Very nice! Can’t wait to try it.
I think your WOL solution is perfectly alright.
This is about the play next problem, and I read your following posting about testing a new beta build. I'm excited and can't wait to get my hands on it. You're the best. I take it that will not show up in my auto update since it is beta. How will I be able to try it out?
Yeah, it’ll be a separate zip file for now, til i’m sure it’s not going to cause too much trouble. You’d install it under the system -> install from zip. If there was a problem, then it can be uninstalled and the old version put back…
Just a quick question…in the previous posts I believe that you stated something about there being an XBMC patch for transcoding that you are waiting to be put upstream (I believe it has something to do with XBMC reading m38u sources directly or something). I am just wondering if, with that patch, does fast forward/reverse/seek work with transcoding?
Yes. The reason it hasn't hit the git master yet it that it's only half finished. It can read and play m3u8/HLS sources, but doesn't have the ability to select streams based on bandwidth. Until this is done, I'm told it won't be included. However it does work and I have a personal windows build with it enabled and it seems good.
Cool. Let us know when that zip file is available and where to grab it. Thanks for all the hard work.
PleXBMC rocks!
Just for info, I patched the “auto next play” in XBMC, and it was accepted into the master XBMC codebase yesterday. So anyone using (or wanting to use) a nightly build should see this issue disappear if they pick up tonights build.
Alright! So the issue was with XBMC intersting. Care to elaborate?
Yeah, basically XBMC activated auto play if the plugin had a provider type of audio. However, it didn’t check what type of media it was queuing, so music and video was being queued.
My fix is a simple check to ensure that only actual audio is queued up.
Very nice.
I found a couple of small things that I think could be further improved:
- I find the default xbmc resume dialog very intuitive and elegant. Maybe we can duplicate it?!
- Since you changed the sorting (and I have to say: for the better) xbmc doesn’t recognize alphabetical lists anymore (wich sadly makes sense). So when one goes through a large collection (e.g “All TV Shows”) the little “letter helper” doesn’t come up anymore. Is there anything you could do about that?
- is it possible to empty out the context menu to make sure, that only the plexbmc stuff is in it? On my xbox I have some things in it, that don’t belong.
- I like the xbmc option “Flatten TV Shows”. Is there a way you could take that into account when displaying tv shows?
Question:
- My trusty xbox is rather slow (duh) so everything takes longer. But sometimes it takes quite a long time (close to 1 minute), before it even starts processing a request inside plexbmc. Is there a way to see, way it takes so long? Do you time the requests in the debug log? I don’t think it is an issue with the server, because on my windows box everything is snappy.
Thank you again for the plugin!
I think that's going to be a skin change. You can manipulate some windows through the plugin system, but not sure if it gives all the functionality.
I *might* be able to put sorting back for alphabetical listing - but it'll involve hardcoding a few things
I already tried that - I can just have plexbmc menu items, but it wouldn;t include movie information option, which you can't add back into a menu. So I decided not to remove it. Not sure how much people use that (me never, as the skin usually shows me what I want)
is that when it goes straight into the season, if only one season is available? Or it just displays a list of all episodes in one big list?
Turning on debug will significantly slow down the plugin. In order to make debug useful, I print the name of the function, which is worked out internally. This code takes a long time (relatively) and therefore slows things right down. probably around 5 times slower...
I don't take time measurements with debugging, but I have previous done timing tests with various bits of code to see if I could speed things up (adding one by one, adding everything in a bit chunk, different ways of getting URLs...).
For Tv and movies, I've moved or altered as much as I can to get a speed up - the slowdown is the number of gathering tasks it does for each movies multiplied by the number of movies there are (I have just short of 800 in one section, which takes about 1-1.5 seconds on a 1.8Ghz dual core (core2), but takes around 5-6 seconds on a 1.6Ghz dual core atom.
Not gathering genres/writers/directors would probably speed this up a bit, if I made it optional...
I get it. It is handy but not necessary.
Hmm, maybe you could make it an option in the settings?
Yeah, that's it! I really like it. Especially for those one season shows where it just makes it two clicks faster. But also for the really long shows where i have watched 4 of 6 seasons. So basically, it is helpful and speeds up things!
OK. I had debug on, so I will disable that first thingonter.
Yeah, I think making this optional would be good.
So maybe you could add a whole sub menu in the settings (e.g. "Interface") and make these things optional (but on by default). How much does all the artwork slow things down? If it makes a difference why not give make it optional as well to turn on/off things like fan art, season thumbs, episode thumbs?
So, just to make sure I get this right. "Flatten" has the same display "all episodes", but we would automatically go into that view from shows (rather than display seasons). could probably do that quite easily (just jump straight to all, skipping seasons)
Yep, that's how it will be done.. Although most of the time is usually taken in retrieving the data, on slower processors, it's possible all the extra bits can weight it down. thumbs and fanart are done in the background by XBMC though, so don;t really slow down the menu display. I'll have a play.
Going to have to put a feature freeze on soon!!!
Exactly.
Great! True, all the displaying is done by XBMC, but you have to retrieve the data, and that could slow things down on a bad connection (e.g. Wifi 801.11b, or VPN)
Hehe :)
Right - here is a BETA version of PleXBMC. This has not been released via the auto installer, as I need to ensure it doesn’t contain too many bugs:
https://github.com/downloads/hippojay/plugin.video.plexbmc/plugin.video.plexbmc-1.9.2.zip
Whats changes?
[list]
[] Bonjour discovery has been added, so you can run the plugin without any configuration whatsoever. Requires an Eden work though. I am going to put in assisted bonjour for 10.1 builds but haven’t yet (where you input any PMS server and it finds the rest)
[] Look and feel menu to alter what features are enabled. Might speed up those slower clients
[] Wake On LAN. totally not tested, as I don;t have anything that can easily be configured with it.
[] Flatten TV - go from show to episode list
[] fixed as issue with selecting subs…
[] unfortunately the auto next pay issue has not been fixed in 10.1. It’s an XBMC limitation. However it is fixed in the new nightly builds (i.e. pre-eden)
[/list]
The main reason this is beta is due to bonjour. I haven;t made 100% sure that servers added into the settings all work 100%, although I’ve tried my hardest.
Works really nicely, although I have one problem with the latest auto build.
When using the confluence.plex skin and using the integration feature I can see my libraries, I can access them through video-plugins though. Any ideas?
Hmm, they seem to have appeared.
Has this fixed the transcoding issue?
Sorry, I can't actually figure out why it doesn't work correctly. Sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. The code hasn't changed for a very very long time and it just seems to stop when getting the first segment. I can see that it has requested it correctly and that the media server sends it over, but after that nothing!
Seems to work fine in a pre-eden build..
I’m getting an “Unable to lookup host” error. Any reason why?
