Getting Pluto extra to work

[bouilliabai]

There should be a vod XML file in the data folder where you can check to see if only 17 rows are coming from the addon.

Kicking myself for not remembering that was there. As mentioned earlier, it does appear that categories are limited to 100 items each.

And lo and behold, there are the URLs too, although it would be a real chore to incorporate those into the IPTV Simple Client.

[sub]

The items are sorted in alphabetical for the next release.

Good deal. While Pluto, and Roku for that matter, don't distinguish between movies and series in their web interface or app, the Pluto extra and Kodi do. Any chance of putting those items under subheadings in order to facilitate the selection of categories?

I can't tell easily from the m3u. There is nothing that says it's TV vs Movie.

From the couple of lists I have access to, I could maybe look at the first item in the list to see if it has a "(1988)" type year, and if it does then assume they're movies. Likewise, I might be able to look at the first item for a "SxxExx" type season identifier, and if it does them assume they're TV. This type of scheme wouldn't work for one of the lists I have though where it has an 'unsorted' full of both.

[bouilliabai]

For real recordings, which come from a device or a live stream, these obviously happen in parallel.

For VOD downloads (which end up looking like a recording in NextPVR), it's as I mentioned above. The download jobs are placed in a queue and done one at a time.

Could be that I recorded a live stream and VOD item at the same time. Again, I was just playing around, and it wasn't repeatable, so no telling what happened.

However, it does appear that VOD recordings in the queue do not show up as pending in the scheduler, while a previously selected item is recording.

[sub]

I'm going to put a limit of 10000 items per group.

One of the lists I have has 23000 items in one group. The browser really struggles with this. Limiting it to 10k helped a lot.

[sub]

Could be that I recorded a live stream and VOD item at the same time.

Yes, could have been this you were thinking of.

However, it does appear that VOD recordings in the queue do not show up as pending in the scheduler, while a previously selected item is recording.

That is true. I kind of can't really easily add them there though. These aren't really recordings, and I don't want the normal recording service trying to process them. I might see if I can do something though.

[bouilliabai]

NextPVR's VOD support is very basic. It's never really had much effort put into it, and virtually no comments at all from the community. Most people are here for live tv and the ability to recording tv.

Precisely why I wanted to get the live TV setup working first. Immediately, the boss wanted to watch something on Stories by AMC, but in order by episode number. And of course, the series isn't available on demand from a FAST service, so I had to explain how the recording process works. The quote "so easy a caveman can understand it" comes to mind, but what it really boils down to is whether the caveman is willing to go to the trouble. Arggghhh!

[mvallevand]

I disagree with changing the order from Pluto TV to an alpha sort. To me the whole point of FAST is to shift from linear TV and maybe give me something new to watch when there isn't something on traditional TV. It certainly wasn't designed for collectors or video hoarders. Although I don't support the extra anymore providing the shows in the same order as the Pluto APP is a plus not a minus. The VOD movie wall is a great way to search out content and it shouldn't be linear.

Recording in NextPVR are quite different since they aren't designed for random viewing.

For pirate IPTV VOD it is slightly different but I'd offer the release date then year are what people are most interested in. Not sure how the pirates make them.

Martin

[sub]

I disagree with changing the order from Pluto TV to an alpha sort.

I've added a checkbox to Settings->General to control with VOD is sorted or not.

[bouilliabai]

The nightly has another new PR to fix an issue with the groups.

Saw that while browsing the PR page. It may not be possible to fix the issue with channels deleted at the PVR still appearing in custom Kodi groups, because what's to say that a channel in question doesn't belong to a PVR that is currently offline, or may appear again at some later point. And if the URL or PIN for a PVR changes, we certainly want the Kodi channels and groups databases to remain intact while the front end is updated. Which is currently the case.

I did mention that the plan for Kodi was to do it as recording. It won't matter for you though since if I do anything at all for VOD it will not support live streams just VOD with a direct video source URL.

Not sure I follow. Live streaming would not come into play unless the buffer is emptied due to slow network speed. The comment was related to starting playback before a recording is completed. The nature of TS files should allow for the recording to be completed and file closed for writing without affecting playback.

There wasn't an issue with VOD in Pluto, it was never meant to be a downloader for PlutoTV, just a reasonable sampling of the content. If you need to browse more than 100 movies to find some "instant" satisfaction you probably should use their app or a content app like JustWatch. I specifically filter everything for Live and VOD because 1,000s of shows would be ridiculous.

Fortunately, Pluto doesn't offer nearly that many movies in any category, and the series filter keeps those from becoming a total mess. Reasonable usage would have only those series of immediate interest enabled in the filter, but movies are a different story.

The main advantage of being able to use NextPVR to stream VOD content is for its time-shifting capability. Not that we don't want to watch Pluto, Roku or Tubi ads... but it's nice to be able to rewind to try and catch something missed the first go-round. There doesn't seem to be too much point in browsing movie titles if only 100 are appearing. The same thing is happening with the new Crackle addon update for Kodi with pagination added but not working correctly. Or perhaps it is working correctly while care is being taken not to run afoul of piracy regulations, as "fair use" may be limited by an intent to present only a sampling from these services. Those concerns are beyond my pay grade. I'm just wanting to get as much use as possible from NextPVR and have it readily interface with Kodi to make things easy for the better half.

I didn't see anything obvious in the script that filters only 100 items. Only that the JSON cache is limited to 10 pages. Then again, I only started playing with Python a couple of months ago when the slug issue for newer Streamlink builds came up, and am still a veritable novice in using it.

[bouilliabai]

I disagree with changing the order from Pluto TV to an alpha sort.

I've added a checkbox to Settings->General to control with VOD is sorted or not.

I wasn't aware that the category order mirrors what's on the Pluto service. That makes sense too. The checkbox gives users a choice. Bravo.