Using ABC’s iView on XBMC

I thought it would be really neat to use ABC’s iView on the Xbox Media Centre (XBMC) and/or Boxee. Honestly, who really wants to watch TV on their computers? Haven’t we evolved from that now?

I’ve got a modded XBOX running XBMC, and I have various Linux boxes running XBMC and Boxee and I think they’re the perfect platform for something like iView.. especially because it’s unmetered traffic on iiNet, Internode and other great ISP’s.

I did a little research, and they seem to use Adobe’s Real Time Message Protocol (RTMP) to stream the video from their server to the iView client, which is written in Flash. Recent versions of XBMC and Boxee have code to support RTMP, which is also used by other digital content providers like NBC’s Hulu, and the BBC’s iPlayer.

It looks like XBMC couldn’t handle the iView RTMP stream right out of the box, due to an RTMP problem. So, I wrote a patch for this and it was accepted in XBMC SVN commit r22434.

This plugin has couple of limitations right now:

• Because of the security used by iView, a special token is generated with a very short lifetime. This is why once you select a progam, you then have to select ‘Play’. I hope to overcome this soon.
• Pause and skipping don’t really work. Not sure if it’s due to the buffer size of the video, but I’ll be looking into it. It may be the streaming libraries.. but too early to say.
• Last, the shows are all broadcasted in 16:9 on the TV, but streamed at 640×480 (4:3). This is really silly, but you can fix it by setting your XBMC view to use ‘Stretch 16:9?. Not ideal, but I’ll be looking into automatically setting the view if it’s exposed in the XBMC API.

I’d like to get this included in Boxee at some stage. I’ll be working on that in the future. In the mean time, you can vote for it at the ‘Get Satisfaction’ page for ABC iView on Boxee.

If you’d like to try out the plugin, and have an SVN version of XBMC (r22434 or greater), then grab the latest plugin from here and unzip it into your ~/.xbmc/plugins/video directory (on Linux.. not sure about other platforms yet). Go to Videos -> Video Plugins and you should see ‘ABC iView’ listed.

Changelog

Version 0.4

• Added thumbnails for channels and programs
• Fixed a 404 URL problem with update from ABC