So it turned out that my plug-in that I posted about yesterday worked much better than I thought it did. If you feed it a URL and the data can be downloaded (rather than streamed from the server), it will download and play back. Here are some results of testing the plug-in last night.
RocketBoom: I connected to a RocketBoom .mov file. It took a minute or two to download to disk and then played back perfectly. Video was good, audio was good. I could not, however, start playback until the entire file downloaded. For RocketBoom’s relatively small video files that wasn’t a big deal.
http://www.rocketboom.net/video/rb_07_apr_10.mov
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Lots more after the jump…
Wild Hogs: I next connected to the High Def 1080p Wild Hogs trailer. It took forever to download (at least a quarter hour), and as before it would not play until the entire file was received. It did, however, look absolutely fabulous on my 720p TV.
http://images.apple.com/movies/touchstone/wild_hogs/wild_hogs-tlr1_1080p.mov
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Next, I connected to the Apple Keynote using the RTSP protocol linked to by the http URL I originally connected to. I would never have figured this out on my own–the IRC folks at #awkwardtv found me this URL. It played back very badly. The audio was fine, but the video kept pausing and failed to update unless I paused and restarted the playback. And what video there was, was awful looking. On the bright side, the data did play back (what there was of it) without having to download the entire file.
rtsp://a2047.v1412b.c1412.g.vq.akamaistream.net/5/2047/1412/2_h264_350/1a1a1ae555c531960166df4dbc3095c327960d7be756b71b49aa1576e344addb3ead1a497aaedf11/8848125_2_350.mov
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Finally, I connected to FLV data–both streaming and download. Neither worked with my current code. The screen went blank and displayed a “loading” circle that rotated for forever.
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As for the plugin, you can download a copy here. In this version I pull in a list of URLs from a plain text file in /Users/frontrow/Documents/urldata.txt and allow you to select the video you want to watch. This is a nice step up from my original version which had the URL hard-coded in, and had to be recompiled for each test.
I’m pretty sure that there’s a better way to grab and view the videos, beyond the BRQTKitVideoPlayer and BRSimpleMediaAsset I used, so I’ll keep hacking away time permitting.
The podcast "Your Make Life":
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=217153739&s=143441&i=15289488
comes in the form of .mov files that are not movies but when played in iTunes will stream the podcast. I noticed this because it takes about one second to "download" this podcast even though it is over two hours long, and the little tv icon that marks videos in iTunes disappears after the podcast is downloaded.
How does this streaming "podcast" work on the TV (AppleTV)?
It's audio only in this case but I'm betting the .mov container can also stream a video.
Hi scstsut: I opened the file and found the following rtsp stream embedded in the .mov data: rtsp://streams.ymlmedia.com/streams.ymlmedia.com/YML070404s.mov
I tried streaming it over to Apple TV but I ended up with the same audio and white video screen as I did with the Apple Keynote.
WMV streaming? No problem. Apple rtsp streaming? No go so far.
Erica: Are you sure that the link above has the correct plugin?
There seems to be a strange dependency between this plugin and your Perl plugin. In my system clicking on Fetch URL shows perl files. And if I don't have the Perl plugin in the Plugins dir, frontrow refuses to load
AK: Mea culpa. I basically rewrote the Perl plug-in to create the URL one and Apple TV thinks they're the same thing. When I get a second, I'll redo one or both to make them completely distinct. (See what the "proof of concept" mentality does!?)
Thanks Erica, will look forward to it. Has anyone been able to run either of them succesfully, outside of the dev environment? I think I have a pretty generic setup very lightly hacked, just have the ATV File Reader plugin, ssh, and ftp client enabled. But I can't get either working.
The Perl plugin just prints the name of the Perl script, but no results. Even your bundled weather script doesnt run.
And this plug acts exactly the same...
Cheers.
AK: Since my two plug-ins (Perl & URL) are using the ATV Files code, that's why you're having that problem running them. Only one of the three (Perl, URL, and ATV Files) can be run at a time at this point.
Hello Erica
Where doi put the files that i downloaded from here ..i have an appletv take2 configured wirh ssh and nitoTV iam able to play WMV files but i would like to stream live windows content..
Thanks in advance for you help