[mandricus]

Hi Gopher,
first of all: thank you, really great stuff! I was just watching first episode of the new season of "Unti e Bisunti 2" on my RaspberryPi with RaspBMC, everything works quite well, with a really good video quality.

I just tried some random DMAX Italia show, everything seems to work fine so far (more testing will come in the next days). Addon is a bit slow, but it works.

I've only two things to report:

- I stopped one video, and I noticed the "resume" icon appeared on the right side. I thought "Hey, if this is going to work this will be some really cool stuff". Unfortunately it did'nt
When I tried to resume the video, the device just hung. It got stuck saying "loading, please wait".. I waited for about 3 minutes, then I had to turn it off becase it became unresponsive. I don't know if video resume is supposed to work or not.

- When playing a video, I am able to fast forward only on the buffered part of the video. I am not able to skip to any unbuffered part. If i try the usual controls (arrow UP - Skip 10 mins or arrow right - skip 3 mins) none of them works. If I try to put the player in fastforward mode, it goes forward only as long as it reach the end of the buffered video, then the player hangs and then the only option is to stop the video and restart it from the beginning. On my raspberry pi the cache fills up quite soon. The device is able to buffer only few minutes of the video. As a result, in my situation it's impossible to start a video from the middle of it, considering resume does not work, and considering starting from the beginning I'm unable to skip to any unbuffered part of the video. So, for now, when I want to see any video, I've to see it always from the beginning to the end!


Thank you anyway for your great work, I'm really really happy to have Dmax Italia videos on my RaspBMC. Please let me know if I can help you testing features / functionalities of your addon on my Raspberry.

[mandricus]

One last thing I forgot: at first I tried with the official addon available from the addons repository. For some strange reason, it was not working (it was simply loading forever). I had to unistall the addon, then to download the .zip available from the first post of this forum thread, and manually install it in order to make it work.

[Gopher]

Hi Mandricus,
Thank you for your testing.
Bad news for you: resume and fastforward are Not supported from the video library that Dmax uses on its own website. Hence it is Not fixable right now. I am sorry.

Regarding the slowness of the addon, it depends on the thumbnail Scraping; basically, during the first loading, the addon collects the thumbnails for every tv shows, but, by website design, the thumbnails are in a different page than the video directory and, for this reason, the addon have to connection to two different page for every tv shows (202 requests). You can control this setting via the addon settings.

Let me know if you need any other information and thank you for your precious feedback: it is gold.

Cheers,
Goph

[germano]

Thank you for the great job Gopher! I've tested the addon on my raspy b+, and after some debugging i've found that the beautifulsoup library performs really slow on that hardware (about 11 seconds to parse the home page). I've modified the code using regex, and now it performs better (about 1 second to grasp all the shows from the home page). Gopher, I've seen from the changelog that in a previous version you used regex, my impression is that form raspbmc it have to use these ones.
I can share my code on a fork if someone is interested.

[Gopher]

Hi germano,
thank you for letting me know! Yep: the first version of the plugin was written using the regexp approach; although it is an approach that, in general, works pretty good, is usually more prone to errors during the parsing and that was the reason for which, following also some suggestions from other fellows, I preferred to switch from the regexp approach to beautifulsoap html/dom parser.
I tested the plugin on a RaspPi B (not the plus one) and I noticed that it performs very slow while it performs at reasonable loading time on the other mediacenter (an Atom Dual Core).

At this point, we have two suitable ways:
- Keep the plugin "safe" and continue using beautifulsoup library, accepting the tradeoff in loading time;
- Re-convert the plugin to use regexp getting rid of the beautifulsoap library, accepting the risk of errors during the website scraping.

I still have the old regexp version and could commit it in a very short time, but I would avoid this way.
Other feedbacks are more than welcome.

P.S.: I am planning to rewrite the whole plugin code together with the Real Time TV plugin to make them more modular and enable an easy integration with other mediacenter software plus other benefits in code maintenance and refactoring. Stay tuned.

[germano]

I will stay tuned! Meanwhile have you considered the possibility to release a tag with raspy's performance optimizations? Maybe It could be a short term fix, until it will find a better solution

[patanegra]

Dear Gopher,
good job, but please consider to upgrade the plugin to see http://it.dplay.com (RealTime + DMax + Deejay TV)
Thanks a lot!

[zanzibar1982]

Hello Gopher, thank you for your brilliant work on this dmax italia add-on.
I just found few minutes ago that it is not working anymore, maybe because main website has changed layout.
Will you fix the add-on or development has stopped?
Thanks in advance for your time and effort.

[zanzibar1982]

Bump...?

[Gopher]

Hi guys,
Thanks for letting me know about dplay.com.
I will work on a plugin to replace the two different ones.

It will take some time..so please be patient .

Thank you so much and stay tuned.
Ciao,
Goph

[mandricus]

Hi Gopher, will you notify us on this thread when the Dplay plugin will become available for testing?

[Gopher]

Hi Mandricus,
I will notify in both the threads and I will also post a new thread.

I am working on the plugin, but since it is a little bit more complex, I need more time to test before making it available to the public.

Thanks and cheers,
Goph

[Vektor]

Hi Gopher,

you might want to reverse engineer the Dplay Android app, since it uses a JSON API, much faster and reliable than parsing the HTML.

The API URL is http://it.dplay.com/api/v1/content/device

Here is the list of all the shows:
http://it.dplay.com/api/v1/content/devic...%2Cpackage

Single show page:
http://it.dplay.com/api/v1/content/devic...%2Cpackage

[energywave]

Hi Gopher,
I'm here with a Raspberry Pi 2 model B with OSMC. I'll test your addon while ready as, for now, I didn't had success on using dmax italia plugin.
Using dplay seems a great idea and even more to use the JSON api exposed for mobile apps as shown by Vektor! Consistent and no risk that scraping will stop working as cosmetic changes happens on the website, not counting the speed...!

I'm a .net developer so Phyton is somehow cryptic for me but one day maybe I can learn and help... Having all discovery channels at once on my TV would be so wonderful!!! At least I can test the addon, even if you have some beta maybe I can help.
(sono italiano, grazie per il tuo lavoro!!!!!)

Thank you and hear you soon! (at least I hope )
Henrik

[mandricus]

Gopher, do you need help in the plugin development? I don't know Python and never developed any XBMC plugin, but would be happy to try it. In the past I've been a frontend / backend web developer (ASP / .NET / C# / SQL / PHP / Javascript) and a System Administrator (Windows / Linux )