[mythtv-users] Hulu Integration?

[Jonno]

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 7:50 PM, DISAFAN <disafan at aim.com> wrote:
> I've been reading the resurrection of discussion on Hulu Integration.
> There are a few thoughts.
>
> 1. PlayOn seems like a great idea. unfortunately, you need a Windows
> system...which is in my opinion an unneeded add-on.  Unless someone can
> reverse-engineer the concept.
>
> 2. The continual problem of controlling a flash player with good remote
> integration. I tried some experiments using irxevent with hotkeys. You
> can pause and unpause a playing video feed with the Space Bar, but you
> have to make sure the video window has focus, which is harder to work
> with. Alt-F does seem to enable fullscreen. Someone on the MythTV wiki
> discussed the idea of using Xautomation to work with playback.
>
> 3. The possibility of putting something together using Mozilla Prism,
> formerly XULRunner, which does support the Flash Player plugins and
> launches 'webapps'. There is a similar program for Adobe
> Air....MyMediaPlayer at http://www.paulyanez.com/labs/mymediaplayer/ .
> We're all discussing Hulu integration, perhaps we need to approach the
> issue of Hulu with a remote and a better interface in general, even if
> it is something we launch from within MythTV as an outside program.
>
> 4. The simplest management method may be LIRCMD, the LIRC mouse daemon.
> Not pretty, but launching a fullscreen firefox and passing control to it
> may be the best quick and dirty method of getting things working until
> something better comes along.
>
> 5. Someone needs to come up with a scraping mechanism for Hulu. RSS feed
> is available for shows, queues, etc. but it seems to be limited to 20
> items. I think the first step, which some people have obviously
> done...ie OpenHulu and other scraping sites, is to create a program that
> can turn the Hulu library into an XML file of data...genre, shows,
> episode information, direct link to episode.  This can be used to feed
> into any future integration. Data is very important.
>
> I think, instead of searching immediately for a perfect solution, which
> will take time, addressing the individual aspects of the project may
> work better, using the same plugin philosophy MythTV used when
> MythWeather was redesigned. Anyone can now write a custom data grabber
> for MythWeather that adds new data sources. A future Myth Flash player
> solution needs the same functionality. It must be able to pull in RSS
> feeds, or other XML files created by outside parsers with categories and
> navigation, launch the player, and allow control of it.

I've been thinking about this some more and it seems the whole tv
landscape might change very quickly in 2009.
Hulu is only one site. There is also Amazon Video On Demand, Netflix
Streaming and the BBC iPlayer (wishing I was based in the UK).
We are seeing all sorts of anouncements about integration of these
sites into various set-top boxes like Roku and Tivo. I know that
Amazon and Netflix don't currently work on Linux but both work on a
Mac so how hard can it be (I kid). Boxee already has support for Hulu
and seems to be addressing these types of sites very quickly.
I think Myth needs to address all of these formats somehow as people
move to more streaming video. And those are just the major players. I
also use Veetle (veetle browser plugin via web) to watch soccer (truly
excellent quality) and also have a subscription to a website which
allows me to stream video (Real Player) of my soccer team and there
are probably many many more.
I'm no programmer so I don't know what the best approach is to
incorporate all these technologies into Mythv. I guess either you have
to have some sort of scraping mechanism that can handle all the
different formats of various plugins and their associated
login/account features or you could build some features on top of a
browser like Firefox that help the user view,navigate and control the
sites as webpages and leave the underlying support for the
technologies to the broswer plugin developers. Seems like the latter
would be more manageable at least in the short term. Or the devs could
decide that Myth is not targeted at streaming video and let Boxee have
at it. In which case I guess I need to know how to switch between
Boxee and Myth with my remote :-D

Just my $0.02