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timewasted · 2014-11-04, 08:23

To be quite honest, I'm very confused. The errors in both those logs is the same one that I got (I reverted back to v0.0.11 to verify, and it's a different line number, but the same actual line) when I checked to see who's playing today. I saw the error, realized it was because there was only a single game, and my code assumed there would be a list of games. I made the fix to ensure that it always receives a list of games, checked it to see that it worked, then pushed out v0.0.12. Problem solved. Or so I thought. I don't see the error, and I'm failing to think of a scenario where the fix would fail. I'll investigate more.

The 400 HTTP responses is just me trying to be lazy about getting the condensed streams, and is a relatively easy fix.

hscotty55 · 2014-11-04, 16:03

Things seem to be working today on 0.0.13 but there is multiple games. The games list loads this time with no issues.

MetalChris · 2014-11-05, 03:40

Seems to be working well for me tonight, but damn it sucks watching a game on Fox Sports with that giant bar at the bottom! I'd pay a whole lot if someone could figure out a way to get rid of that thing.

timewasted · 2014-11-07, 09:47

Watching French streams should be "fully" functional now. I say "fully" because there's very little rhyme or reason (in my eyes at least) when French streams show up for games in the archive.

I expect to have another update out, hopefully tomorrow, that will make the add-on a lot less ugly. Progress looks good, so we'll see.

Also, I am looking for some feedback on the menu system. Currently, it looks something like:

Today's games
- Some Team vs Another Team
  - Full game
    - Home stream
    - Away stream
  - Condensed game
    - Home stream
    - Away stream
  - Game highlights
    - Home stream
    - Away stream
Recent games
- Same menu structure as Today's games
Archived games
- More or less the same menu structure as Today's games

If you want to watch the live "Some Team vs Another Team" game, you click "Today's games" (first click), "Some Team vs Another Team" (second click), "Full game" (third click), "Home stream" (fourth click). This has you clicking at least four times before a video starts. Considering XBMC/Kodi is a media center appliance, is having to make this many selections an annoyance?

[brick] · 2014-11-07, 17:24

I don't have a problem with 4 clicks. But it could be reduced if Condensed and Highlights weren't available in the Today's games path. They could appear only in the Recent and Archived paths. Which makes some logical sense--you want to watch today's games live, and finished games, even if played today, are either Recent or Archived once they're finished.

I launch this plug in from an Add-on shortcut, so would appreciate there being an icon for it. Right now, in Confluence, there's just a blank placeholder and the add-on text.

sdsnyr94 · 2014-11-07, 18:20

(2014-11-07, 17:24)[brick] Wrote: I don't have a problem with 4 clicks. But it could be reduced if Condensed and Highlights weren't available in the Today's games path. They could appear only in the Recent and Archived paths. Which makes some logical sense--you want to watch today's games live, and finished games, even if played today, are either Recent or Archived once they're finished.

I launch this plug in from an Add-on shortcut, so would appreciate there being an icon for it. Right now, in Confluence, there's just a blank placeholder and the add-on text.

As long as the icon is completely different from the original Gamecenter plugin. Smile

I have both installed and would like to be able to differentiate easily between the two.

Timewasted - thanks for your work on this.

timewasted · 2014-11-07, 19:56

(2014-11-07, 09:47)timewasted Wrote: Also, I am looking for some feedback on the menu system. Currently, it looks something like:

Menu structure removed for brevity

I made a mistake in my example menu structure. Games that show up as in progress skip the "Full game"/"Condensed game"/"Game highlights" choice and jump straight to the full game "Home stream"/"Away stream" choice. Even still, some of the games under "Today's games" can involve four clicks before you hit video.

Also, I just pushed out an update to try to make the add-on less ugly. This is a somewhat exciting release for me, because it replaces the default folder icons shown for games with actual "Some Team @ Another Team" matchup images. It very much livens things up.

In addition to the matchup images, I finally added an icon and fanart image for the add-on. This was tricky for me since Carb0's add-on was hit with a DMCA take-down notice. I didn't want to just use official NHL GameCenter images since this isn't an official GameCenter app. That meant finding good images that don't create the illusion that this is an official app. I'm still not sure that I'm 100% happy with the images, but I'm also not unhappy with them.

[brick] · 2014-11-07, 21:01

Looks great!

hscotty55 · 2014-11-07, 21:19

It is perfect the way it is. Thanks Laugh

theoren_1 · 2014-11-08, 23:41

Hey, I'm new to the app and XBMC, but any reason why I wouldn't be seeing the stream options for the FLames/Panthers game this afternoon? It's underway, and I can sign in and click through to the game, but I'm not seeing any streams... Huh

hscotty55 · 2014-11-10, 04:50

Not sure if games can still be blacked out? I am pretty sure I saw streams for the Flames game today.

timewasted · 2014-11-11, 22:25

I released v0.0.19 yesterday, which was primarily just code cleanups. Since I changed a good chunk of the code, please make sure you're running v0.0.19 or later before submitting a bug report.

I'm going to mention a potential feature that I'm playing around with. This may never materialize as an actual feature! I'm looking into what is required to be able to rewind live playlists back to the start of the game. There is unfortunately no way (that I have found, at least) to make an API request that says "please send me a playlist that starts at the beginning of the game instead of the currently live position". I have an idea for how to do this manually that, according to the HLS specs, should be easy to implement. I plan on playing around with it to see if it can actually work the way I hope it will.

As far as the previous comments go:

(2014-11-08, 23:41)theoren_1 Wrote: Hey, I'm new to the app and XBMC, but any reason why I wouldn't be seeing the stream options for the FLames/Panthers game this afternoon? It's underway, and I can sign in and click through to the game, but I'm not seeing any streams...

The only thing that I can think of would be that it was blacked out for you. That would result in seeing just a couple "Retry" links instead of actual streams. If you didn't see anything, well, that would be pretty interesting to me.

(2014-11-10, 04:50)hscotty55 Wrote: Not sure if games can still be blacked out? I am pretty sure I saw streams for the Flames game today.

Games can most definitely still be blacked out. I did happen to notice something that I found odd though. The Redwings/Lightning game was streaming live and completely unencrypted.

[brick] · 2014-11-13, 00:58

One tiny interface thing to mention: in the Condensed games tree the column that shows the time is showing the time for the entire game. Example, the streams for the Condensed versions of the OTT @ VAN game show a time of 1:53:00. Not a major crisis, since that information is largely superfluous anyway, but, thought I'd mention it. Lookin' good, otherwise, thanks for making it happen.

timewasted · (This post was last modified: 2014-11-15, 09:34 by timewasted.)

The displayed durations are kind of a hack to begin with. It's simply game_end_time - game_start_time in minutes. The funny thing is that it's not even really accurate for whole games either. I could probably fix it to be more accurate in more situations, but it's pretty low on my to-do list at the moment.

I'm finding out that rewinding in-progress playlists to the beginning is an interesting endeavor. I have some code that works, mostly, but the whole thing is a mess. First, there's the hassle of having to implement an HTTP server inside of an XBMC addon, just to serve up the custom playlist. Annoying, but not difficult. Second, ffmpeg doesn't seem to want to actually start at the beginning of the playlist, unless that playlist has the "endlist" flag. (edit: after looking at ffmpeg sources to see what's actually going on here, it seems they just opt to start at the the third-from-last segment. sigh...) Third, there's roughly five hours of "this game will begin shortly" at the beginning of a stream.

I'm not certain that this feature will ever actually see the light of day. I really would like to have a changelog entry proclaiming the ability to rewind time though...

timewasted · 2014-11-16, 06:33

The deeper that I go down the rabbit hole of rewinding live games, the more I realize how terrible it is. I can now more precisely rewind to a specific point in the playlist (this specific time will generally be the start of the game), which lets me skip the hours of "this game will begin shortly" that my previous method gave me. I've also worked around ffmpeg's annoying desire to start at last_segment-3 in a way that (mostly) doesn't make me hate myself for writing such terrible code.

Problems solved, right? Wrong! Some streams allow you to skip forward/backward, while others (seemingly most of them) do not. Based on the errors that ffmpeg is dumping into the XBMC log, I'm reasonably confident that this is a problem with the actual video segments that are being served by the GameCenter servers. If this is true, it's unlikely that there's anything that I can do to fix it.

I personally find little use in being able to rewind to the start of the game if you can't also skip past the less exciting parts of the game (such as period intermissions).