alright, coders... gear up. let's get this done because i really want this feature and it would make an insane mix of a good pc backend to a great xbox front end.
first off, let's start off with the sdk for beyond tv 3.5.1 i think is the latest...
you can get that, here:
http://www.dev-hack.com/beyondtvsdk.zip
secondly, here are a couple of provided tuts for programming with the sdk.
the reason i post this stuff is so that coders can see examples of the commands that exist on the exposed portion of btv. obivcously, if we could just port btvlink over, we wouldn't be having this discussion. but this is as good as we can get it thus far.
http://www.snapstream.com/community/arti...rksample1/
and tut2:
http://www.snapstream.com/community/arti...rksample2/
these should provide the clues we need to get xbmc to interface.
to me it seems pretty simple. when doing a remote viewing, first you do have to authenticate(if configured) and then start the stream. if you just connect to the machine running btv without first starting the stream then you'll get refused. i know this because i was using my ppc phone to watch tv a while ago using the web interface.
secondly, btv doesn't get it's guide from it's own program. there may be a way to create a guide browser for snapstream.com the biggest problem would be when you select something that should currently be showing, is getting it to know the difference and then getting it to start the stream, change the channel and initiate the video.
i think we should really shoot for basic functions.
easy way for most networks is to use windows media transcoding instead of trying to stream the mpeg2 data. some xbox users are on wireless and that's just too much thruput for b connections.
i think we should get a basic login(if configured in btv), start stream, change channel with minimal delay in change. what you might consider doing is instead of maintaining the stream when you change channels leaving anywhere between a 10 second to 1 minute delay, make it stop the stream and start it again, meaning simply stop playing video and reconnect to the server. this way the channel change will only take a few seconds for the prebuffer and viewers can go on their marry way instead of changing channels and then going to get a cup of coffee while they wait.
if we can get some sort of btv'esque osd, that'd be nice, however, i havne't seen any scripts that have done osd so i'm not really optimistic on that front. basically, if you could shrink the video window to say... 70% and introduce a surrounding menu for changing channels, more dish and directv ish than having to stop change channels and then start the stream manually again. ya see what i'm saying here? that sounds easier than trying to overlay buttons and text on the video while playing, that sounds something like a hardcoded function of xbmc than it does a script option.
lastly... and this is rather secondary. integrating record functionality into the control. so that it doesn't record on the xbox but on the btv box and then obviously that leads into the ability to browse the recorded shows. there are two ways of doing that. you can either stream them through btv or you can just have it open the smb folder(properly configured obviously) to where the saved shows are stored. i think they're named appropriately anyway. hope so.
let's get on it, guys. i'm no coder, i'm a problem solver.
so let's shoot for the basic stream, channel change control and we'll go from there.