NIck.com Plugin

[RNHurt]

I need help with developing/maintaining the Nick.com plugin

After failing to get the [Nick.com plugin](https://github.com/dbl-a/Nickelodeon.bundle) working on my Roku box I dug into the source code and started playing around. It looks like this plugin is using the Site Configuration but in my digging I found that each episode is available as a raw SWF file. For example, the Legend of Korra SWF file is available at http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:episode:nick.com:1135772 (after a redirect).

Shouldn't Plex be able to stream these files directly to Roku or any other player? There doesn't seem to be any encryption on the SWF but when I try to play it with the Plex Player (http://www.plexapp.com/player/player.php?url=http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:episode:nick.com:1135772) it never responds. Do I have the correct URL format? Or am I missing something big and this will never work and I shouldn't waste my time?

Thanks for helping me out. I want to get Legend of Korra (plus all the other great Nick shows) on my Roku and this is the best way I know how.

[Horkonaut]

I’m just a newbie but if you look at the Daily Show plugin, it plays video from http://media.mtvnservices.com without a Site Configuration file and www.plexapp.com/player/player.php also has problems with these Daily Show video clips. The Daily Show plug-in works on my Roku. So I am thinking that you could use the Daily Show plug-in as a guide to get Nick.com working.

[sander1]

Hi all! Good to see more and more people in this part of the forum interested in building or fixing plugins!

Site configurations are a bit of a pita to work with, but we don’t have an alternative to get some content to play in Plex for now.

I'm just a newbie but if you look at the Daily Show plugin, it plays video from http://media.mtvnservices.com without a Site Configuration file [...]

The Daily Show does use a site config file. The site configuration xml files can live in 2 places: inside the plugin bundle file or in the global SiteConfigurations.bundle file. The one for The Daily Show can be found here: https://github.com/plexinc-plugins/SiteConfigurations.bundle/blob/master/Contents/Resources/dailyshow_colbert_mtvn.xml

[...] and www.plexapp.com/player/player.php also has problems with these Daily Show video clips.

That's correct, we can't use "our own" player to play these streams/clips (nor can we use the RTMP streams directly). This is because of a protection mechanism called *SWF verification*:

SWF verification in Flash Media Server is a security feature that allows you to directly control which SWF files can connect to your server. Without implementing this feature, any SWF with the proper connection Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and application name could freely connect, potentially accessing your streams and using server resources.



With SWF verification, you can configure the server to check that the SWF file attempting to access a certain application or application instance belongs to a group of preapproved SWF files.

[sander1]

It looks like this plugin is using the Site Configuration but in my digging I found that each episode is available as a raw SWF file. [...] Shouldn't Plex be able to stream these files directly to Roku or any other player?

A swf file is not a video file, it doesn't have a duration or anything like that. It's used as a player to play a separate video file. As an example you can compare it to VLC or Windows Media Player (being the player) being able to play .mp4 files.

There doesn't seem to be any encryption on the SWF but when I try to play it with the Plex Player (http://www.plexapp.com/player/player.php?url=http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:episode:nick.com:1135772) it never responds. Do I have the correct URL format? Or am I missing something big and this will never work and I shouldn't waste my time?

That will never work :( You're trying to load a player in a player. The thing at plexapp.com/player is just a player and can only accept a (unprotected) video file or stream as input.

[Horkonaut]

The Daily Show does use a site config file.

Thank you for the clarification - now some things make much more sense.

[conivek]

I was having trouble getting nick.com videos to play on my Roku. All the metadata showed up fine, but episodes wouldn’t play. Oddly, the audio would start playing on the laptop running the server. Thanks to the Korra link in the first post, I was able find a minor change in the dbl-a-Nickelodeon.bundle/Contents/Code/init.py code to fix it. Just change “item” in the VIDEO_PLAYER string to “episode”:



**#**VIDEO_PLAYER = “http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:item:nick.com:”

VIDEO_PLAYER = “http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:cms:episode:nick.com:”



It works perfectly now! Thanks to whoever created the plugin!



Kevin