2012-06-11, 13:23
/disclaimer: Nothing in this post is meant as criticism, I just want to understand the problem and possibly tackle it myself.
A very common problem for me in my daily use of xbmc is that some of my favourite or temporary internet streams are not playable in xbmc. For instance, right now I would love to play the dutch Eufa 2012 streams, but since they are temporary by nature, noone has coded something for them. This has been a recurring problem.
Everything requires support either from a plugin or some aggregate site. Getting the right streaming address appears to involve difficult tools and some sort of arcane knowledge. My basic question is, why is this so hard? Why is it necessary to write a plugin for every specific site, apparently using some regex magic to retrieve the url?
For a laymen like me it seems weird that I can access these streams from any browser with a simple click, but in XBMC this is apparently a hard thing to do for most sites. Even a, to me, simple solution like a browser plugin to send the stream via http to the xbmc pc requires site specific coding apparently.
Can anyone please explain to me the difficulties? Is it for instance maybe possible to write an extremely basic 'browser' for xbmc that parses the url that has the player including stream and let the user do the final 'click'? Because as far as I can see, a generic plugin that has support for any stream (as long as the format is supported of course) is a killer feature, even if it requires user input.
A very common problem for me in my daily use of xbmc is that some of my favourite or temporary internet streams are not playable in xbmc. For instance, right now I would love to play the dutch Eufa 2012 streams, but since they are temporary by nature, noone has coded something for them. This has been a recurring problem.
Everything requires support either from a plugin or some aggregate site. Getting the right streaming address appears to involve difficult tools and some sort of arcane knowledge. My basic question is, why is this so hard? Why is it necessary to write a plugin for every specific site, apparently using some regex magic to retrieve the url?
For a laymen like me it seems weird that I can access these streams from any browser with a simple click, but in XBMC this is apparently a hard thing to do for most sites. Even a, to me, simple solution like a browser plugin to send the stream via http to the xbmc pc requires site specific coding apparently.
Can anyone please explain to me the difficulties? Is it for instance maybe possible to write an extremely basic 'browser' for xbmc that parses the url that has the player including stream and let the user do the final 'click'? Because as far as I can see, a generic plugin that has support for any stream (as long as the format is supported of course) is a killer feature, even if it requires user input.