[juggie]

Thanks Guys :-) best news I've heard all day !!!!

Carb0, do they need a logged in cookie now to pull the key? That would be great news as its been pirated like crazy due to their lax controls. And when I actually pay for it, am not pleased when a popular game buffers!

You need a cookie from the login to get the url for the m3u8 file and the cookie that is needed to access the keys. Unless it's possible to get this cookie in a different way, it's not possible to access the keys without a login cookie.

Access to the decryption key url by passing the authentication cookies/url parameters is only solving one part of the problem.
Both NBA and NHL use a HLS implementation for live games that will not work on xbmc 13.X for more than one minute at a time.
Imho the best approach is to use a custom hls client (like mlbhls) to pull/decrypt the stream and feed the decoded data to xbmc via a fifo node

You're right. It stops after a few minutes. There is an old mlbhls version of this add-on somewhere in this thread. Biggest issue with this solution was that it wasn't available on all platforms. At that time there also have been suggestions to create a server in python that downloads the keys and provides a custom version of the m3u8 files. XBMC would then play the custom m3u8 file without additional parameters.

I am also writing a nhl gamecenter addon. with a custom skin and live scores. since I copy and pasted the landscape view from xperience1080p skin and using some of the png, I am waiting for his permission to redistribute.

if you need help accessing the streams LEGALLY, let me know.

here is a nutshell of it.
1. login in amd get cookie
2. send a get or post to publishpoint*
3. it will return a path to the m3u8
4. get this path. the url has all the info to get the key to the stream.

publishpoint takes the following params.
type: game, video
id: gameid (201401003)
gs: live, dvr, archive, condensed, continuos
ft: 2,4 (and other values. this changes the home/away feed)

you will need to provide a user agent string as well. the server uses this to format the url. if my user agent is android it will return ...android.m3u8
desktop browser will get an adaptive:// flash type stream. and so forth.

ps. sweet I didn't know 5000kbps is a valid bitrate!

Thanks. I didn't notice a difference in quality compared to the 4500kbps streams.

Awesome news that the key now requires a valid sign in. This is a welcome addition, despite the difficulties for XBMC. I have some code that is able to get the available live streams and such using some json stuff NHL.com makes available. It also works for highlights and a ton of other stuff. I have never shared it in the past because there was no authentication on the key in the past so by simply being able to build the m3u8 links it enabled piracy.