on - demand tv

[fuzzweed]

Sorry for the lazy approach to this, but can anyone summarise the latest state of play regarding integrating (UK) on demand TV into NPVR. I'm particularly thinking iplayer, but other channels and netflix, love film would also be interesting.
If my mums sony TV can do it, I don't see why I cant...
There was an iplayer plugin some time back, but it gradually stopped working as the good old beeb changed things at there end - is this still going?
I currently use npvr pc clients, so I could change to xbmc as a front end fairly easily. i know next to nothing about it, but does this have an iplayer (etc) plugin, and if this was a possible route, what would I loose compared to npvr?

[Graham]

XBMC has BBC iPlayer and ITV player and they both work rather well. Channel 4 and 5 players use "insert technical mumbo jumbo" that doesn't work with XBMC.

[imilne]

You don't need to change the front end if you don't want to...you could always just launch xbmc as a custom task from within NPVR whenever you wanted to use some of its functionality.

Iain

[fuzzweed]

Not really the seamless solution I'm looking for I could nearly as easily launch the iplayer webpage directly and configure the remote to browse that.
I think my point is that a few years back when I started with GBPVR I had this futuristic TV setup that wowed people with its recording and time shift facilitiy, great epg, and it could also play music, DVDs games etc etc and (after a bit of initial set up) worked all rather easily from the users (wifes) point of view. Nowadays, as pointed out in my OP, my mums TV from Argos outshines it in a few critical areas (multiple on demand tv, web tv, youtube, skype, etc.), without the need for any work arounds, as do many other one box solutions that can be bought off the shelf from tesco.
I love NPVR to bits but I need to keep the whole project ahead of the game, At the end of the day if my wife can't just press one button and watch what she wants the whole thing is deemed a complicated failure.
..anyway although I feel terribly disloyal saying this, the xbmc as a client route does look rather promising so will trial that on the side for a while and see how it works out.
ta for the advice.

[imilne]

I understand your feelings, but ultimately it comes down to the size of the NPVR user base which is simply not as large as XBMC's. There's few enough developers producing plugins for NPVR as it is, and fewer still that would be able to produce anything that will only work in the UK. And as great as a seamless interface would be I do feel there's less demand for having these sort of plugins when consoles, TVs, blu-ray players, smart phones, etc can all provide that functionality.

I'm sure in a couple of years time though, when Sony have decided to stop supporting your mum's TV because it's no longer their latest and greatest and half the "smart" apps on it stop working because of API changes you might feel a bit different about the situation

Iain

[fuzzweed]

All good points.
The NPVR server and XBMC client is starting to look really good. I trust NPVR to be reliable handling the actual programming, and then I can just pinch the pretty bits from XBMC to keep the WAF up. If it works out I suppose the future is then moving XBMC to a raspberry pi and sellotaping it to the back of the screen. Voila the demise of the Sony TV

[Tompeel]

You don't need to change the front end if you don't want to...you could always just launch xbmc as a custom task from within NPVR whenever you wanted to use some of its functionality.

Iain

Hey Iain,
Dug this old thread up!
Im strugling to find any documentation on how to get Custom plugins to work, i get the linking the .exe but not sure about the arguments section?

Cheers, Tom