Open source add-on

[alberiv80]

Hi everyone,
I'm WMC user since it was first released in 2005 and even though a lot of products came to the media market since then, like smart TVs, I still believe WMC is the best one and for some time to come. This is also confirmed by the WMC still alive population.
Unfortunately the program is missing an essential feature to be perfect, the ability to stream media through the internet from popular media websites.
The macrotube add-on would be perfect but it's dead. The provider helper project doesn't work so well and it has a limited set of providers, basically only YouTube. I'm a professional programmer and I would like to make such a add-on, a open source project with the contributions of the WMC community because I strongly believe in the product.
I had the idea to make an add-on that interfaces with and exploits the video add-ons of the xbmc project. The xbmc project it's very active and updated and there are a lot of add-ons available. They are downloaded from the repository directly in the add-on. Technically it's not so hard I already made the basic add-on that shows the list of available xbmc video add-ons from the repository. Xbmc video add-ons are written in python so we need a .net python interpreter or pinvoke the windows python library and also translate the xbmc python GUI library back to show WMC GUI elements.
Before I start doing this big work, I would like any comments and suggestions from you. Also if everyone is interested in participating, is more than welcome.
The alternative would be to make an open source macrotube clone but in this case the hard part, i.e. the scrapers part, is not already done like in the architecture described previously and it also needs periodical maintenance as the providers change their websites code. I don't have much time and the WMC community is not so flourish as the xbmc one (and I don't understand why, maybe because it runs on more platforms ).
Regards

[barnabas1969]

DVBLink IPTV add-in?

[alberiv80]

sorry but I can't see any similarity with the addon I described. First of all that is not usable via WMC it's a windows w32 application. It's only a media streamer/recorder like the one you probably have inside your router. It says it can stream to WMC and that's simply because WMC can open streams.
To make it simple you can't watch youtube videos with this program, simply because there is no direct url access to youtube streams. All the (free) youtube plugins around (on every platform) work on the html page to grab the video. And there are concerns even if this is legal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping#Legal_issues). I guess it's not legal in commercial applications.
However I'm not sure if youtube plugins on smarttvs and commercial (not owned by Google) products can directly access thanks to license agreement. By the way even microsoft has no direct access, I know it because on my windows phone there isn't a youtube app and I red that google denied it because they are competitors.
Least but not last it costs 20 euros
That's what I know, correct me if I'm wrong.

[barnabas1969]

First of all that is not usable via WMC it's a windows w32 application.

No, DVBLink IPTV installs a virtual BDA tuner. You can then setup a channel in your guide which "tunes" to an IPTV stream.

[alberiv80]

ok, good to know. That will be useful in the future when tv will run on IP. In my country at the moment only premium services can be watched on IP.
But I remember that WMC already has IPTV support and the US "version" has some IPTV channels installed, doesn't it ?
I remember there was a hack to let WMC believes you are in the US and then using a proxy with a US ip, you were able to watch those channels everywhere.
Anyway I wrote some more code and I decided that the best way would be to make the addon to support both xbmc video addons and providers written specifically for the addon.
The xbmc python api available to xbmc addons writers is made of 5 python modules with bindings to C code. They use swig to made the python library, very easy.
Here are the swig files with declarations inside
https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/tree/maste ... faces/swig
Code for these functions must be written to provide that behavior under WMC.

[kingwr]

Hi everyone,
I'm WMC user since it was first released in 2005...

Windows Media Center Edition ("M C E") was originally released in 2002 for specially equipped OEM platforms. M C E 2005 was the first version available to anyone and was released in 2004.

[barnabas1969]

ok, good to know. That will be useful in the future when tv will run on IP. In my country at the moment only premium services can be watched on IP.
But I remember that WMC already has IPTV support and the US "version" has some IPTV channels installed, doesn't it ?
I remember there was a hack to let WMC believes you are in the US and then using a proxy with a US ip, you were able to watch those channels everywhere.
Anyway I wrote some more code and I decided that the best way would be to make the addon to support both xbmc video addons and providers written specifically for the addon.
The xbmc python api available to xbmc addons writers is made of 5 python modules with bindings to C code. They use swig to made the python library, very easy.
Here are the swig files with declarations inside
https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/tree/maste ... faces/swig
Code for these functions must be written to provide that behavior under WMC.

It is always helpful to tell us where you are located. The majority of users on this site are in the USA, and I think the 2nd most populous group is in the UK. I think that people in the UK enjoy more free (and legal) IPTV channels than we can get in the USA.

The "Internet TV" to which you are referring isn't exactly the same as "IPTV". It was never very good, and Microsoft discontinued it.

[alberiv80]

Sorry I forgot to mention I'm in Rome, Italy.
By the way there is also a IPTV addon for xbmc if I ever will be able to finish this addon.
I hope someone will reply with some comments and suggestions about the addon development, that was the purpose of my post.
Maybe posting this question on the xbmc forum is more appropriate because the problem is more related to the xbmc code.
thanks for your time and sorry for my grammar errors

[alberiv80]

I posted the question on the xbmc forum if someone's interested
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=190063

[PrplHaz4]

@alberiv80 I think the goal is a good one - as there are clearly not enough streaming options for WMC - but it will be no easy feat. XBMC definitely has a great set of plugins, so being able to use any of those inside WMC would be fantastic.

You may also want to check out the Online Videos extension for MediaPortal. They have a fairly large, curated library of scrapers in many different languages available through an API, as well as a standalone client and MP plugin - might offer a good base for what you're looking to do.
https://code.google.com/p/mp-onlinevideos2/
Update: site list http://onlinevideos.nocrosshair.de/

[mark1234]

Streaming content is a definite weakness in WMC, whilst other platforms focus on that now - XBMC being particularly good as you mention. If it was possible to piggy back on XBMC's add-ins in WMC, that would be a fantastic feature. Just as long as you're aware that WMC has a small, and shrinking, user base.