Announce: BBCiPlayer Plugin (UK only)

[jwedwards]

I don't know if this is helpful or if I'm barking up the wrong tree but here goes:

I use the Music Information Screen (v4.3.7) screen saver which I've configured to display PLAYTIME_ALWAYS / SONGTIME in the corner of my display. I've noticed that the first time I listen to any stream, SONGTIME is displayed as 00:00. But if I stop it and restart, the correct time (the total length of the stream) is displayed - in my case 2:01:00. This is true even if I've only listened for a very short time (<1 second).

The difference is that MIS is corrected after the second connection whereas the iPlayer plugin always stops at the same point if left uninterrupted.

It's as though something isn't picking up the correct total stream time and defaulting to a value of 587136 at which point it stops playing even though the stream is still flowing.

As I see it, there are 2 ways to fix this:

1. Change the default threshold to a much larger value so that most fixed-length streams will always play all the way through - a bit of a kludge but might be easy

2. Find a way of querying the total length of the stream the first time it is accessed or perform 2 passes - the first one to gather info and the second one to actually play the stream

Hope this helps,

Cheers,

John

[autopilot]

Sorry, i have not read the whole thread since i last posted. But i now have a boom (FW 45 with SC7.4b) and can't get iPlayer to work. Says its buffering up to 17%,then says now playing but no audio. No problems with other players in my house (SB3 etc). Is this what other people are seeing?

[Triode]

So I think I've worked out what is causing this as unfortunately its not easy to fix. It looks like the way the iplayer downloads the files at present gets a corrupted byte at offset 73400321. I think this causes the mp3 decoder on the player to fail. It also causes SqueezePlay and Foobar to fail, though in different ways...

I'm sure this didn't occur previously. But we will possibly need to live with it now. I will look at what we can do to improve the situation.

[awy]

Triode, I suspect that it must be more than just a single corrupt byte. Otherwise the decoder would just skip the corrupt frame and continue (I think).

[Triode]

Alan - you are right. I was using cmp without -l and only getting the first difference. The stream goes totally our of sync at that point and no player can decode it.

[rabbit]

Triode,

Looks like you are getting somewhere there! Does that mean that the "corruption" is coming in the stream from the Beeb? Would that explain why its still possible to listen to a programme that stops at the magic 58 mins (R3) and then the second time you stream it it plays right through? I have definately had this happen, but its a bit tedious sitting through the first hour for a second time on the off-chance that it keeps on playing.

Many thanks for your efforts on this, please keep trying to resolve as the quality of the streams enabled by this plugin is superb and I would hate to have to go back to AlienBBC.

[Triode]

I've been looking at the issue of streams stopping as discussed above and have come up with a beta version which will hopefully address this.

It requires a small change to the server code, so you will need to be running the latest 7.4 nightly beta release of the server. (If not it will now stop slightly earlier)

To install:
1) upgrade to 7.4 nightly (needs to be later than version 26338) - available here: http://downloads.slimdevices.com/nightly/?ver=7.4
2) go to Settings - Advanced - Extension Downloader
3) uninstall the previous plugin (allow the server to reboot)
4) add 'http://triodeplugins.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/testrepo.xml' to the additional repositories section and click apply
5) select BBCiPlayer 0.5beta to install from the test repository and click apply and then allow the server to restart

The new version includes some code to restart a stream if the player becomes disconnected from the stream before it expects (e.g. due to bbc/isp issues) and also to restart the stream at 64M which is before the point when the streams start to corrupt. When it restarts you may hear a very short audio glitch assuming its is working correctly (I can't get round this)

Please post feedback here and if positive I will release this as the main version of the plugin.

[rabbit]

Triode,

I'm off on holiday in the morning so won't be able to try this for another 10 days or so. I'll post feedback as soon as I have it up and running.

Thanks

[SadGamerGeek]

I tried playing "The Archers" omnibus this morning, and it was giving me real problems using the previous version of BBCiPlayer running on 7.3.2 (to SB3's) . It initially played for a few minutes before stopping, but then failed to play at all, with what appeared to be license related errors in the log:

[09-05-10 12:10:59.2054] Slim::Formats::RemoteStream::open (46) Error: Couldn't find server or port in url: [/iplayer/licence/error.shtml?statuscode=404]
[09-05-10 12:10:59.2060] Slim::Player::Song::open (374) Warning: stream failed to open [iplayer://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/3/auth/iplayer_streaming_http_mp4/b00k7pyh].

Anyway, I've upgraded to the most recent 7.4 beta (Windows), and installed the BBCiPlayer .5 Beta as described.

I'm happy to report it has given me a massive improvement. I've just finished playing The Archers omnibus. It played almost to the end without problems, but did stop unexpectedly at around one hour & five minutes in (can't find a log error for that). I restarted and fast forwarded to that point and it played the last bit (programme is 75 minutes long) without issue.

So, definitely a big improvement!

One little thing, I thought (though I may be wrong) that my MusicInfoSCR screen used to show the total time of such listen again programmes. I noticed that for the show I've just listened to, it was always just showing "0:00"...

Thanks for your hard work with this!

[Triode]

It should show the total time of the listen again songs - what does the web interface or normal now playing screen say?