[RizThon]

I would like to write a plugin to watch videos from a website that uses flash.

Is it possible to just give the link to the flv file to XMBC? Or must I resolve the URL to get the URL corresponding to the mp4 file?

You must be logged on the website with a paid subscription to access all the videos, and there are some security features handled by the flash player (mostly avoid streaming/downloading more than 2 videos at the same time, avoid people downloading the videos). Thus the owners of the website wouldn't mind an XBMC plugin that uses the flash player to display the videos, but not something that would allow people to bypass security measures. Also they're too busy to spend time creating a secured API.

Would it be possible? I already created a C# application just for myself using a proxy to resolve and download the videos, and create the nfo file to watch them on XMBC. I thought having an XBMC plugin instead could be cool too...

[spiff]

no.

[ghizzu]

I would like to write a plugin to watch videos from a website that uses flash.

Is it possible to just give the link to the flv file to XBMC? Or must I resolve the URL to get the URL corresponding to the mp4 file?

You must be logged on the website with a paid subscription to access all the videos, and there are some security features handled by the flash player (mostly avoid streaming/downloading more than 2 videos at the same time, avoid people downloading the videos). Thus the owners of the website wouldn't mind an XBMC plugin that uses the flash player to display the videos, but not something that would allow people to bypass security measures. Also they're too busy to spend time creating a secured API.

Would it be possible? I already created a C# application just for myself using a proxy to resolve and download the videos, and create the nfo file to watch them on XBMC. I thought having an XBMC plugin instead could be cool too...

I don't know the website you're talking about, but if the question is "Can XBMC play flash (swf) videos?", the answer is "Only with an external player" like Swiff Player or Flash Movie Player. Or, you can setup your webbrowser as an external application and launch it via XBMC, modifying the page on the fly to display the flash movie fullscreen (http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=94739).

[RizThon]

Thanks for the info.

So if it's not directly possible to use swf videos, how do people wacth videos from youtube or such websites? Do they just know how to resolve the swf link to the flv one?

In my case I can't do that as the direct link to the video is dynamic...

What I already did in C# is:

• Create a WebBrowser object to load the pages and parse them, as well as start playing the video through the Flash plugin
  
• Use the Fiddler Core library (http://www.fiddler2.com) to catch the location where the real video is (those links always start with the same address, so it's easy to spot)
  
• Close the WebBrowser to stop loading the video
  
• Download the video using the caught location
  

I guess we should be able to do the same in Pyhon? Also is it possible to use a .Net library from Python? If so I could easily reuse what I already did, at least for a proof of concept.

If I could do it, I guess it could help using other websites. For websites that already have resolvers, it might make things easier as there should be no need to update the resolve method whenever the website changes it, we could simply be able to look for a link like my.web.site/*.mp4 or *.flv.

[ghizzu]

Thanks for the info.
So if it's not directly possible to use swf videos, how do people wacth videos from youtube or such websites? Do they just know how to resolve the swf link to the flv one?

Yes, exactly. And that is the hardest part, because every site has its method to resolve to the direct video stream URL. That's why some are writing resolvers libraries (t0mm0's, the Navi-X processors etc) for the most popular video sites (YouTube, Megavideo, VeeHD etc).