Thinking about writing a plugin for ABC iView here in OZ and was wondering if anyone else is
interested in helping out? I'm a Java developer rather than python but willing to give it a go
to contribute something back to the plex community!
I started to write one a few weeks ago (just messing around for a single evening). I've got as far as scraping all the channel information and listing each programme for each channel and presenting the menus. It does build a URL of what should be the URL to view the show, but that's not working yet.
I haven't done any of the setup required for a flash player (it's on the wiki somewhere) because I'm not sure how to get the co-ordinates of the controls for a player that resizes as you resize the window. I wonder if Plex's WebKit view uses a fixed size that you could set your browser window to in order to find the play,stop, scrub etc widget positions?
I'm not really sure if I'll have much more time for working on it (a 4 month old baby takes a lot of time), so I've attached what I've got here. This DOES NOT play videos yet.
Thanks Paul appreciate you giving me a copy of what you have done. I started to have a look at the list of channels etc and started to get a weird decoding error but could be my lack of
knowledge on the framework etc. Totally understand with your time as I have 3 kids myself! Will try and take more of a look and let you know how I go.
I had a go at working out the site configuration file. Using this, it does pull in the flash and display the right stream… however, I think the stream actually does a redirect (or something similar) to a summary page. I’m fairly certain it is using the correct URL as pasting it into a browser it will start the right stream, but only the second time around… (hard to explain!)
So what is needed is for Plex to do a single click to start the video… not sure how to do that.
Also, the stretching of the stream to fit the window is a bit tricky…
Cheers Ryan just got a basic site configuration file myself and will take a look at what you have done also. Looking at the BBC iplayer configuration I think we need to configure some sort of event to pickup the need to click to
start the video.
Below is part of my Site Configuration file for ABC iView. For the life of me I still cann’t get to play. Have also tried looking for the white pixel on the play arrow symbol.
[codebox]
<site site=“http://.*abc.net.au”
plugin=“iview_209_loader.*swf”
initialState=“loading”
version=“1.0”>
…
[/codebox]
Below is attached a picture of the iview player in action and paused.
No worries all to do with the geo location ip checks all these sites do. Really appreciate the help tho!
Have implemented you suggestions and think you are on the right track but I don't think the condition is
matching as I see an endless 'Executing Moving to state loading' on the Plex Media Server console. But
has atleast moved me more forward than I could get.
Thought that maybe the case. Cann't wait for the more extensive documentation around all this!
Nothing magic here just copied others. Would clean things up once it's all working
Appreciate all the points on this stuff
I do but thought I need to get it playing initially first
so the request does not necessarily get REDIRECTED, but rather the system checks, if you are all set for iView (e.g. it is fully loaded etc.) and in case you are not ready … you get sent to the start-page first.
Another possibility might be that your HTTP headers will be checked, if you got to the playable video through the star-page or not … if not … you get presented with the start page.
Anyhow this should not be a big problem, if the SITE-CONFIG file is checking for this and clicks in the right place to get the iView stream started.
Please be careful HOW you get the COLOR info … I used a windows system first … to do the screen shots elicit colors etc. …
Only the size and locations I got right … but when it came to colors I was totally off … my MAC has different colors … thus I could not get my site-config to work … until I did a screen shot on the mac and used the MAC OS tool to get the color codes of the location I was looking for.
Sometimes it helped that I gave a few color options and have the FW look for any possible match … this way … if I was off a few pixels … I still got a match.
Thanks again for all the pointers and help but still seem to be having issues. Been very busy the last week or so but will hopefully have time to again soon. Would be
great to have some sort of tool that would capable the screen interaction and use that as the basis for developing the plugin.
Are you able to attach the site config xml file that you're currently working with? I'll have a look and see if I can get it working (though you probably know more than me about it now).
Very interested in this working… and happy to help if I can.
These guys have worked out how to pull flash streams off the iview direct, techniques are in there to pull the token required and how to check whether your ISP has an unmetered peering agreement, or to pull from akamai.
I don’t know my way around python, but am keen to help out… can bash some stuff.
