GBPVR & XBMC

["Martyn Wendon" <martynwendon@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Thought I'd let the group know about a pretty cool development over on
the
GBPVR forum.

I've been using GBPVR as a "back-end" DVR for TV (DVB-T, DVB-C,
DVB-S) for
many years now, with a variety of "front-end" clients during that
time.  My
current set-up is GBPVR running in a Virtual Machine on a VMWare ESXi
server
with HDHomerun network tuners and XBMC running on original XBoxes to
actually watch recordings.

This has always worked fantastically well, but the XBMC "client"
could only
watch the recordings via a network share, there wasn't any integration with
GBPVR itself.  This meant that to actually schedule recordings or manage
existing recordings we had to use a PC and the GBPVR Web interface - no big
deal really, but I've always wanted a better, more integrated solution.

I realise that I could have replaced all the XBoxes with fancy low power
PCs
and used GBPVR in client / server mode, but that's a bit extravagant -
there's nothing wrong with the (many) Xboxes that I already have, and XBMC
has always worked perfectly and played just about everything I've ever
thrown at it (HD aside)!

So anyway, an enterprising chap called Ton over on the GBPVR forum has
produced a set of Python scripts for XBMC that pretty much allow full
integration with GBPVR - scheduling recordings, watching recordings, it all
works from right there in XBMC!

Well, at least it does if you're using the Linux or Windows versions of
XBMC - it seems that the scripts use a Python library that relies on some
compiled C files for the authentication between XBMC and the GBPVR web
service and they're only available for Linux and Windows (unless you can
compile the source code for an XBox target)!

So are original XBox owners SOL?  Nope, thankfully I managed to track down
a
pure Python implementation of the AES authentication used and have adjusted
the code to use that instead of the original library and it all works
swimmingly well.....WAF has increased no end ;-)

Here's the forum thread with Ton's scripts (my humble part is on page 12)

http://forums.gbpvr.com//showthread.php?46098-myGBPVR-use-XMBC-as-GBPVR-FrontEnd

or

http://tinyurl.com/28u6wyy


Cheers

Martyn





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