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jbaiter / plugin.video.mubi

MUBI Plugin for XBMC
BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License
12 stars 0 forks source link

Open Letter to Thomas Ex-subscriber #7

Open gtd opened 10 years ago

gtd commented 10 years ago

We received a letter in the MUBI offices requesting this plugin be fixed. Unfortunately XBMC is not on our radar and we don't have an XBMC device. If Thomas could get in touch with me perhaps he could beta-test a fix, but we have no way to contact him other than this desperate attempt. If you wouldn't mind leaving this open for him to respond I'd appreciate it.

choffee commented 10 years ago

That would be great. By the way XBMC is not a device as such but software you can download it for most platforms http://xbmc.org/download/ for Desktops, phones and Raspberry Pi! I think the problem is that he is having to do web page scraping to get it to work. It would be some much simpler if you had some sort of API.

gtd commented 10 years ago

Now that we've built Boxee, PS3, Bravia, iPad, iPhone, Samsung, and Android (pending) versions we have a pretty good idea what a standardized API would look like, but we are not quite ready for the maintenance load of releasing and supporting an official API. It most likely will come piecewise (film metadata first, social data and streaming URLs later).

Thomas-O commented 10 years ago

Hello, I am the idiot who sent that letter. Unfortunately I am not the developer of this plug-in and wouldn't be much help with beta-testing a fix. However, I noted from above that you have developed a Boxee plug-in. Boxee is a fork of XBMC. With XBMC providing the framework and core of the Boxee platform. So rather than fixing wouldn't it be easier to tweak the Boxee plug-in and release it as a MUBI XBMC plug-in? Just an idea.

gtd commented 10 years ago

Hi Thomas! To give you a bit of inside information, we did not actually develop the Boxee application other than to set up a few endpoints for it. The Boxee team generously provided a developer to implement the app to get us on the platform. At the time we were just getting our feet wet in non-web platforms and so it was a bit of a one-off and a bit thrown together. We are getting better organized around platforms now, but we are still very understaffed, so we won't be able to look at XBMC any time soon of our own volition, thought we might able to support external efforts in some way.

jbaiter commented 10 years ago

gtd, if you give me documentation for the Boxee-endpoints and maybe a trial-account, I could see if I can adapt the plugin to use those.

gtd commented 10 years ago

Sorry for the radio silence, once we looked a little closer we realized that the Boxee API had become somewhat broken over time due to code rot. This went unnoticed because there weren't really any new Boxee signups since the company went belly up. A few long-time users were still using the API successfully, but having been built years ago specifically for Boxee, it was not designed for our new business model (new film every day, stays for 30 days, ie. 30-day rolling window of films) and supporting it did not make technical or business sense. So the Boxee endpoints are now officially dead.

For our newer integrations (iOS, Android, Samsung, and upcoming PS4) there is a common API substrate that could be adapted to a documented and public API. We have some work to do before we get there, but this API would be much nicer to build against. We have higher priorities at the moment, but I'll let you know when we're working on it.

mkkyah commented 10 years ago

Hi gtd, Do you know that there is a working new plugin (started with jbaiter's project)? You can reach it from here http://jamie.net/2014/07/xbmc-plugin-for-mubi/ It's actually doing quite good so far, but API support would be a nice improvement and would guarantee a longer lifespan for the addon, I guess. Actually, that addon is the reason why at least I'm paying for a subscription!