UbuStream Dynamic Source "mini-plugin" architecture for on-demand streams

[ubu]

And here's the scraping class...

So, I've taken the liberty of using your class in the little prototype I'm building for "Interactive Dynamic Source" apps (for want of a better term). Basically, a DynSource app with a form for capturing links from google, youtube, etc. It works like a regular DynSource app except that the form pops up when you press the import button. You can then copy video clip page URLs from your browser and paste them into the form where they get resolved into the actual target URL and added to a list. When you are done, the list gets turned into a PLX file which is then imported in the normal way.

I'd already built one for YouTube where I capture the link for playing the Flash video in full screen mode on the YouTube site. To play it I built a "player" from a simple webrowser control in a form with no border. Then, when I saw your GooglePage class, I built another one that uses your technique (ie. capture the actual URL of the file and then use VLC to play it). Here's what I found so far:

Your avi links work really well. At least they do in VLC 8.4a (my test system) but in VLC 8.5 (my GBPVR system) it complains that the avi format is broken and then stops (EDIT: but works fine in 8.6-test2a beta - I'm watching one now).

The flv links work (eventually) but VLC seems to have to download the entire flv file (which takes forever) before it starts playing it. I haven't figured out if you can persuade it to start playing while it's still being downloaded (like it does with most other formats). The flv files seem like they are really huge compared with other formats too. (EDIT: Just noticed that you already told me about this problem a few days ago. Duhh! I really must get some sleep ).

Using my YouTube technique, where I'm letting their site host the player and just rendering the resultant window, works kinda OK (Flash video is very slow and unreliable at the best of times, IMHO). The gotcha in my case is that something seems to change in the target URL they use every so often, so the link I capture works for a while and then no longer works. The video id is the same but something else seems to change. Still trying to figure out what.

I'll post the source (and, with a bit of luck, working binaries) when I've got it slightly more sorted out. Very much a "what if" project, though. Just one approach to solving the problem.

EDIT: Here's an example of the problem I mentioned above (I've highlighted the bit that changed):

Code:

http://www.youtube.com/watch_fullscreen?video_id=BL5kHYtL430&l=189&t=OEgsToPDskK[B]FQs1JFiiH_z2Dl1vOi9Rl[/B]&fs=1&title="Dance of the Firefly"

and 20 minutes later I get:

http://www.youtube.com/watch_fullscreen?video_id=BL5kHYtL430&l=189&t=OEgsToPDskK[B]TE6ki-TuKlF_u6JWqVIPk[/B]&fs=1&title="Dance of the Firefly"

Any ideas? A timestamp, maybe?

[ubu]

So here's the source code for what I have so far with "Interactive Dynamic Source" apps. I've also included a PodcastsDynSource app I whipped together that explores using the Dynamic Source architecture for something other than scraping web sites.

[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]

The binaries are included in the latest UbuStream "Release Candidate" zip attached to this post in the 2.0 beta thread..

As described in my previous post, the interactive mini-plugins work like a regular DynSource except that they display a form that lets you capture the URLs of the target video clip pages in order to create a PLX playlist file. This functionality has been implemented as a generic form within the common Dynamic Source library.

The Google one uses HTPCGB's google scraper class to get the stream URL from the page and plays it using VLC. The YouTube one gets the URL for YouTube's full screen version of the clip and plays it using an "ersatz" player - UbuFlashPlayer.exe. The YouTube player shows the player control bar at the bottom of the screen (can't get rid of it) which will respond to mouse clicks but not to the remote control. The Back button on the remote control (or Esc) will close the player.

The Podcasts mini-plugin creates its sections from your podcast download folders (as created by by a podcast receiver, such as Juice) and loads the filenames of the audio (mp3) and video (mp4) podcasts as UbuStream stations. The station name and description are created from the file's ID3v1 tag.

HTPCGB: I made minor adjustments to your class: added two methods to get the title and the description of the clip from the GooglePage html and also changed the methods to be properties of the GooglePage (cosmetic preference; no good reason ). Also, btw, I "went round" the problem of the YouTube "timestamped" url by moving the code to scrape the fullscreen clip url from the DynSource app to the "player" app, so it gets resolved at run time.