Overview

How to watch videos, even TV streams, from online websites.

Introduction

This plugin integrates websites that host videos or stream live tv into MediaPortal 2. Examples are YouTube and wwitv.

The videos/streams can be discovered by reading RSS feeds, parsing HTML, programming against provided APIs or directly adding urls of live streams. Only direct links to video files or streams (.flv, .mp4, ...) are supported, because they will be rendered using directshow. This allows usage of your favorite codecs to control audio and video quality (e.g. using ffdshow you can upscale low quality videos as well as upmix stereo sound and output to spdif) and gives the best integration with MediaPortal.

Features

• Automatic (by language) and user defined grouping of sites
• Thumbnails for sites, categories and videos/streams
• Pin to protect adult sites
• Search (on sites that support search)
• Paging in video and category lists
• Download videos (concurrent or queued)
• Multiple quality playback choices
• Add videos and categories to a Favorites site
• Play all videos currently shown
• Automatic updating of sites (with restarting)
• Integrated SiteManager to add and remove sites
• Configuration of plugin and site settings (without restarting)
• Fully localized interface

User Interface

The main view of the plugin at first shows a list of languages represented by flags that is build from all sites in your personal list. This automatic grouping of sites can be disabled or customized. Selecting a group will show all sites for it. By selecting a site you can dive into the categories for that site. If a category has subcategories (e.g. Miro), by selecting a category you will dive into the subcategories recursivly, otherwise a list of videos for that category is shown. Each of these 4 views can be shown as a list, small thumbs or large thumbs. Some sites support a details view that provides more information and a list of clips for a movie.

Home Content

If the OV plugin is attached to the main menu (can be done with the menu editor) Home Content is shown on focus.

• You can see the list of languages for which frequently sites were launched
• The latest launched sites
• The favorite sites according to how frequent they are launched

Groups view

The default view, that will be shown upon entering the Online videos plugin shows the language groups. In settings this view can be also skipped to directly reach the sites regardless of language.

Sites view

After selection of a language a list of sites is shown. 

Site context menu

• Add / remove from my sites
• Change settings

Side Menu

• Toggle Viewmode between list and grid view

Categories view

Shows a list of categories with thumbs. If the number of videos in a category is known, it will be displayed right aligned in the list mode.

Side Menu

• Toggle Viewmode between list and grid view
• Search

Video view

Example for the video view with large icons. In the lower part, the title, a description and the runtime as well as the publication date (if known) of the selected clip are displayed.

Video context menu

• Download video (only visible when download folder was set in config)
• Delete file (only when showing DownloadedVideos)
• Custom entries depending on the site (e.g. show related videos on YouTube)

Details view

This screen is only available on sites that have multiple choices for a video (e.g. iTunes Moview Trailers and IMDB)

Side menu

• Change layout: list, grid
• Search (+category to search, if available)

Configuration

The configuration form for the OnlineVideos plugin can be handled in the client settings.

Go to Settings >  Plugins > Cinema

Group Sites By Language

Show your sites classified by language groups that will be shown as top level view when entering OnlineVideos.

Turn automatic grouping by language on/off.

Automatic Update

Enable automatic updates of your sites.

Automatic Update Interval

Define after how many hours next update should be performed.

Use Age Confirmation

Define weather a PIN should be used for adult sites.

PIN for Age Confirmation

Enter a PIN used for protection of sites with adult content.

Timeout (seconds) for webrequests

Define a timeout after how many seconds a request for online data be aborted.

Time (minutes) to chache data from the web

Define after how many minutes should http data be invalidated in the cache.

Download Folder

Choose a folder where downloaded videos should be saved.

Manage Sites

Following actions can be done on this page:

• Enable automatic updates
• Change the order of sites
• Delete, create and import or publish/update sites

How to add live-streams

• Create a new site or select the site where you want to add the live streams and press Edit .

• Create a new group in the lower part and fill the name and optional url of a logo
• Select that group and add a new stream
• Fill the streamname, streamUrl (remember: this must be the direct url of the stream, and not some url to a page with a flashplayer playing that stream), and optionally the url of the logo.