Release Streaming Radio: A nicer way of playing custom radio streams
#1
Hi,

A little while ago I started listening to a couple of internet radio stations on the web, but I wanted to have a nice way of playing them in Kodi. They weren't available in any existing (working) addons, and I wanted a better experience than what's available with .strm files.

I sat down with the intention of creating a simple addon with a couple of artwork files rolled into it, however, after being encouraged by my girlfriend, I ended up attempting to make the user experience as similar as possible to Kodi's local music player, with track information and album art. It wasn't straightforward - it turned out I was trying to do something that the addon API really isn't designed for - but after some discussion on the forum and a lot of trial and error, I've arrived at something that I'm sufficiently happy with to release into the wild.

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Features:
  • Custom radio streams
  • Specify the station's name, tag line and artwork for display in Kodi's GUI
  • Multiple bitrates supported with an option to set the maximum
  • Now playing track information displayed in OSD (only Xperience1080 at this time)

Displaying track information in the OSD requires skin support in the addon. Currently this is only available Xperience1080, but I'll probably add support for Estuary once Kodi 17 is released. Other skins may be supported if demand is there, and pull requests are also welcome. Unsupported skins will still work, just with a degraded user experience.

If you're interested please download the latest release .zip file from my GitHub repository. I've included Buddha Radio as an example station, so you can try it without having to configure your own streams. The readme on GitHub also has information about how to set everything up.

If you have problems please let me know here or start an issue on GitHub. I've tested with Kodi 16.1 and 17.0-Beta5 on Windows 7 and Ubuntu.

Cheers,
Jon

Download here
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#2
Hello,

I installed it on my test machine (Kodi17).
Went to Music add-ons and clicked on Streaming Radio.
just leaves me with a blank screen.

(I was expecting buddha radio to start playing?)

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#3
To quote the OP's description.

'Currently this is only available Xperience1080'

Not working on Estuary Skin.
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#4
Nice work bud Nod
Learning Linux the hard way !!
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#5
I haven't down any testing at all in Kodi 17 yet. When I get a chance I'll take a look and see if I can work out what's going on. Skin's other than Xperience1080 should work in Kodi 16, but you won't get the track info or album art.
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#6
(2016-10-29, 18:15)gedisony Wrote: I installed it on my test machine (Kodi17)

I've just fixed the problem you were seeing. Please try the latest version; it should now work correctly in Kodi 17.

Cheers,
Jon
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#7
Thanks, all good.

an anime addon by thehighway has this same issue on krypton.

Was it related to
xbmcplugin.setContent(int(sys.argv[1]), 'movies')
where if you set the content to something not supported, the entire directoryitem won't display?
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#8
(2016-11-09, 20:48)gedisony Wrote: Was it related to xbmcplugin.setContent(int(sys.argv[1]), 'movies') ?

Yes, that's right. I ended up removing the setContent() call completely in this case, since the closest content type songs didn't really do what I was after.
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#9
Jonathan,

cool plugin, just started to play with this and have decided to integrate support for it into my skin. I have just posted an issue to your github and will advise if there are any other issues with integrating support for you plugin.

Please tell me that you are planning to eventually release this to the main Kodi repo as this really needs to get before a much bigger audience.

Thanks again
Wyrm (AppTV)
If required a FULL debug log can now be submitted from the skin in settings->skin settings->support. Or follow instructions here if you can't access skin settings.

FAQ's located at :- http://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:AppTV
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#10
(2017-06-21, 16:02)wyrm Wrote: Please tell me that you are planning to eventually release this to the main Kodi repo

If there is demand, then I'll certainly polish it up and submit it for review.

When I previously checked the rules, I thought they said addons must not make modifications to other files, which mine will do when patching a skin (if supported). However, looking again just now, I didn't see this requirement in the wiki.
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#11
Your project is very interesting. I'm currently working myself on a radio addon too: AudioAddict

For these streams I could grab also additional information like 'track duration', 'artwork' and other information which could be displayed if possible. I will look at your code and have a look if there is something useable for my addon. But I would like to have it working for all skins.

Thanks for publishing your code, that might be useful for me and others!
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