[RELEASE] XBMC Flicks - Netflix Movies / TV Shows (Video) experimental Addon for XBMC

I hope some on can help my one stumbling block with XBMC and XBMCFlicks is that the TV show seasons are not “grouping” so if a show has 5 I would like to select the season then the episode. Am I doing something wrong. All the shows list the SxEx at the beginning.

Also it would be nice is if the watched shows would display as watched.

I am wondering if the Netflix app for units like the boxee, and the WDLive could be emulated on XBMC

Maybe that is my problem.
I am in the UK.
No matter what i try, everything seems to be fine, i log in and associate my account, then when i select my recommendations or any of the other headings i get taken to a blank screen.
So maybe it does not work in the UK yet.
Anyway here is my new log as you asked.
http://freetexthost.com/6ow2l302og

I did not include the Verbose user info, sorry. i am not really sure what i needed to delete if i did.

(2012-04-20 06:43)bengalih Wrote:  

(2012-04-19 21:23)lestat1977uk Wrote:  Hi all,

been searching through the forums but can't get a definitive answer, can you use XBMCflicks with a UK Netflix account yet? or is this still being worked on?

Sorry if this has been asked already i just wanted an update.

Keep up the good work as always

As far as I know this works only with US accounts, and possibly Canadian. To be honest there probably isn't alot that needs to be done to work with other accounts. I would assume that all the Netflix APIs work the same way, the difference is in selecting the appropriate servers to connect to and download the data.

Until Fekker gets back, or this is taken under the wing of another developer, I don't see support being added for UK. If you are desperate, start digging into the python and taking a look at the URLs being used. It may be as simple as replacing a few strings :/

(2012-04-20 07:15)bengalih Wrote:  

(2012-04-19 22:23)lordjubblydave Wrote:  I have been struggling with this for a couple of hours.
Need some help please.
Running XBMC 10.1 osx

Here is my
log http://freetexthost.com/4wsrtdptgh

I'm not an OSX guy...but I don't see anything in there at this point that shows XBMCFlix misbehaving.
Make sure you enable debug logging in the XBMCFlix plugin (may also want to enable Verbose user info...but if you do make sure you strip any token info out of your log).
Then delete your XBMC.log file to start fresh.
Load up XBMC, go into XBMCFlix and take a look at your queue.

Then post back with that log and what exactly the problem you are having is (can't open the plugin? get an error? can't view queue? etc).

(2012-04-20 15:57)biljol Wrote:  I hope some on can help my one stumbling block with XBMC and XBMCFlicks is that the TV show seasons are not “grouping” so if a show has 5 I would like to select the season then the episode. Am I doing something wrong. All the shows list the SxEx at the beginning.

Also it would be nice is if the watched shows would display as watched.

I am wondering if the Netflix app for units like the boxee, and the WDLive could be emulated on XBMC

I don't think this is (easily) possible anymore since Netflix changed its season grouping.

This is due to the newer model in the Netflix API which you can read about here. To summarize:

Quote:Netflix is moving toward treating a television series as a unified object — a single title — rather than as a set of seasons or discs. The set-of-seasons or set-of-discs model is more of an artifact of the way DVDs are published and marketed, whereas the series-as-a-singular-thing is closer to the natural way of how subscribers think of a television series. You can already see this change emerging on the main Netflix site, and you may also note some changes in the underlying data to support this change.

As far as I know the only way to get them to display as separate seasons would be to parse out the "Ssn 2" or "Season 5". These two formats seem to be the most common, but the issue is there is not always consistency...and Netflix may change the way series are titled (which should technically not affect the API, but will affect the way XBMCFlicks parses out the XML stream).

I know that the Netflix website groups them by season, but none of the other apps I have used (XBMCFlicks, Wii, Vizio, WMC, Roku) group them by season...they all show just one list. So, while technically it would be possible, I don't think it would be worth the work as it would be fragile. And, since it doesn't seem that any of the other apps provide this functionality, I don't think we will see this (ever) in XBMCFlicks. Perhaps if/when Netflix enhances their API to provide this data....but that's not in the future for now...

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(2012-04-20 16:22)lordjubblydave Wrote:  Maybe that is my problem.
I am in the UK.
No matter what i try, everything seems to be fine, i log in and associate my account, then when i select my recommendations or any of the other headings i get taken to a blank screen.
So maybe it does not work in the UK yet.
Anyway here is my new log as you asked.
http://freetexthost.com/6ow2l302og

I did not include the Verbose user info, sorry. i am not really sure what i needed to delete if i did.

That link didn't work for me...but no bother...if you are in the UK then I am pretty sure that's the reason.
I honestly don't know what the differences are (and there is virtually no way for me to test not being in the UK).
However, take a look at the posts in this thread dealing with Canada issues...like this one. Looking through the code a bit and finding out what URLs are being used on your end (a packet capture tool like Wireshark may help).

If you get the log file up, i'll take another look, but not sure I would find anything.

I would agree but if you look at the apps that are in the boxee and WDTV you will see that they are grouped. In fact both of those units use the exact same “App”. You can also group them in XBMC now by using a filter of S2 that will show only the season 2 episodes.

WMC used to do seasons but for some when the new version came out they took it out. In fact that was when I started looking for an alternative.

If you think about it as filters you could just add another step ie. Select the show if “Seasons” option is on then display list. “User” would then select the Season XBMCFlix would apply filter.

Reading the API “Episode titles will include information about the season number and episode number for each episode” they say that they are standardizing on the naming convention for seasons and episodes. Also since XBMC already does this for local TV media and I know that the naming convention can be different for those, XBMC works fine. It should not be that hard to do in XBMCFlixs.

But I am no programmer.

(2012-04-21 05:33)biljol Wrote:  I would agree but if you look at the apps that are in the boxee and WDTV you will see that they are grouped. In fact both of those units use the exact same “App”. You can also group them in XBMC now by using a filter of S2 that will show only the season 2 episodes.

WMC used to do seasons but for some when the new version came out they took it out. In fact that was when I started looking for an alternative.

I didn't say it was impossible (in fact I said the opposite)...and the options you give are pretty much identical to what I already described ("parsing out the season numbers").

But you happen to mention two products (Boxee and WDTV) which seem to be the current outliers. WMC, XBMC, Roku, Several TV Apps,Wii, and I think XBOX and PS3) do not show them by season. I can only assume that those two companies see the value of investing time to rewrite their code every time Netflix makes changes to their API or title format.

(2012-04-21 05:33)biljol Wrote:  If you think about it as filters you could just add another step ie. Select the show if “Seasons” option is on then display list. “User” would then select the Season XBMCFlix would apply filter.

Reading the API “Episode titles will include information about the season number and episode number for each episode” they say that they are standardizing on the naming convention for seasons and episodes. Also since XBMC already does this for local TV media and I know that the naming convention can be different for those, XBMC works fine

I don't see anywhere in that API page that they are "standardizing" simply that they are including information about the season. AFAIK there are still subtle variations in some titles. Does this make it impossible to code for? No...but it does make it harder.

(2012-04-21 05:33)biljol Wrote:  . It should not be that hard to do in XBMCFlixs.
But I am no programmer.

So...you aren't willing to do it..or even learn...even though it's not that hard? But you will come here and complain about it? :/

Realize that XBMC is an open source project, these guys aren't directly paid for what they do. Also realize that the XBMC team itself has no current desire to integrate Netflix (for reasons mentioned in previous posts).

Also realize that XBMCFlicks is an add-on, not even developed by the XBMC team, but by another 3rd party developer who probably has even less time to devote. Also realize that he hasn't even been active in these forums for months.

I agree that ALL of the options EVERYONE wants would be nice to have...but unless someone is going to invest the time.....
I would attempt some more fixes, but unfortunately I am not a Python coder, and even if I was, the main work of this script is in using "regular expressions" which is a really weak area for me coding-wise. I suspect even the developer has some challenges with RegEx (even though he is no dobut versed in them) because most of the current issues with the script are do to parsing strings improperly with RegEx.

Hey guys. New here and have a problem. I think this XBMC app is amazing, however when trying to authorize the XBMCFlicks app I'm getting nowhere.

It opens up "Index of /Applications/FireFox.app/" in Chrome, and then opens FireFox to the Google Home Page.

I'm on OSX 10.7.3 using 11.0 Eden and version 1.0.22 (the "spudsdude" build) of the XBMC plug-in that I got from github in zip format because the plug-in wasn't showing in the regular add-ons section.

I'm located in the USA, and I do have the OSX option selected in the configuration of the plug-in.

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UPDATE:

Ok this post by fekker a couple pages back seemed to have helped me:

(2010-12-14 01:44)fekker Wrote:  FAQ

1. Get nexflix working on your machine natively - this will ensure that you already have siverlight and anything else netflix might want to get working.

2. Turn on Plugin Debugging
Go to Videos / Add-Ons
Right Click XBMC Flicks
Select Add-On Settings
Under Debugging, turn on Both options
Back out to the Add-Ons menu

3. Start XBMC Flicks

At this point your bowser should kick off asking you the account to authorise for netflix usage - do so. If that doenst kick off, you can pull the url from the xbmc.log file in a line that looks like "Authorize user access here: https://api-user.netflix.com/..."
....

However when I did this, I had to leave this window open in FF and then re-do the authorization from XBMC. It THEN gave me the authorize screen. So get your url form that xbmc.log, enter it into FF, authorize and leave it open, go back into XBMC, authorize from there AGAIN...and then it works for OSX.

(2012-04-22 12:18)psionicsin Wrote:  Hey guys. New here and have a problem. I think this XBMC app is amazing, however when trying to authorize the XBMCFlicks app I'm getting nowhere.
....
However when I did this, I had to leave this window open in FF and then re-do the authorization from XBMC. It THEN gave me the authorize screen. So get your url form that xbmc.log, enter it into FF, authorize and leave it open, go back into XBMC, authorize from there AGAIN...and then it works for OSX.

Kudos for figuring it out yourself....
Yeah the authorization seems a little buggy (perhaps moreso on OSX). The suggestions I put a few posts back (in clearing out some of the add-on data) may help.

Even on Windows with IE I have sometimes had to run the authorization process a couple of times to get it to "take".

Ideally it should put your authorization info in the userinfo.txt file so you don't need to hardcode it, but I haven't had enough time to really understand the code.

I do think this problem is more an EDEN thing...as I suggested it may be because some library locations may not always be accessible the way the script expects them to be. I didn't seem to have this issue on Dharma....and you should be able to reuse your userinfo.txt file from a Dharma install.

(2012-04-22 18:34)bengalih Wrote:  Kudos for figuring it out yourself....
Yeah the authorization seems a little buggy (perhaps moreso on OSX). The suggestions I put a few posts back (in clearing out some of the add-on data) may help.

Even on Windows with IE I have sometimes had to run the authorization process a couple of times to get it to "take".

Ideally it should put your authorization info in the userinfo.txt file so you don't need to hardcode it, but I haven't had enough time to really understand the code.

I do think this problem is more an EDEN thing...as I suggested it may be because some library locations may not always be accessible the way the script expects them to be. I didn't seem to have this issue on Dharma....and you should be able to reuse your userinfo.txt file from a Dharma install.

I seem to have spoken too soon. All of my information and queue is there, but when I go to play something it doesn't play. What's happening now?

(2012-04-22 18:48)psionicsin Wrote:  I seem to have spoken too soon. All of my information and queue is there, but when I go to play something it doesn't play. What's happening now?

No idea...but first step would be a debug log...

(2012-04-22 19:23)bengalih Wrote:  No idea...but first step would be a debug log...

http://pastebin.com/KGncmFVZ