atomic22
April 27th, 2009, 03:58 PM
Thanks for the response.
I started working on a speedTV plugin, and while I haven't gotten very far, I've tried to document most of my work as I learn. I'll try and post everything I learn, so others can hopefully learn from it.
That said if I make a mistake please point it out so I can try and correct it. I'll post updates as much as possible, but I do work, go to school and have children, so my time is tight. Right now I'm focusing on setting up testing enviroment and working on the SpeedTV plugin at the same time.
Here's what I have so far:
First, let me start by saying that I understand Boxee is in it's infancy and will continue to grow. I have gotten a lot from this program and I thought I'd give a little back. Hopefully, this will save you some of the troubles I had and help you develop your own plugins to share. I'm going to try and keep adding to this document as time permits me to. Most of the information in this guide is gathered from a lot of sources and I'll try and point out where I am getting something from someone else and give them credit for it.
I started out following this tutorial http://developer.boxee.tv/2009/04/14/building-your-first-boxee-app/
It is a great tutorial and helped me a lot. However, there are a couple of things I discover when I was using the tutorial.
1. As with all XML you need opening and closing tags. So in
<window type="window" id="14000">
<defaultcontrol always="true">100</defaultcontrol>
<controls>
You need to add the closing </controls> tag.
This wasn't very clear in the tutorial. I know XML and I still missed this point.
2. The rss feed that the tutorial points to does not have anything listed in it, therefore, when you put all this code into boxee and try and run it you won't see anything listed. I scratched my head on this one for a while until I looked at the link with Firefox and realized nothing was listed. Here is a more reliable link I got from the boxee api site:
rss://www.nick.com/all_nick/specials/podcast/podfeed.jhtml?show_id=unfab
Here is my guide to writing plugins for boxee.
My setup
Windows
Notepad ++ or Jedit
Python from ....
I tried to create an optimal environment for producing plugins. There are still some things I'd like to tweak, but this is a pretty good setup.
1. Get your log on. I got some of the information from this post http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=7680, so thanks robcoles.
Here's how:
1. You need to write a simple log xml file called advancedsettings.xml
2. Here's the code:
<advancedsettings>
<loglevel>0</loglevel>
</advancedsettings>
3. There are different levels of logging. Here where you find the explanination: TODO: I need to find the information again.
2. To kill the initial load page and go right to your desired application page (I.E. Video) you'll have to modify some of the xml files found in (remember this is windows) C:\Program Files\Boxee\skin\Boxee Skin NG\720p\
1. Open Home.xml in your editor
2. Comment out Line 390, 646, 979, and 1311 <!-- -->
TODO: I'm trying to figure out how to stop the weather from loading, it looks to me right now that this is what is causing some slowdown.
Things to keep in mind:
If your plugin won't load look very carefully through your code. More often than not, you may have missed a closing carrot or something really simple. Boxee doesn't tell you whats wrong it just fails to load your files.
That's all for now. I'll add more as I learn more.
If anyone know how to shut off the weather onload I would really like to hear how.