XMBC

XMBC is a pretty good media player/media center. But teaching an old horse new tricks isn’t as easy as it sounds.

This time it was about to get the 30C3 Streams into the interface without actually downloading them. Not as difficult as it sounds…

The 30C3 Team has done a marvelous jobs and published all talks already on their webspace, ready to watch in various formats.

All you basically do is to put the URLS to the files into a playlist and hand that one over to XMBC.

  • Choose the video quality you’d like. I’ve chosen MP4-low quality.

  • Extract the URLs from the website:

    $ lynx -dump -listonly http://cdn.media.ccc.de/congress/30C3/mp4-lq/ | grep '\.mp4' > ~/30c3.pls

This will give you a plain file with the format like this:

6. http://cdn.media.ccc.de/congress/30C3/mp4-lq/30c3-5142-en-Monitoring_the_Spectrum_Building_Your_Own_Distributed_RF_Scanner_Array_h264-iprod.mp4
7. http://cdn.media.ccc.de/congress/30C3/mp4-lq/30c3-5185-en-FPGA_101_h264-iprod.mp4
8. http://cdn.media.ccc.de/congress/30C3/mp4-lq/30c3-5186-en-Programming_FPGAs_with_PSHDL_h264-iprod.mp4
9. http://cdn.media.ccc.de/congress/30C3/mp4-lq/30c3-5192-en-Android_DDI_h264-iprod.mp4
10. http://cdn.media.ccc.de/congress/30C3/mp4-lq/30c3-5193-en-Hardware_Attacks_Advanced_ARM_Exploitation_and_Android_Hacking_h264-iprod.mp4

  • As you can see it takes all the MP4 links, also numbered one. But the numbering is still slightly off. Remove the last five urls from the list and put them on top, change the numbering, so that it starts with 1.

  • Do some Regex-Magic and replace the digits + dot at the beginning with Filex= (where x is the digit).

  • Add the header for the playlist according to the TLS specifications

    Now it should look something like this

    [playlist]
NumberOfEntries=138

File1=http://cdn.media.ccc.de/congress/30C3/mp4-lq/30c3-5619-de-en-Mind-Hacking_mit_Psychedelika_h264-iprod.mp4
File2=http://cdn.media.ccc.de/congress/30C3/mp4-lq/30c3-5622-en-de-30c3_Keynote_h264-iprod.mp4
File3=http://cdn.media.ccc.de/congress/30C3/mp4-lq/30c3-5623-de-en-Amtliche_Datenschuetzer_Kontrolleure_oder_Papiertiger__h264-iprod.mp4
File4=http://cdn.media.ccc.de/congress/30C3/mp4-lq/30c3-5634-en-07KINGSTON25_JAMAICA_MALARIA_UPDATE_Dispatches_from_Fort_Meade_h264-iprod.mp4

  • Put this file somewhere into your XMBC source folders, so you can address it with the media browser. I’ve just created a sub-directory 30c3 and dropped the file in it.

  • You should be able now to see the playlist in XMBC and you can play the actual streams as well.