[jwdv22]

My primary use case is to search for shows to watch rather than look at the most recently added stuff with RSS, but the current frontend is more geared to RSS.

I meant it would be nice to have that RSS front-end plus the ability to search. Sounds like you have it coming along rather well. I will have to give it a shot.

[LtChambers]

I've spent hours tonight trying to figure out why playing the RAR when it is initially downloaded only plays the first second of video and then aborts. Whereas when the first RAR is already downloaded (according to a check with par2.exe), it can start the video and the background downloading without the video aborting. I've tried many things, including shutting down all the download threads before trying to play the video, and trying to make the script state as similar as possible between the two different situations of starting the video.

It sure would be nice if XBMC would log WHY it is stopping its playback.

[mr.b]

I'm sure it's been quite frustrating, but why not just add some code to wait to try and start playing until the first RAR has been downloaded. This doesn't solve the issue but lets you get past it for now - you can always loop back later if you can get some developer support to help you get to the root of the problem.

[LtChambers]

Thanks, but I currently do wait until the first RAR has been downloaded. XBMC can't play from a file that has been opened for write (exclusive) access, like is obviously necessary to download a file. I could probably reopen the stream every time I need to add more to the file, but that could be a later development. Right now I'm having enough trouble just playing from the completed first RAR. :/

[mr.b]

ok, sorry for the useless recommendation -- I guess I'm having trouble understanding the distinction between the two cases. I did grab the plugin from SVN and gave it a try in an attempt to recreate your issue, but on my machine, it doesn't ever seem to start trying to play, instead it just continues downloading. I'll try and check it out in more detail later.

[LtChambers]

It doesn't try to play after it finishes the first RAR (should be either movie.rar or movie.part01.rar)?

[LtChambers]

Tried to fix the same issue for a few hours tonight also. I still have no idea why the video stops playing. It sucks to get so close and stall.

[LtChambers]

It works sometimes and not other times, even on the same set of RARs (first RAR complete, all the others in the set are 0-byte). I am beginning to suspect a race condition in the RAR playing code.

A simple script like:
video_url = "rar://C%3A%5Ctest%5Cnzb/movie.mkv"
xbmc.Player(xbmc.PLAYER_CORE_MPLAYER).play(video_url)

If that RAR set exists and plays, running the script repeatedly will eventually cause:
ERROR: XFILE::CFile::Read : Access violation at 0x008e422a: Reading location 0x0987a31a

At least on my machine. Can someone else reproduce this issue?

[mr.b]

sorry for leaving you hanging, I'll try and test today to confirm the behavior. What platform are you testing on?

[LtChambers]

Windows 7 64-bit

I recommend testing the simple script I posted right above your post. That bug is probably what I'm running into with my full script, or at least confounding my debugging.

[mr.b]

I tried the simple script method on a Jaunty 32bit box and I got some weird results. If all of the RARs were present, it played correctly. When I subbed 0-byte files for all but the 1st rar, it started to play the first time I tried it but had lots of issues. Once I stopped it and tried to replay it, it did not work at all. I'll try and figure out what's going on and post an update. I've also got other platforms I can test on later.

[LtChambers]

Yay, I'm not crazy! Thanks for testing. Definitely this project is dependent on being able to play after getting the first RAR. Otherwise, I will just hack something together to manually assemble the video from (non-compressed) RARs as they are downloaded. That would even be faster to start the stream (could start as soon as the first couple megabytes are downloaded) and would beat the pants off competing solutions like NZB Player. But obviously that hackage would be a lot trickier to implement and more prone to weird RAR file list issues. That would be like a streaming RAR extractor, which honestly could be pretty cool for a lot of uses.

[mattiasp]

Thumbs up for the development! This is highly appreciated :-)

Is the source code available on SVN somewhere? I'd like to test it out and give you some feedback

I think you should split the plugin into several components:

1. Interface for XBMC
The purpose of the interface is allowing the user to browse / search for an NZB-file, separately of the Downloader. This way the interface could be coded against different NZB-providers (Newzbin, Newsleecher etc.). Maybe the different NZB-providers could be 'modular' eg. the core interface takes directions on how to fetch NZBs from Newzbin using an XML-file. This way other providers could easily be added down the road and other programmers could add/change support for providers.

2. Downloader
Accepts input of NZB-file, reorders files in set, download, verifies and callback to XBMC to play the file.

[mr.b]

mattiasp,

ltchambers plugin focuses on streaming ability -- if you simply want a nzb downloader, there's a great sabnzbd plugin and also take a look at sickbeard.

[DV3B]

Hi,

I've just installed the plugin with the svn_repo installer but I can't access the plugin settings menu.

Nothing seems to work, I've tried right clicking on each of the indexing sites as well as using "c" on the keyboard but it just brings up the context menu that you normally get when looking at a video source folder.

I can access other plugin menu settings like Apple Movie Trailers Lite using a right click or "c" on the keyboard.

The XBMC version is revision 27284.

Thanks.