[ddfczm]

I have put a little video of what it currently looks like here: http://imageshack.us...os/545/36p.mp4/
(The animation is jerky because of the heavy screen recording software).

Although it is still early and very rough, all feedback & criticism very welcome :).

[sevenofone]

biskyt, on 15 June 2011 - 01:31 PM, said:

Another +1 for this plugin. Really nice being able to use iPlayer without having to quit out of media center first. One thing that would really make the experience better for me would be if you could get it to allow skipping backwards/forwards in the wmv streams.

To the earlier poster from cyprus: Have you tried www.tvcatchup.com ? It has live streaming of all the UK Freeview channels. I assume that it won't work without a VPN if you're outside the UK, but that doeswn't sound like a problem for you. I notice that they also do live streaming to the iPad now too, so it might even be a service that could be built into this new MCE-IPTV project :o)

I tried TV catchup yesterday, but firstly it seems they are having some legal disputes, and second they seem to be blocking several VPN providers. After signing up and trying to access a channel, it gave me an error saying' your ISP is not suitable for playing this channel' and then listed the UK ISP name after it..

oh well, at least the BBC stuff is ok

[sevenofone]

ddfczm, on 15 June 2011 - 02:14 PM, said:

I have put a little video of what it currently looks like here: http://imageshack.us...os/545/36p.mp4/
(The animation is jerky because of the heavy screen recording software).

Although it is still early and very rough, all feedback & criticism very welcome :).

That looks great. The 4OD stuff especially. That will be BBC & Channel 4 available. Brilliant

[wazza1]

Looking great. Any timeline for the release?

[ddfczm]

wazza1, on 17 June 2011 - 11:06 PM, said:

Looking great. Any timeline for the release?

So many things going on outside of this so I cant put a date on it. But I will make an effort, if anyone is interested, to put up very early beta versions in the next week or two :).

[nelbarn]

ddfczm, on 15 June 2011 - 01:53 PM, said:

Yup, I have been looking at all the iPad apps for online media. The main problem is they all use a new streaming technology iOS devices support but very little else does. I have however followed the RFC and created a tool which can receive this format and re-package it into something media center will play and understand. I can therefor support some of these iPad streams however some of them are really locked down (like 4oD) so those would need to use the more traditional launch into a browser approach sadly.

My general plan is this:

Finish building a system which is advanced enough to build my original iPlayer plugins but in such a way that the plugin itself is not written in compiled code. I have done the vast majority of this. You simply provide your styles, assets, information about where to get media data (feeds etc) and information on how to play the media.

Using this system put together plugins for a handful of core services & then release. Ideally people who like to go a little deeper will consider creating / sharing other media sources, hopefully I will have made the barrier low enough for people to do this.

I love your plugin but I only use it from an extender and therefore I find that often the programs on iplayer do not play, presumably because they are not in wmv format. What I tend to see after I click on a program is the buffering sign come up against the blue background and then it disappears and nothing else much happens. I have to click back to get back into your program menu. For this same reason, programs streamed from tunerfreemce from other channels (itv, channel 4, etc.) never work on extenders either. I am just wondering whether what you've mentioned above in relation to the manipulation or repackaging of streams created for the ipad will enable you to transcode all streams into wmv to maintain extender compatibility. This would be absolutely fantastic if you could pull it off. It really is the only thing that is lacking in my mce setup, which is entirely extender based.

[ddfczm]

nelbarn, on 18 June 2011 - 05:27 AM, said:

I love your plugin but I only use it from an extender and therefore I find that often the programs on iplayer do not play, presumably because they are not in wmv format. What I tend to see after I click on a program is the buffering sign come up against the blue background and then it disappears and nothing else much happens. I have to click back to get back into your program menu. For this same reason, programs streamed from tunerfreemce from other channels (itv, channel 4, etc.) never work on extenders either. I am just wondering whether what you've mentioned above in relation to the manipulation or repackaging of streams created for the ipad will enable you to transcode all streams into wmv to maintain extender compatibility. This would be absolutely fantastic if you could pull it off. It really is the only thing that is lacking in my mce setup, which is entirely extender based.

Ok, so this is a fairly messy subject. Yes my code can repackage iPad streams into something media center & an extender will support however there are two problems.

Some iPad streams like those on tvcatchup are easy to access, they are not secured, others like 4oD however are much more secure. If we have the final URL to a 4oD stream this plugin could play it to an extender but some ad supported streaming systems make you jump through many hoops before they give you the URL. It isn't all stuff you can spy on either, sometimes they lock the logic into the compiled code and its very difficult to work out.

The other problem is advertisements. I have no desire to stream ad supported media without showing the appropriate ads, however this can be very tough. The ads are usually separate to the main video file so for the provider to know you have watched the ads they rely on the video player sending tracking information. This is not standardized and thus is difficult to support.


Saying all that however, there are plenty of iPad streams which will be compatible. iPlayer streams for the non wmv encoded content might be a possibility.

Although clicking on a video and opening a browser in media center isn't a great experience I think i can make it better than tunerfree. I have never been a fan of the mouse automation as a means to control video and believe I have alternatives for many cases.

[wazza1]

ddfczm, on 18 June 2011 - 02:19 AM, said:

So many things going on outside of this so I cant put a date on it. But I will make an effort, if anyone is interested, to put up very early beta versions in the next week or two :).

Cool, so looking forward to trying the early beta. thanks

[Dcurtis]

Hi there,

I'm new to this site and joined Purely due to finding this topic online... WOW, this is what I have been looking for!

I have downloaded and installed the iPlayer plugin, however I have a few problems with it that I hoped you may be able to help me with? If not, I'll just wait till the new version is released (in Beta or full version)

I installed it, rebooted and it is only showing in the "Start Menu and Extra's" options, but not on the Start page or in the extra's library at all. Slightly confused here...

Any help would be much appreciated!

David
UK

[mrben]

Just want to say this is looking really good, one of the most polished UIs of any media centre plug-ins, very excited to see updates to the most used plug-in by my family!

[dh]

Just to add my support, been using your plug-in for years now, as with a number of other users, I use media centre on extenders only, and this plug-in has been the only one that works, and works flawlessly. Great news that you are picking this up again.
One comment on the current version, is there anyway of getting it to show all items by default, when I select a channel the plug-in doesn't show the relevant programms for the channel untill i select all.

In fact issue 14, as reported here on your code source site

This post has been edited by dh: 07 July 2011 - 12:35 PM

[mrphil]

jtenniswood, on 27 May 2011 - 10:21 AM, said:

One bit of bad news is that they just announced they're closing SeeSaw tv streaming!
Lets hope it wasn't too hard to develop for.

SeeSaw has been saved and won't be closing.

Hopefully this project is still alive as there are plenty of UK MCE people over at TGB wanting to use the new version!

[duffstars]

Great to hear your working on a new iPlayer plugin the old one was the best designed graphical and functionally until it stopped working for me.

ddfczm, on 25 April 2011 - 10:03 AM, said:

http://img848.imageshack.us/img848/3448/89002801.png

I also see SeeSaw has been saved:
http://blog.seesaw.c...en-greatly.html
Will you be able to put the functionality back into MCEIPTV?

I hope so.

[mogulbashe]

This is all great news. I am an avid user of the iplayer app. There are a couple of things from a UI perspective that I wanted to mention. When going into a category it would be great if the programs could be sorted alphabetically as quite often I know what I want to watch and finding it in say BBC 1 all programs can be a pain.

Also BBC have begun live streaming of each channel and unlike TVCatchup they do not block VPN. At the moment I have been coming out of media center to Iplayer in IE to watch live Formula 1 etc. If you could incorporate the live channels into iplayer that would be wonderful.

Many thanks for this great plugin. I have written a bunch of c# wpf applications but could never get to grips with Media Center Devlopment as I just could not find enough information on it... Thanks Again

This post has been edited by mogulbashe: 25 July 2011 - 02:00 PM

[nelbarn]

Thanks ddfczm for your response on the extender issue. It would be absolutely wonderful if we could get all of this program available on an extender. I noticed that we haven't heard from you in a while and was just wondering whether development on this project was continuing or perhaps the plugin has been released elsewhere and I'd missed it.

Thanks for all your great work, nevertheless.