[jayceejazz]

Radio stations are not functioning on the BBC iPlayer add-on either.

[DarrenHill]

@jayceejazz - @CaptainT is working on that at the moment, and there is a fix available in the beta version I tested for him recently.

See the end of this thread for details. Hopefully the updated version should be available soon.

[toggoboge]

FYI, I've reported the issue with the URLs served up by api.radio.de to radio.de via their website.

On Monday, I received a nice reply from radio.de indicating that they were working on a fix. Right now on Friday evening, the problem with BBC stations is still happening - I see the following (on Linux):

Code:

~ @comte$ wget --no-http-keep-alive --user-agent "XBMC Addon Radio" -O - http://api.radio.de/info/v2/search/stati...tion=11932 2> /dev/null | python -m json.tool | grep '"streamUrl"'
            "streamUrl": "http://bbcmedia.ic.llnwd.net/stream/bbcmedia_6music_mf_p",

I want to listen to the BBC this weekend, so I went ahead and edited the Radio plugin's config file by hand. I'm now listening to BBC Radio 6 Music again using Kodi. The following is what worked for me on Linux. If you're on some other system, you'll possibly have to tweak this.

1. Using the Radio plugin interface in Kodi, add the desired BBC stations to My Stations as normal (with the broken streams).
2. Using the Radio plugin interface in Kodi, add a test custom station with arbitrary data.
2.1 For me, this is accessed by going to Music->Music add-ons->Radio->My Stations->Add custom Station
2.2 We're just doing this to find out about the format of a custom station in the plugin's JSON configuration file. This is in order use a file editor to manually create custom stations using the BBC streams at https://gist.github.com/bpsib/67089b959e...a59ad74bc3
2.3 BTW, I don't know if it's strictly necessary to flag the BBC streams as custom in the plugin config file.
3. Backup the original config file:

Code:

cp ~/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/plugin.audio.radio_de/.storage/my_stations.json ~/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/plugin.audio.radio_de/.storage/my_stations_orig_20210402-1900.json

4. Prettify the file so it's more human-readable in a text-editor and save that in a new .json file

Code:

cat ~/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/plugin.audio.radio_de/.storage/my_stations_orig_20210402-1900.json | python -m json.tool > ~/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/plugin.audio.radio_de/.storage/my_stations_new_20210402-1900.json

5. Edit the new .json file in a file-editor
  5.1 Add the following to each BBC station you want to modify
    "is_custom": "1",
    5.1.1 BTW, I'm not sure that this step is necessary
  5.2 Replace the broken bbcmedia.ic.llnwd.net stream URLs for each stations entry in the config file with URLs from https://gist.github.com/bpsib/67089b959e...a59ad74bc3
  5.3 I've used the .pls links from there where they are available for the stations I'm interested in, except for Radio 5 Live.
    5.3.1 The .pls didn't work for 5 Live for me, possibly because I'm in Ireland, so I used the non-UK 5 Live link in BBC-Radio.m3u
6. See my new Radio plugin config file here which has a bunch of BBC stations and some others: https://paste.kodi.tv/xoqagovoxe
7. Stop Kodi
8. Overwrite the plugin config file with your updated file

Code:

cp ~/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/plugin.audio.radio_de/.storage/my_stations_new_20210402-1900.json ~/.kodi/userdata/addon_data/plugin.audio.radio_de/.storage/my_stations.json

8. Restart Kodi
9. Enjoy the BBC again!
10. I've left the test custom station in the config file I posted, but have removed it from the file I'm using on my system.

I've tested the streams for each station and listened long enough to hear that something is playing, but not long enough to hear any station id mentioned.

[toggoboge]

6. See my new Radio plugin config file here which has a bunch of BBC stations and some others: https://paste.kodi.tv/xoqagovoxe

Some of the stations in my previous config file used broken URLs for the thumbnails. Fixed here: https://paste.kodi.tv/dusivacihi

[timintheshed]

Good work @toggoboge I'll give that a go.  Thanks.

[toggoboge]

I tried removing "is_custom": "1", from the config for each of the stations (step 5.1 in my post yesterday). It seems to be required, on my system (v3.0.3 of the plugin in Kodi 17.6 on Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS) at least. Without it, Kodi just skipped over the BBC stations until it hit one of my other stations, and started playing that.

[jayceejazz]

All BBC stations working again!

[C.O.D.]

I've got some custom stations here where there's no track information shown by Kodi when playing them. Playing them in VLC e.g. shows artist and track with no problems.
Does anyone has an idea what's going on?

https://stream.rockland.de/rockland.mp3
https://bestofrockfm.stream.vip/classic/...ofrock.fm/
https://bestofrockfm.stream.vip/hardrock...ofrock.fm/

[sba923]

I've got some custom stations here where there's no track information shown by Kodi when playing them. Playing them in VLC e.g. shows artist and track with no problems.
Does anyone has an idea what's going on?

https://stream.rockland.de/rockland.mp3
https://bestofrockfm.stream.vip/classic/...ofrock.fm/
https://bestofrockfm.stream.vip/hardrock...ofrock.fm/

I might have a similar issue. Can you describe how you play those streams in VLC and display track info?

[C.O.D.]

I've got some custom stations here where there's no track information shown by Kodi when playing them. Playing them in VLC e.g. shows artist and track with no problems.
Does anyone has an idea what's going on?

https://stream.rockland.de/rockland.mp3
https://bestofrockfm.stream.vip/classic/...ofrock.fm/
https://bestofrockfm.stream.vip/hardrock...ofrock.fm/

I might have a similar issue. Can you describe how you play those streams in VLC and display track info?

I just opened the VLC app on my cellphone, pasted the above URL under 'new stream', the station starts playing and artist / track appears in the player bar.
I'd guess it'd work also on PC this way...

[sba923]

I've got some custom stations here where there's no track information shown by Kodi when playing them. Playing them in VLC e.g. shows artist and track with no problems.
Does anyone has an idea what's going on?

https://stream.rockland.de/rockland.mp3
https://bestofrockfm.stream.vip/classic/...ofrock.fm/
https://bestofrockfm.stream.vip/hardrock...ofrock.fm/

I might have a similar issue. Can you describe how you play those streams in VLC and display track info?

I just opened the VLC app on my cellphone, pasted the above URL under 'new stream', the station starts playing and artist / track appears in the player bar.
I'd guess it'd work also on PC this way...

Can't get this even with VLC on my Android phone (how do I share screenshots here?)

[C.O.D.]

I might have a similar issue. Can you describe how you play those streams in VLC and display track info?

I just opened the VLC app on my cellphone, pasted the above URL under 'new stream', the station starts playing and artist / track appears in the player bar.
I'd guess it'd work also on PC this way...

Can't get this even with VLC on my Android phone (how do I share screenshots here?)

So the rockland stream doesn't work even with VLC but the bestofrock streams do.
Regarding screenshots - would also be interesting for me...

[sba923]

I just opened the VLC app on my cellphone, pasted the above URL under 'new stream', the station starts playing and artist / track appears in the player bar.
I'd guess it'd work also on PC this way...

Can't get this even with VLC on my Android phone (how do I share screenshots here?)

So the rockland stream doesn't work even with VLC but the bestofrock streams do.
Regarding screenshots - would also be interesting for me...

Indeed works with the "Best of Rock FM - Classic Rock"... on Android, not on Windows (or I haven't found out how to get VLC to display artist/title there...)

How can I extract the stream URL for one of the radios (not custom, probably added via a search operation) I listen to with Kodi but where the artist/title information is not displayed (but is replaced by two numbers)?

[C.O.D.]

Can't get this even with VLC on my Android phone (how do I share screenshots here?)

So the rockland stream doesn't work even with VLC but the bestofrock streams do.
Regarding screenshots - would also be interesting for me...

Indeed works with the "Best of Rock FM - Classic Rock"... on Android, not on Windows (or I haven't found out how to get VLC to display artist/title there...)

How can I extract the stream URL for one of the radios (not custom, probably added via a search operation) I listen to with Kodi but where the artist/title information is not displayed (but is replaced by two numbers)?

You can try with the Yatse android app (info button in the playing now screen or check on https://www.radio-browser.info...

[black_eagle]

How can I extract the stream URL for one of the radios (not custom, probably added via a search operation) I listen to with Kodi but where the artist/title information is not displayed (but is replaced by two numbers)?

You can put Kodi into debug mode (settings -> System -> Logging -> Enable debug logging) and then look in the log as it will show the resolved URL in there.  If you don't know where the log is, there is a log viewer addon in the official repo that you can install that will display it for you.
 

the bestofrock streams do.

Indeed.  The problem here is that Kodi does not look for tags in .mp3 files that are streamed from the internet because in many cases the tags are simply not present.  Because the tags can be at either the beginning or end of an .mp3 file, if Kodi were to search for tags in a streamed .mp3 (where there is no end) it would simply search forever if there were no tags present.  Whether or not this can be improved upon, I'm not really sure at the moment.  But current behaviour is that Kodi does not try to read any tag information for .mp3 files streamed from the internet.