New iPlayer Plugins

[TravUK]

Like others on here, it took a little bit of fiddling to get it working, but its looking good and works a charm.

Great work, cant wait to see how this evolves

[ddfczm]

Thanks for the feedback, its all noted, i dont have a great deal of free time these days but i do aim to put an update out in the coming weeks .

Feel free to keep posting requests / bugs

[ddfczm]

Shortly after my previous post....

Ive published a few updates here:

http://www.mediafire.com/file/2myh2m...p_alpha1.3.msi

Changes:
Few crashes fixed
Faster load time for categories view (thumbnails load seperate now)
Added radio stations to channels view (will only play in browser player so wont work on xbox)
Added the live streams
Updated the setup to install its own iPlayer menu and to install into the extras library (hopfully this will help people having troubles)
Fixed channels thumbnail size

Sorry, but you will need to uninstall the old version before you can install this build.

Screenshots:





g'night

[thcnunz]

Great app man, but I cant get mine working from inside media center.

I used the tool to add it as an icon, but it just says it cannot find the path?

It works if I manually put in the path from the start menu.

%windir%\ehome\ehshell.exe /entrypoint:{799df54e-abd6-41cd-a99f-45367b790bb5}\{89d083d5-f12d-4d63-836c-7cfff56774dd}

Any ideas ?

[TravUK]

New version seems to work, live streaming ok for all channels except BBC News, not sure if its just something quirky or a bug.

A few times I launched a program and I still see the iPlayer progress bar at the bottom, when the program is playing.

When buffering programs theres a lot of flicker as if something should have been rendered twice, into both buffers, but wasnt.

When programs are running it doesnt seem to hold off the screen saver and so it comes on after the allotted time.

All pretty minor issues and easy enough to live with, great work again.

[kevyn]

Thanks for the update, just a couple of things to note:

I changed the default install location (removed the fczMedia bit) and get this error when launching a 'live tv channel':

----------------
Web Browser

Cannot find 'file:///C:/Program%20Files%20(x86)/fczMedia/iPlayer/iPlayerHost.html#bbc_radio_one-,-9346'. Make sure the path or Internet address is correct.
----------------

it appears that changing the install location messes up some things! however, I reinstalled it to the default location, and it seems to work a treat. It still doesn't install a custom strip, but it does add itself to the extras library which is great. media center studio solves this problem anyway

The other thing I noticed, is there is no way to tell what menu/text is highlighted, so when you press channels --> BBC1 you get the 3 options above the shows, but you never know which menu is selected, and most of the time I end up pressing the right button which takes me to 'categories'.

My other suggestion is to group shows, and perhaps have a 'sort by show name' option.

Of course if you wanted to take it to another level, C4 on demand would be useful! but I imagine this opens up a whole new world of hurt for you to program!

edit: the other thing that would be great is an 'update' button so update the program, which would of course require the program to be homed somewhere.

[switchfrnt]

I've installed and the iPlayer comes up and I'm able to browse the content but when I click on one it shows a message saying "This content doesn't seem to be working. Try again later." Could anyone think of why I might be getting this message? thanks!

Nevermind, it was a connection issue, good to go! Brilliant work!

[MiniMax]

Simply put, for me this is 99% perfect.

That extra one percent would be the option to select HD streams where available.

Excellent work!

[switchfrnt]

Well I was able to get this to work on my Desktop WMC by using a proxy but on the 360 it still gives the "This content doesn't seem to be working. Try again later." Does anyone know a way to get around this?

edit: I also tried to install the security update mentioned above but the Upgrade button is grayed out?

[grunger106]

Great looking app.
Couple of probs here.

I just get the spinning orb, 1 - 2 times out of 10 it brings up the pictures of the channels, if it go from channels to highlights and back they do show up.

The vidoes don't actually play - I just get the MCE blue backdrop.

The streaming TV does work.

I have installed the DRM update.

Win7 x86, v1.3

Any ideas?

Thanks

[Bagal]

Did you happen to try the plugin last night? As I also had the same problem as you, when I visited the iPlayer website it said it was down for maintenance, tried it again tonight and appears to be working fine.

[MacBurp]

This is a great plug-in. v1.3 installed in minutes and works really well on my extenders - no bugs (unlike TunerFree MCE).

Some development issues though
- no easy way to group series
- programmes older than a week (eg spooks eps1-4, still on iplayer as its a series in progress) don't stream WMV - instead it tries to show a window in a web browser that is not controllable in MCE and buffers constantly)
- Very hard to get to the submenu (Highlights, Popularity etc). The intuitive way is to go down but this takes you to content icons and you need to go back up. Hard to tell if you're on the sub-menu - often when you think you are you're really on the main menu and so left/right takes you away from where you want top be - annoying

This stuff may seem picky, but getting any sort of WAF for MCE for me is very hard and she got this stuff right our of the box with iplayer on Virgin media

thanks again for the plug-in

[GuruSnaish]

- programmes older than a week (eg spooks eps1-4, still on iplayer as its a series in progress) don't stream WMV - instead it tries to show a window in a web browser that is not controllable in MCE and buffers constantly)

DDFCZM... you are a God! This plugin is incredible...
However I am also experiencing the issue described above. It is the only issue, but it does break things a bit.
Is it possible to just not display anything more than a week old? (You have probably guessed I'm not a programmer!)
Same issue occurs with Live TV so personally I'd be happy to drop that too, and finally have a bullet-proof iPlayer plugin. I would definately dionate for that!

Thanks again for doing such a fantastic job.

[MacBurp]

Is it possible to just not display anything more than a week old?

Well, I'd rather the plug-in managed the series entirely as WMV - or the WAF will go down the toilet for media centre again, as iPlayer on Virgin Media does this no problem

[ddfczm]

I don’t think there is any way in the feed data i can use to tell if a WMV will be available and it would be too slow to go and check if there is for every media item on display.

It sucks that we sometimes have to drop into browser mode but the BBC only provide WMV for new content, virgin media can handle this because they are a close partner, I am sure they get access to the raw video to host themselves.

When i get time i can make the browser page compatible with MCE (although just turning off the warning goes a long way) but they dropped the HTML stuff from the latest MCE SDK so I didn’t notice it straight away. The thing that will most benefit the browser page will be having the browser setup as the now playing item so other media does not interfere.

It seems more valuable to me to include live TV for everybody, maybe add some options to remove it.

All things for me to think about, im running on very little free time right now however . I would also like to turn it into more of a framework, so the plugins are a set of code you can put iPlayer, 4OD etc on top of. Would make creating on demand media apps a bit easier.

I want the mods and updates too :P just a matter of when i have time. When i cleanup the code into a framework i will probably start up a google code project, maybe we can get some other developers to help.