Long awaited Netflix update status.

[whurlston]

Now that NPVR has been released publicly, I can announce that I have resumed working on a plugin for Netflix Watch Instantly. It is not quite yet ready for release but it soon will be. Look for it over the next few days.

The "bad" news:

This is a complete code rewrite due to the changes with both NPVR and the Neflix data service. So the first release will just be a basic plugin that lists all available Watch Instantly titles by name with a basic player. Additional features like queue management and list sorting will be added after the initial release.

The good news:

The new plugin pulls the current list of available titles at the when first activating the plugin (or selecting "Refresh List"). The data is pulled directly from Netflix which means that there is no interim server like there was before so you do not have to wait me to update the list.
Refreshing the list takes minutes depending on your connection.
After the initial basic plugin is released, the code will be made available on Google Code and additional project developers will be assigned (all of those who offered previously). This way the project will hopefully continue with or without me and other developers can step up to add additional features.

Other thoughts:

Everyone should now be on the Silverlight player so there is no downloading of titles to watch later. Everything will be streamed. Silverlight does however create some challenges for trick play with a remote (ff/rew). I can remap remote keys when the custom browser (the player) is in windowed mode but when switching to fullscreen, I cannot remap the keys. So for fullscreen, you will need a programmable remote or programmable remote software like HIP.

[whurlston]

Here are a couple of screenshots.

List View:



Covers View:

[elbryyan]

Thaks whurlston, I'm realy looking forward to this plugin.

[whurlston]

I've been working on the player window all night but the plugin is pretty much ready. Just a couple of small things to do now:

1. Finish the skinning. (Wave skin is pretty much complete. I'll finish that and the default before posting. BlueRetroVE+ will be added after release.)
   
2. Add Popup for cast and crew details. (Probably do this after the release.)
   
3. Fix a small issue with the player when switching in and out of fullscreen mode. (I'll fix this after posting the release. It's usable but the timeline is visible at the bottom of the screen.)
   
4. Write some semblance of documentation. (I dread this part more than the coding.)
   

I should have it out tomorrow with minor bugs.

[johnsonx42]

wow, nice, I've been waiting/hoping a long time to have an easy way to access Netflix. I used to call Zinc as an external task from GB-PVR, and it worked ok but had way too much going on... very low WAF. Now in NPVR I had nothing since there's no external task support yet... looking forward to your release.