Kodi Community Forum

I got the new plug-in version and the login makes the difference

Thanks again!

PBS subscriber here. Works perfectly! Thank you so much for your hard work.

Not having cable, addons like this are a large part of my tv entertainment.

Many thanks!

Just downloaded the latest update, but the search, popular and sort by alphabetical options are no longer included. I bring this up because the Rick Steve's Europe travel show does not come up in the Genre categories (like last time). Can we bring back these options?

It's a great add-on and I use it lots!

DISREGARD! I found it. Helps to turn off watched...

Popular and A-Z are not available any longer.
Within each genre and show you can sort using the Kodi sort in the sidebar menu.
The content available differs depending on your login.
I will eventually add in search, but it will most likely be in the Jarvis version.
Rick Steve's Europe is available in the Science and Nature genre.

(2015-12-22, 05:06)learningit Wrote: [ -> ]Rick Steve's Europe is available in the Science and Nature genre.

And this is the crux of the problem. Genre categorization is completely subjective. Everyone has to have the same thought process as the person at PBS doing the categorization to find their shows.

Not that the missing A-Z is your fault since you can only relay the categorization that the website presents (although one could argue that you could simulate the A-Z that they took away by crawling all of the categories and enumerating all of the shows in a local list[1]). But it's still a problem.

[1] Although doing that would start to take Kodi in the direction that I personally think it needs to go. The current concept of local videos being different than plugin videos and where you need to know which plugin to use to go to what you want to watch is all wrong IMVHO. Everybody shouldn't need to know that in order to watch This Old House (say), they need to know whether the content is local or streaming and if streaming to go to the video plugins and from there to go to the PBS plugin. That's too much required knowledge. It should be as easy as selecting Television from the main menu and then seeing the list of shows available, both local and streaming from all plugins, all in one list. But I digress, wildly.

Thanks for keeping this updated so quickly. Hate to be a bother, but any news on the pbsKids breakout?

(2015-12-23, 18:22)melendyk Wrote: [ -> ]Thanks for keeping this updated so quickly. Hate to be a bother, but any news on the pbsKids breakout?

Just released PBS Kids.
Please see 253386 (thread)

Thank you so much for the updates, learningit. Appreciated as always.

I signed up for an account on PBS (just a regular, non-paying account) and the shows that appeared on the website when the local station was set, appeared and worked fine via Kodi. I'm in the UK but I took your advice and set my local station to WNET. Things show up fine in Kodi and there's more programs to choose from. Haven't had any problems apart from the 'Expired or Needs Passport' error.

I have a question that concerns 1080p content. I don't know if you had bothered to delve too deeply into it yet -- I understand why you wouldn't have -- but I managed to work out the links for videos that do have their content at 1080p. My addon is set to use 1080p for the quality but only ever plays 720p. This is fine if there are no 1080p links available but on occasion, they're are. Take for example the 'Prohibition' series. In my Kodi log, it uses this link for the 720p version:

...so I wanted to see if changing '2500k' to '6500k' that had worked before, worked again. It didn't. It just threw up an error. So I looked at what the m3u8 link is like when the video is played in my browser and noticed it's the same apart from the subtraction of the '192-' part near the end of the url:


I don't have a clue as to why the '192-' part is included in the link Kodi plays but I found that if you take that part out and also use '6500k' instead of '2500k', it plays in 1080p. (if the video has a 1080p version) I had a look at the default.py file and seen line 291 and managed to get Kodi to use 6500k but I didn't find a way to remove the '192-' part for the url so it threw up an error. Fingers crossed you'll be able to look at it and come up with a fix but only when you're free. I understand you're busy and it's not really a 'problem' , plus... the addon works fine in its current state. It would be nice to have the option there again though.

TL;DR on the 1080p part: If you remove '192-' and also change '2500k' to 6500k' in the URL, you get 1080p content on videos (...if they are available in 1080p, which not all videos are.)

EDIT: OK, I found out that the '192-' part is just the lowest available quality. As is, 192k up to 2500k. When you download the m3u8 file and open it in a text editor, it shows the available options for the streams. 6500k is NOT listed so that is why it won't work unless adding the url directly.

There's more to the story than that. The 1080 links have actually been disappearing. This is probably not the best place to discuss all this.
Thanks, I've been aware of the above and will monitor to see if it's worth making the change for the long term.

Happy Christmas, learningit, and thanks for all the work.
I've been putting videos in Watchlist in the browser version (through Chrome Launcher in Kodi) where the passport restricted videos are flagged. They then appear in the addon Watchlist for playback. Favourites work in the same way. I've noticed also that there appears to be more content in the browser than in the addon folders and it's easier to navigate and find stuff at present.

Just noticed that PBS Thinktv addon has changed. I got it updated to 2.0.4, but I can't seem to find some of the shows that I normally watch. My wife really enjoys Sewing with Nancy. There is no way to search or list all shows. Any help would be appreciated.

(2016-01-02, 22:41)SpecOps Wrote: [ -> ]Just noticed that PBS Thinktv addon has changed. I got it updated to 2.0.4, but I can't seem to find some of the shows that I normally watch. My wife really enjoys Sewing with Nancy. There is no way to search or list all shows. Any help would be appreciated.

Please read the forum thread. There have been very significant changes to the website. Search and a fix for displaying next page of shows will be in the next release, but the website needs to calm down a bit first.

Thank you for your quick response. I have read the forum, understand there have been changes to the website, and I do appreciate your work. Just making sure I wasn't missing something with the current release. Looking forward to the next release. Thanks again.

(2016-01-03, 00:41)SpecOps Wrote: [ -> ]Thank you for your quick response. I have read the forum, understand there have been changes to the website, and I do appreciate your work. Just making sure I wasn't missing something with the current release. Looking forward to the next release. Thanks again.

Please understand that even with fixes in the next version, you may not be able to easily locate/access some content. This is because you need to create a PBS account and select a home PBS station. You may not have all content that you had with the previous version of the addon. This is due to two reasons: 1) content not being permissioned as available for the specific home PBS station you choose; and 2) quite a bit of the content is only available to "Passport" members - people who donate at least $60 annually to PBS.