[jamontes]

Hi,

I have made a video add-on called ESA Videos to watch the space videos provided by the ESA web site.

The European Space Agency (ESA) is Europe’s gateway to space. Its mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world.

ESA is an international organisation with 20 Member States. By coordinating the financial and intellectual resources of its members, it can undertake programmes and activities far beyond the scope of any single European country.

ESA’s job is to draw up the European space programme and carry it through. ESA's programmes are designed to find out more about Earth, its immediate space environment, our Solar System and the Universe, as well as to develop satellite-based technologies and services, and to promote European industries. ESA also works closely with space organisations outside Europe (source: http://www.esa.int/About_Us/Welcome_to_ESA/What_is_ESA).

More than 1500 videos are available. You can select from the settings menu your preferred language to watch the videos, so if the video selected has a version available for that language, you will watch it in the language preferred.

The video add-on provides an option as well to search through all the videos available, based on title, content, or description of the videos (any of them that match will be selected and showed).

Although the video add-on is well tested during developing time on several platforms (for both, Frodo and Eden releases), I would like to receive some feedback from the community, before let it available into the official repository.

During that time, you can download and install the zip file directly from the GitHub repository using this link plugin.video.esa.zip, following the standard installation way for any zip file add-on. That link will not change along the bug fixes, and can be used to get the latest release until the add-on is finally uploaded to the official repository.

Any comments, suggestions of improvement, and issue notifications would be very welcome. Please use this forum thread for that, and I'll try to reply as soon as I can.

If you find any problem and wants to let me know it, please activate the debug logs from the Add-on settings, and post it on this forum thread using a pastebin link.

This thread will be used to provide the official add-on support as well.

Enjoy it!

jamontes

[artrafael]

Nice! I'll have to try this out later. It'll be a good complement to the NASA videos add-on. Thanks for making this available to the community.

[jamontes]

Sure! Please, try it and let me know any issues or suggestions you find it. I want to provide and maintain a really useful add-on.

Cheers,

jamontes.

[jamontes]

Hi everyone,

From now on, the ESA Videos add-on is available from the official XBMC repository (Frodo release), so you can download and automatically install it from the XBMC Add-ons menu.

For those of them that still continue (like me, for some of my systems ) with the Eden release, you can still use the download link of the first post to download and install the latest version of the add-on (which is compatible for both Frodo and Eden releases).

Please, use this forum thread for official support. Any suggestions, issues, or problems detected and reported will be very welcome.

Enjoy it!

jamontes.

[ferriedeperrie]

Hi jamontes,

Thanks for your great plugin. I love watching the ESA videos and especially this morning it was exciting that there was the Rosetta orbital injection.
That's why I was wondering whether it would be possible to add the Live stream of ESA to the plugin as an extra option?

The link is: http://www.esa.int/spaceinvideos/ESA_Live

It would be really cool to see the Rosetta landing in November on a big HD screen! :-D

Kind regards and all the best,
ferriedeperrie

[jamontes]

Hi jamontes,

Thanks for your great plugin. I love watching the ESA videos and especially this morning it was exciting that there was the Rosetta orbital injection.
That's why I was wondering whether it would be possible to add the Live stream of ESA to the plugin as an extra option?

The link is: http://www.esa.int/spaceinvideos/ESA_Live

It would be really cool to see the Rosetta landing in November on a big HD screen! :-D

Kind regards and all the best,
ferriedeperrie

Hi ferriedeperrie,

I'm glad to know that you like to watch the ESA videos using the add-on. I've been trying to include the ESA Live option as you say. Unfortunately, is not that easy as I thought at first time, because the video live source is an rtmp link, and is quite hard (at least for me) to get it properly formatted to play it inside the add-on as any other video.

To be honest, I've been trying to get the rtmp link working outside the web browser for the last three hours (at least, not kidding), without success. I have no experience dealing with rtmp sources, and I have to admit it is something out to my scope of knowledge.

If someone could get the rtmp from the webpage properly encoded to use it inside the add-on (i.e. by calling xbmcplugin.setResolvedUrl or the sort), I'll be glad to include the Live option into the main menu and update the add-on with pleasure.

I'm sorry to say that, but by the moment, the only option to watch the live events is through a web browser (or any other app for Android/IOS available), or wait a while until the video recorded is available into the website (I think it is a matter of hours, maybe a day or two as maximum).

Many thanks for your interest and suggestion for improving the ad-on, and best regards,

jamontes.

[ferriedeperrie]

Hi jamontes,

Thanks for your amazingly quick response and for immediately trying to implement this suggestion. I understand the stream is a different way of connecting to the video. I've been trying to read code from other add-ons to analyze how they manage to connect to RTMP sources (TwitchTV is one for instance), but so far I've not been able to find a good example.

What I was able to do is to sniff some of the request headers that pass when one loads the ESA stream. There is some metadata going past in XML that contains a URL to be connected to by means of RTMPT protocol. I'm not sure if this is something you already found out, but I thought I might mention it just in case. I really would like to help out where I can and I have some coding experience myself so maybe we can together stumble our way towards a working plugin by the time Philae goes down :-)

Using LiveHTTPHeaders add-on in FireFox I captured a request to:

Code:

www.esa.int/spaceinvideos/content/download/279520/12048654/file/esa-live-streamname.xml

This links to an XML document containing:

Code:

<LiveStream>
<item>
    <file>esaintWEBTV</file>
    <streamer>rtmpt://esaintlivefs.fplive.net:80/esaintlive-live</streamer>
</item>
</LiveStream>

So it looks like the actual URL to obtain the RTMP stream from is:

Code:

rtmpt://esaintlivefs.fplive.net:80/esaintlive-live

At this time I have no idea how to process this further in XBMC as I have no experience with either Python or the libraries / APIs of XBMC for add-on creation, so this is at the moment as far as my knowledge goes.

I will however keep an eye open for any example that may enable this. I would love if we could get this working.

Thanks again for your enthusiasm, best regards,
ferriedeperrie

edit: for later reference I add these forum links that contain useful explanations on how to add RTMP streams:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=93280
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=163086

[jamontes]

Hi ferriedeperrie,

Yes, you are right; I've got to that point by several ways parsing the raw HTML and JavaScript code from the webpage (including the XML file you pointed above).

There's even a link specially for the iPad (pointing to a m3u8 URL file), but couldn't get the video played anyway.

Thanks a lot for the forum links. I'm positive they are a valuable source of information.

I'll try to investigate a bit deeper to let it play through rtmpdump, using the info and adding all the parameters around the command (as the swfUrl, pageUrl, playpath, and live). This is a matter of time to find the way.

Then, I'll have to learn how to play the video using the XBMC add-on API (I'm pretty sure there will be a bundle of good examples into the add-on repository) without making use of strm files.

But right now it's something late here (around 3am local time), so I need to sleep a while

Thanks a lot for your help and interest.

Best regards,

jamontes.

[sammy1971]

Hello,

is this plugin broken? Every time i try to play a video i get
"Video-Typ wird nicht unterstützt" => Video type not supported

I tried on OpenElec 5 with Wetek Play and cubox.

Best regards,
Andreas

[jamontes]

Hi Andreas,

I wasn't aware of that. The ESA website has made some changes to its internal layout so the add-on cannot reproduce the videos since then. I'll try to fix it with a new add-on update in a few days.

Thanks a lot for let me know. I'll try to get it working back again.

Best regards,

jamontes.

[sammy1971]

Hi Jamontes,

Thank you for your quick respond.

Best regards,
Andreas

[jamontes]

Hi Andreas,

I've already fixed the problem. It was an small change into the code, and hopefully in a couple of days the updated version will be available into the official repository.

Best regards and enjoy it!

jamontes.

[Deadpan110]

Just joined the forum to say that I really enjoy watching ESA Videos on my Kodi setup and was concerned when they suddenly stopped working.

Glad to hear it will be fixed!!

Thank you and keep up the good work

[jamontes]

Hi Deadpan110,

The ESA videos is already updated into the official repository (just a few hours ago), so you will enjoy it again from this weekend :-)

Please, if after the update you find any problem with the add-on, just let me know and I'll try to fix it as usual.

Cheers,

jamontes.

[sammy1971]

Good work,
the addon update works like a charm

Best Regards
Andreas