definately working from the PowerFLV plugin now :-D (though their servers are always woefully slow!). Stage5 obiously won't and I culdn't get the few veoh links to work (probably they'd only be five minute prviews even if they worked :-) )...megavideo doesn't seem to be working.

S6 also lks like it's working as well.

Thanks for yur hard work Nickspoon! I should be able to find some things to watch now :-D (if only we culd crack the VeohTV problem as there's loads of veoh links that probably won't show more than 5 min previews even if we managed to link the videos themselves....

Cheers Bro!

Anyone able to revive any of the other scripts from the dead? surfthechannel?

Also is there any way that I can help with http://www.tv-links.cc given I know extremely little python. I previously identified some expressions around the category listings in a different post don't know if that will help folks ;-) think it's the Tv-links is back post.
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#6
The XOT script has support for http://www.quicksilverscreen.com which also holds a lot of media. XOT 3.0.1 is coming soon, which will extent the support for the site even further. So check it out on http://code.google.com/p/xot-uzg/
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#7
@Basje: No, it doesn´t support quicksilverscreen AT ALL. Because they switched to Veoh, Megavideo etc. So the quicksilverscreen channel in your script is empty all the time.
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#8
hew97 Wrote:@Basje: No, it doesn´t support quicksilverscreen AT ALL. Because they switched to Veoh, Megavideo etc. So the quicksilverscreen channel in your script is empty all the time.

Yes it does. Like I said in 3.0.1, I just coded it. Megavideo is working like a charm and veoh.com is almost finished! Googlevideo is finished, I just need some time to clean things up and then I will release it.
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#9
Sounds reasonably good... can´t wait. Thanks.
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#10
http://www.cucirca.com/ for prison break, lost, heroes and some others.
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#11
Quicksilverscreen is back with divx movies on their main site (from divxvine.com).
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#12
I did some movie site testing the last couple of days and these are my finding so far:

"Veoh":
-Video quality is very good
-URL's of long movie version change constantly (every 10 minutes or so).
-Server is fast (direct streaming)

"Mega video"
-Video quality is not so good (~320x200) (also XBMC rendering is bad). Not acceptable quality I think.
-URL's are stable
-Server is fast (direct streaming)

"Surf the channel quality"
-Video quality between (320x200) to (640x480)
-URLs are stable
-Server is slow (lots of buffering)

"Google video"
-I'm having troubles playing higher quality videos. XBMC crashes with Mplayer, and DVDplayer does not play the movie.

Veoh is the best so far but as stated the URLs constantly change.

Almost all movies on these sites are Flash videos (.flv) and my experience is that XBMC is not a good flash player (at the moment). Are there plans to improve this?

Also for all sites which I have seen the movie links cannot be retrieved by simply parsing the HTML (like was possible for stage6). There is no direct relation between the HTML link and the FLV video link. I use a tool called "Replay Media Catcher" to retieve the direct movie links. But maybe there is a trick which I need to learn. Other people in this thread seem to have more success.

The search continues....
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#13
rodejo16 Wrote:I did some movie site testing the last couple of days and these are my finding so far:

"Veoh":
-Video quality is very good
-URL's of long movie version change constantly (every 10 minutes or so).
-Server is fast (direct streaming)

Is there a way to extract the URL of the long movies? Thus far, I have only be able to get the preview URL's for my XOT Script?
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#14
Hoi Basje,

The only way (until now) how I have been able to get the URL of the long movies is using the Replay Media Catcher tool. This tool shows you the URI to the media. I use this to analyse URL's. Based on this I can say that the Veoh URLs constantly change.

The Veoh movies play fine on the XBOX and the quality is good. Also the server has enough bandwidth todo direct streaming (I watched a complete Veoh movie this evering on my XBOX).

I think the next step is analyse the HTTP request/responses in more detail. We need to know what the Veoh player is doing. But this can be difficult.

I think we should join our effort and exchange our findings.

Another (possible) solution I have in mind is setup a separate server which acts as a bridge. The XBOX does not directly access the Veoh site but this (helper) server. The server runs all the tools to get the direct (movie) URL and returns it to the XBOX (client). In fact the server is a smart webbrowser. However, I hope we can solve it without such a solution.

Rodejo (en veel succes)
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#15
A number of people have requested script support for movie sites like Veoh, 66stage and surfthechannel. All these sites use flash movies files. These files are played using the adobe flash player or a proprietary (Veoh) player which is started from the HTML page.

Although XBMC can play flash video streams (.flv) it does not support the adobe flash player features like SWF files, RTMP protocol, authentication, etc. (other threads in this forum have already confirmed this).

My conclusion is that none of the above movie sites can be supported in XBMC using a Python script. Only sites which provide the direct .flv link can be supported. None of the above sites do this.

If anyone knows a solution for the above then please let me know.

Rodejo
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