YouTube-> My Tube with XBMC
Posted by Jeff July 08, 2006
Google Video is giving away videos, including a lot of Charlie Rose episodes. He gets good guests and is generally a good interviewer, so I’ve been downloading them with the Video Downloader Firefox Extension. Sometimes AVI/MP4 formats are available; other times it’s only Flash FLV files. This got me wondering - could I get FLV to playback on my XBMC setup? Usecase: sitting in the living room with friends, and want to send a video to the XBOX (with superior screen and audio)
XBMC Fox lets you click right-click on a video, and send it to the XBox for playback. This simply uses XBMC’s web server to kick off the playback. Ultra-cool. Another simple API is GetCurrentlyPlaying. Entering a URL of http://192.168.123.3/xbmcCmds/xbmcHttp?command=GetCurrentlyPlaying returns:
- Filename:http://media.libsyn.com/media/actioncorp/ACTV-XboxMediaCenter.mp4
- SongNo:-1
- Type:Video
- Title:ACTV-XboxMediaCenter.mp4
- Time:00:00:55
- Duration:00:02:59
- Percentage:30
This led me to look into upgrading XBMC to playback FLV files. Installed XBMC-CVS_2006-06-25-T3CH.rar.
MC360 is a cool skin which emulates the 360 MediaCenter. Screenshots and trailers are here. Taking me a while to get used to it - especially the animated water background, but it’s an efficient powerful UI.
XBMC supports a ton of video formats, but Flash isn’t one of them (yet).. which is a pain because so much viral video is coming out in Flash format. So, I didn’t achieve my goal of playing back YouTube/GoogleVideo on the XBMC.. but I did:
- upgrade XBMC
- get a nifty 360-style skin
- gain the ability to “send” videos from the laptop to the XBox.
Hey,
I came across this doing technorati checks on videosift.com. I am one of the admins over there, thanks for that media center skin, that is pretty sweet. Also have you tried to integrate the flash play back using the browser? I know that there is at least a basic web browser on xbmc because it lets you do imdb look ups and the like. I don’t know if it is possible to install flash to the browser though, although it would seem like you should be able to compile firefox to run on the xbmc. You would then only need a way to use a “mouse” which could perhaps be done with some creative thinking about the arrow keys on the remote, and the center button.
Hi James-
I love VideoSift! I’ve told a couple others about it… it’s very addictive.
As far as I know, the only browser available is linksbox, which is pretty primitive.
You’re right that IMDB, and lots of other scripts, scrape and extract information from sites - that’s mainly done in python.
I think it’s likely that FLV will be better supported in the future. Web browsing seems unlikely; TV’s don’t really have the resolution for web browsing- not ’till everyone has HDTV at least
Also, there’s nothing quite as smooth as an optical mouse on a laptop…
Hi,
thanx a lot for the info!
Btw: XBMC with the skin MC360 is INCREDIBLY amazing!
And for all those last.fm junkies out there:
Just add the following bookmark to your sources.xml below
this is the code to add:
last.fm
lastfm://
Then enter your username and password in the system blade -> My Music -> Last.FM
Now you’re able to browse your last.fm stuff through media blade -> music -> last.fm
AWESOME! It even downloads the cover artworks when you’re listening to your friends’ radio stations!!!
hi!
please delete my post since the code doesn’t seem to show up!
thanx
There are python scripts out there to watch google video and youtube videos from within xbmc, you can browse, search etc.
Also mc360 rocks, out of beta soon aswell.. *smiles*
Linksboks will get intergrated into xbmc soon but it’s abit of a sucky browser and doesn’t support advanced stuff atall. I’m also not entirely sure, but i think xbmc did add a flash video player. But not too sure.
Thanks
Mikew
Just thought I’d chime in… I have xbmc and in the scripts menu there are a number of python scripts, including one to play youtube and google video (including searching and such). The youtube and google videos work great through the script, but I have the same problem as you in playing local flv files, or flv files directly…
try this bookmarklet, drag it to your toolbar and use on a youtube page, as of Jan 07 2008 it’s working.
XBMC
above post didnt work: just copy this into a bookmark:
javascript:var download_url = ‘http://youtube.com/get_video?video_id=’; var playerDiv = document.getElementById(’movie_player’); var flashvars = document.evaluate(”attribute::flashvars”, playerDiv, null, XPathResult.STRING_TYPE, null).stringValue; var t_id = flashvars.match(/t=([^(\&|$)]*)/)[1]; var video_id = flashvars.match(/video_id=([^(\&|$)]*)/)[1]; var video_url = download_url + video_id + ‘&t=’ + t_id;var esc_url = escape(video_url); var w=window.open(’http://192.168.1.4/xbmcCmds/xbmcHttp?command=PlayFile¶meter=’+esc_url);
i heard there was some problems with the x360 skin????