BBC iPlayer

[chatterbox]

Hi,

In the UK we have a great streaming serve called BBC iPlayer - This has had semi recent sucsess in the XBMC community - It would be great to see the feature added to BOXEE.

Peace out all, the product is looking fantastic

[Siberia]

I think for the UK this would be one of the major points to the greater success of boxee and I have found iPlayer so worthwhile to have since they have released it and I know others would really appreciate it too.

[avneron]

i agree we need to find a way to bring the iPlayer into boxee

[Gamester17]

an iPlayer script is already available for XBMC (search the XBMC forums), ...though I am not actually sure if Boxee's GUI allows for script to simple be copied in or if it only support plugins for that?

[NPerez]

this is currently the biggest project for iplayer in XBMC as far as i know:
http://code.google.com/p/xbmc-iplayer/

this is a plugin. you can use this in boxee without modifying it in any way. i don't know if it's working at the moment - i'm not getting any videos listed, but then again, I'm in the US so it shouldn't be working for me.

if you're in the UK, give it a try, and if you experience the same problem, then the latest word on a fix will likely be in this utterly gigantic thread about it on the XBMC forums: http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php...hlight=iplayer

i wasn't able to find any recent scripts for it, but if there is a working script, it can be migrated to boxee without needing any major changes. if there's any xbmc scripts that anyone would like to see made compatible with boxee, you can let me know and i will make the necessary changes - it's rather simple most of the time.

[marcel]

Hi guys

You can add a script to boxee by manipulating the sources.xml file see thread

http://forum.boxee.tv/showthread.php?t=52

try adding script:// with the script path in sources.xml.

enjoy!

[deeceefar2]

As far as I'm aware BBC iPlayer as well as Hulu, both use RTMP for their video. I've seen some of the RTMP support from Boxee ported back to XBMC, but I don't think it is complete. I've tested out VLC's implementation a bit with some open RTMP streams and it seems to work fine, however I've not tried with any Hulu streams. I think, though I may be wrong that the RTMP implementations are all using the same source library which I'm not sure is complete.

On another note from listening to the demo given at the Video 2.0 conference it seems that Boxee is angling for official Hulu support, perhaps why they did the port of RTMP intially, to test if it is possible to implement in Boxee. I could be way off here, but it seems to me they would like to hold off full RTMP support until being able to work something out with Hulu so they don't hurt the would be partenership by implementing their service in Boxee without permission.

So my guess is patience is going to pay off on this one. Either Hulu partenership becomes reality, AWESOME, or it doesn't and they finish RTMP support. Either way it would seem they have other more important things to work on at the moment, and although I'm sure there is ALOT of us that would like to see RTMP support in Boxee it will take time for Boxee to foster relationships with Hulu or other RTMP streams or give up on them and provide the protocol support.

That said the source code is open, there are other open source projects with somewhat working RTMP streaming ability so I don't think it would be a stretch for someone to pull RTMP support into Boxee and XBMC. However it seems the most able to do it now, have other things more important to do.

Anyway just my take on the RTMP support topic.

[Strawp]

Hello!

I'm in that big XBMC thread and I'm the SysOp for the beebhack wiki (http://beebhack.wikia.com/) I think that RTMP is the ideal goal and it sounds like it might be happening quite soon, but the H.264 stream might also be doable directly to playback without any storing to disk by using the methods that Phil Lewis came up with (and presented at BBC Hackday 08, cheekily ).

http://beebhack.wikia.com/wiki/IPhone_H.264_version

Is it possible to pipe video from STDIN into the player in Boxee?

[NPerez]

interesting.. I just set my browser to a UK proxy & faked the user-agent to the iPhone, and it is in fact loading in Quicktime format (though it seems that Quicktime knew I was in the US, as it gave me a 403).

i'm pretty sure that it would be possible to set this up in boxee using only python.. but as noted in that beebhack wiki page, they've been changing the site around often. this is the biggest problem with any site that doesn't like external use of their content.

obviously, before going crazy with creating fragile hacks/workarounds, an inquiry with bbc wouldn't hurt, and perhaps they'd be willing to provide some sort of solution, seeing as we're not trying to provide any functionality that isn't already available from their site.

if that isn't a possibility, then that's all well and fine, but with all of these plugins/scripts that are on shaky grounds with the content owners, i think it's becoming more and more necessary to have a feature for plugins & scripts to update from within the app, similarly to how addons update in firefox

[Strawp]

They moved on beyond user agent tests about a week after the iPhone interface went live. They haven't made any changes to how they check for ages though and to be honest they'd have to implement some real DRM to get what we have now properly blocked out.

I actually learned about Boxee from cubicgarden who is in the XBMC iPlayer thread and who works for the BBC, unfortunately his view differ from those in charge...

I think this is another project which suddenly becomes easier once RTMP is supported.