New and improved UbuStream web tv/radio "tuner" - now released as a plugin

[jksmurf]

I'd just like to add a note for folks trying to get the url of a (Audio or Video) stream, where the normal stream page link doesn't "appear" to have a direct link to the stream to add to UBUStream. e.g. I was trying to get NDR2 Radio from North Germany, located here, where you have to choose a Real Audio OR Windows Media Radio button, then click start audio.

http://www1.ndr2.de/pages_special_lib/0,...r2,00.html

Nothing on the page gives a clue to the actual link. This might seem simple to "those who know", but if you don't have a clue, here's one way to find it.
1. At the html page from where you can manually start the stream, choose "view source" (at least from within IE) and notepad will pop up with a lot of code.
2. Perform a search on (Audio Formats) wma and/or rm depending on your player format preference. Look for a line that starts http:// and ends with .wma or .rm. If the page has neither wma or rma, there are other audio and video formats, and if you open UbuStream.xml in Explorer you will see a few of them, such as asx, ram (also Real Audio Media), sdp, and smil, to name a few.

RMA Stream
http://stream.ndr.de/bb/redirect.lsc?str...e&media=rm

WMA Stream
http://lsd.newmedia.tiscali-business.com...e/ndr2.wma

This worked for me but YMMV. I'm coming from a more simple perspective here, so if anyone can/needs to correct the above, please say the word, and I'll fix it. Hope this helps folks looking for their favourite stations but can't find it using normal search methods.

Cheers,

k.

[EDIT]Ubu: I'll try and add this to http://www.worldwidemediaproject.com/ when I work out how (if) I can get hold of their radio schedule. They show "currently playing" and before and next and you can choose a time, but there isn't an advance playlist, at least not one I can find, only what they have already played.

[ubu]

I'd just like to add a note for folks trying to get the url of a (Audio or Video) stream, where the normal stream page link doesn't "appear" to have a direct link to the stream to add to UBUStream. e.g. I was trying to get NDR2 Radio from North Germany, located here, where you have to choose a Real Audio OR Windows Media Radio button, then click start audio.
......................

This worked for me but YMMV. I'm coming from a more simple perspective here, so if anyone can/needs to correct the above, please say the word, and I'll fix it. Hope this helps folks looking for their favourite stations but can't find it using normal search methods.

The technique you describe is fine and will work in most cases. However, there is a simpler approach that will work 90% of the time (including the NDR2 site).

If the site offers the option of playing the stream with an external player (as in the NDR2 case) you can choose that option and, when the player starts playing the stream, open its properties window and then copy and paste (highlight the url and Ctrl-C to copy) the url into UbuStream.

For instance, in Windows Media Player, click File>Properties and copy the url in the Location field. In RealPlayer, click File>Clip Properties>View Clip Info and copy the url in the File Name field. (If the filename appears to be a local file you can use File>Clip Properties>Clip Source instead to get the "true" url.) Quicktime and VLC both have equivalent properties fields.

If the site does not have an external player option but embeds the player in the page, you can often use a similar technique with the embedded player. If it's WMP, right clicking on the video area or on the status area at the bottom of the player and then selecting Properties from the context menu should work. For RealPlayer, right click on the status area at the bottom of the player and choose Properties (if available) or Play in External Player (so you can use the external player technique just described).

All of the techniques above will work for the NDR2 streams but, often, a site will use an embedded player which has blocked the ability to see the properties of the current stream. In which case, jksmurf's technique is the way to go. With some additions:

Perform a search on (Audio Formats) wma and/or rm depending on your player format preference. Look for a line that starts http:// and ends with .wma or .rm. If the page has neither wma or rma, there are other audio and video formats, and if you open UbuStream.xml in Explorer you will see a few of them, such as asx, ram (also Real Audio Media), sdp, and smil, to name a few.

The stream url may start with rtsp://, udp:// or mms:// instead of http://. Other common extensions are wmv, avi, asf, mov, qt, mp3, mp4. In the case of mms addresses there may not be an extension and the url can end in a directory name. Flash media files use the flv and swf extensions.

The worst case is when the player is executed from a PHP or Java script and the url is not obvious in the page source at all. All is not lost, however, if you do a little detective work. You can usually find some parameters to the script that give a clue to what the underlying url might be.

So that's everything I know about the subject.

Ubu: I'll try and add this to http://www.worldwidemediaproject.com/ when I work out how (if) I can get hold of their radio schedule. They show "currently playing" and before and next and you can choose a time, but there isn't an advance playlist, at least not one I can find, only what they have already played.

I'm sure the folks at WorldwideMediaProject would be happy if you added the station. A schedule isn't required.

[jksmurf]

The technique you describe is fine and will work in most cases. However, there is a simpler approach that will work 90% of the time (including the NDR2 site).

Awesome stuff Ubu, thanks. Your approach is certainly simpler!! :o Mine was based on my experiences with tvxb (an XML Grabber).

k.

[ubu]

Awesome stuff Ubu, thanks. Your approach is certainly simpler!! :o Mine was based on my experiences with tvxb (an XML Grabber).

Funny you should mention that. I'm working on the next release of UbuStream and one of the things I'm looking at is providing an url grabber (expecially useful for on-demand video streams). I have a prototype working which contains a mini-browser (so you can navigate through the relevant web pages) and a selection list which gets populated with the likely "candidate" urls on each page. The idea is that you could select an url and dynamically add it to the UbuStream database so it would be immediately available for selection from the GB-PVR UI.

As you can imagine, the difficult part is coming up with the right algorithms for matching the url patterns in the html.

There is more and more on-demand video available (Yahoo, Google, AOL, etc. in addition to the movie downoad sites) and a lot of sites that used to host streaming video/audio have now switched to the on-demand model, so I think UbuStream has to support it better.

[HTPCGB]

Funny you should mention that. I'm working on the next release of UbuStream and one of the things I'm looking at is providing an url grabber (expecially useful for on-demand video streams).

Coincidentally, an idea was proposed in this post to create a plugin similar to ubustream, except for dynamic content support. The plugin would use "mini-plugins" to extract video url information from specific sites such as CNN, BBC etc... Since you are now working on something similar, I'd like to ask if you'd be interested in implementing this "mini-plugin" architecture in ubustream.

Regards,
HTPCGB

[RMK]

Great Idea ... Can't wait till i can get my hands on GBPVRUIElements (wiki not delivering) so i can try it

[ubu]

Coincidentally, an idea was proposed in this post to create a plugin similar to ubustream, except for dynamic content support. The plugin would use "mini-plugins" to extract video url information from specific sites such as CNN, BBC etc... Since you are now working on something similar, I'd like to ask if you'd be interested in implementing this "mini-plugin" architecture in ubustream.

That is an intriguing notion. It raises a lot of questions about how such an architecture could be implemented. Initial thoughts:

My current approach is to try to provide a generic solution (not tied to any specific site) that will search for a variety of common URL patterns and let the user choose the URLs they wish to add to the UbuStream station database. Since these patterns may not work for all sites, some ability to customize the pattern matching (user defined regular expressions?) would be needed.

This approach has the advantage of avoiding site-specific code (and the attendant legal issues to which you allude in the CNN plugin thread ). The downside is that this approach is a bit cumbersome and unwieldy, especially for the totally non-technical user. The other major problem is that, while pattern matching for URLs may achieve a reasonable success rate, finding the name (or description) of a stream in a given page is extremely difficult if not impossible. Sometimes the name is part of an <a href construct, sometimes (if the page has an embedded player for a single stream) it's in the page title, sometimes it's a parameter to a script, etc., etc.

So the idea of supporting site-specific mini-plugins is attractive. UbuStream would have no legal issues since it wouldn't contain site specific code but the end-user would get the advantage of "intelligent" custom scraping of each site. But there seem to be a couple of "impedance mismatch" issues to consider in melding the two approaches to playing web streams within GB-PVR:

1) The UbuStream paradigm is a simple list of stations, each representing a stream. (In the next release these may also be organized into groups/playlists). The user can "cherry pick" the streams they want to include in the list. The station title (entered by the user) is the only information displayed for each stream. The CNN plugin (or any site specific plugin) would, presumably, need to organize the streams differently, based on the list of streams provided by the target site, and display additional information (description, date, etc.) for each stream.

2) What is the UI that the user sees when playing a stream? UbuStream simply provides a GB-PVR shell which invokes a media player to play a stream and the plugin assumes the user has configured their remote control to send commands to the player in addition to GB-PVR so the flow of control is relatively seamless. The CNN plugin (as I understand it) displays a form with WMP embedded within it that overlays the GB-PVR display (not sure how the remote control talks to it).

Here's some ideas off the top of my head:

1) A simple (albeit inelegant) solution might be for the mini-plugins to implement a wrapper that could be compiled as an .exe application so that UbuStream could treat them as a just another media player. The mini-plugin would appear as a "station" in the UbuStream UI. This would require no changes to UbuStream and would, I believe, work with the current release.

2) The new release of UbuStream will also support importing stations from m3u or pls playlist files (including dynamic, almost real-time imports). A site specific mini-plugin could, perhaps, export a playlist of streams for consumption by UbuStream.

3) A more sophisticated solution might be to develop a mechanism whereby UbuStream could invoke the mini-plugin which would then display a site-specific selection and information panel and, when the user chooses a stream, would call an UbuStream command processor executable (similar to UbuStreamCmd.exe which is currently used by UbuStream's "channel mode" execution option) in a new process. The mini-plugin would then terminate itself and the command processor would invoke the appropriate media player to play the chosen stream.

One advantage of the last approach is that it could potentially solve the problem of MVP support (which I gather is an issue for the CNN plugin) by the mini-plugin. Since the stream could now be played using VLC (or mplayer) it could be streamed (recorded) to a temporary MPEG2 file which, in principle, could be viewed on the MVP. This is how UbuStream supports MVP users, via channel mode, today. I don't own an MVP myself but I'm told it works OK.

There are probably better solutions but that's what leaps to mind immediately. One thing to consider, if you feel that a more complex approach is needed, is who would "own" the architecture? (And maintain it, support it, defend its integrity, etc.).

Let me know. Thanks for an excellent idea. (And Remco too ).

[Remco]

My idea for making it "extensible" is working with plugins for the viewer-plugin: We define an interface-class. Each extension (e.g. a CNN-parser) is a seperate dll that implements that class. The viewer-plugin looks in a directory for plugin-plugin-dll's and shows a name per dll to the user. When the user selects this name, the viewer, gets the URL's by getting data from the class. At that moment, that plugin-plugin gets the data from the website (e.g. CNN) and parses it to URL's that are returned to the viewer-plugin.

I hope my explanation is clear. I made a little prototype in GB-PVR and i'm sure this will work.

My idea about this class:
- The main viewer, shows a list of Page()
- each Page() has a title, an URL, a type (page or stream) and optional a list of subpages. Each subpage is again a Page(). When the type of the page is "stream", the URL is a videostream that can be played. If the type is "page", the user sees the title of that page and can select it for seeing the list of subpages, etc.

I'd like to give my idea a try. Ubu, is it possible you share the source-code for your plugin with me. Then i'll try to extend it with a plugin-structure.

Some info about plugins in C#: http://www.codeproject.com/csharp/plugin...ct=1211605

[RMK]

Got through the setup ... checked all of this thread and think i'm close on the setup. Trying to get channel mode working ... Right now, When i select record ... i see command window open and close ... and then windows media player kicks off ... Record fails .... My Log is:

10/8/2006 3:42:47 PM Installed ADO.NET Provider: System.Data.OleDb.OleDbFactory
10/8/2006 3:42:47 PM ...using System.Data.OleDb.OleDbFactory
10/8/2006 3:42:48 PM Poker TV Started:
C:\Program Files\Windows Media Player\wmplayer.exe mms://win25ca.audiovideoweb.com/ca25win25001_1 /fullscreen
10/8/2006 3:45:04 PM >>>>>>UbuCmd v0.2 (Mar 2006) - Processing request from GBPVR......
10/8/2006 3:45:04 PM playerParms: out=#transcode{vcodec=mp2v,vb=1024,scale=1,acodec=mp2a,ab=192,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=std{access=file,mux=ps,url=^H:\Recordings\xxxxxx programming.\xxxxxx programming._20061008_15001600.mpg^}}
10/8/2006 3:45:04 PM oid:0
10/8/2006 3:45:04 PM oid:8
10/8/2006 3:45:04 PM Installed ADO.NET Provider: System.Data.Odbc.OdbcFactory
10/8/2006 3:45:04 PM Installed ADO.NET Provider: System.Data.OleDb.OleDbFactory
10/8/2006 3:45:04 PM ...using System.Data.OleDb.OleDbFactory
10/8/2006 3:45:04 PM Error encountered in: System
while executing: Boolean StartWithShellExecuteEx(System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo)
==> The system cannot find the file specified
at System.Diagnostics.Process.StartWithShellExecuteEx(ProcessStartInfo startInfo)
at System.Diagnostics.Process.Start()
at System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(ProcessStartInfo startInfo)
at UbuStreamCmd.UbuStreamEngine.Main(String channelNum, String playerParms)
Process invocation: bbb yyyyyy out=#transcode{vcodec=mp2v,vb=1024,scale=1,acodec=mp2a,ab=192,channels=2}:duplicate{dst=std{access=file,mux=ps,url="H:\Recordings\xxxxxx programming.\xxxxxx programming._20061008_15001600.mpg"}}
10/8/2006 3:45:04 PM Terminating UbuStreamCmd.

10/8/2006 3:45:09 PM >>>>>>UbuCmd v0.2 (Mar 2006) - Processing request from GBPVR......
10/8/2006 3:45:09 PM playerParms:
10/8/2006 3:45:09 PM oid:0
10/8/2006 3:45:09 PM oid:8
10/8/2006 3:45:09 PM Installed ADO.NET Provider: System.Data.Odbc.OdbcFactory
10/8/2006 3:45:09 PM Installed ADO.NET Provider: System.Data.OleDb.OleDbFactory
10/8/2006 3:45:09 PM ...using System.Data.OleDb.OleDbFactory
10/8/2006 3:45:09 PM Error encountered in: System
while executing: Boolean StartWithShellExecuteEx(System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo)
==> The system cannot find the file specified
at System.Diagnostics.Process.StartWithShellExecuteEx(ProcessStartInfo startInfo)
at System.Diagnostics.Process.Start()
at System.Diagnostics.Process.Start(ProcessStartInfo startInfo)
at UbuStreamCmd.UbuStreamEngine.Main(String channelNum, String playerParms)
Process invocation: bbb yyyyyy
10/8/2006 3:45:09 PM Terminating UbuStreamCmd.

[ubu]

Got through the setup ... checked all of this thread and think i'm close on the setup. Trying to get channel mode working ... Right now, When i select record ... i see command window open and close ... and then windows media player kicks off ... Record fails ....

There is a support thread for UbuStream in the Plugin & Skin support forum that is the best place to post this kind of question. I have posted my response to your question there. This thread is intended for announcements and discussions about the features of UbuStream.