BBC iPlayer broken in MythNetvision but not in MythBrowser

[Chris Jewell]

Hi,

I am currently having a problem with an installation of Mythbuntu on an existing Kubuntu 10.04 installation. I have the Mythbuntu-Updates and Mythtv-Updates repositories enabled, and am running Mythtv 0.24 with the stock Adobe flash player present in the repositories ( ).

The behaviour I am experiencing is that when I set up BBC iPlayer (yes, I am in the UK) in MythNetvision with the bbciplayergrabber.py script, I can download all the programme titles fine. However, if I try to lauch one of them, the flash player comes up okay and presents me with the usual iPlayer "Click to Play" button in the middle of the screen. However, on clicking or tabbing across to the play button and hitting enter, iPlayer spins for a bit, then displays the message "This content doesn't seem to be working". This doesn't apply to all content sources, and I can play YouTube and MTV titles absolutely fine.

NB. If I navigate to the BBC iPlayer website using MythBrowser, however, then the content works fine, albeit in a small (too small) window.

So I wonder if this could be a problem with screen resolution (not worked out how to alter that yet), something missing from the bbciplayergrabber.py script. I'm very happy to be entirely interactive with sorting the bug out, if pointed in the right direction!

Thanks,

Chris

[Chris Jewell (chrism0dwk)]

An update:

Having played around a little, I can confirm the following:

1. Tabbing onto the Flash instance can cause system instability. It seems like the processor usage goes through the roof and the system halts.

2. When the media fails to play (at the "This content doesn't seem to be working" stage), the error message from Flash player (using right-click ->"Copy error message") is:

Title: GenericKind:FMSConnectionError.FMS_CONNECTION_API
 Description: CDN Failover, final connection failed
 Code: 4

So, this looks more like a network issue. Do we have a problem in bbciplayergrabber.py, I wonder?

Chris

[James Le Cuirot (chewi)]

I get roughly the same error on Gentoo and we're not the only ones. Unfortunately the MythTV devs are washing their hands of the problem - http://code.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/9357. I thought it might be related to local Flash storage. If you browse to http://www.macromedia.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html with MythBrowser, it just shows the same settings as your regular browser does. But then I thought I'd better check whether the regular iPlayer site works in MythBrowser - and it does!! I'm going to mention this on that ticket.

[James Le Cuirot (chewi)]

Gah, it's locked!

[David Mitchell (a-launchpad-admin-forestit-co-uk)]

OK I seem to have worked around the issue - it seems that the URL generated by the bbciplayer.html file is wrong in some way.

A google search pointed me to this page:

http://upyourego.com/pip/

And by entering VIDEOCODE as the episode code I was able to cut & paste the generated code straight into the obvious line in bbciplayer.html, adding the width & height entries at the beginning & it all seemed to work....

Still not perfect - having to click on the Flash player is a PITA as I normally use just an IR remote and it seems to take ages / not always escape out when requested, anyone got workarounds for these yet...?

Now if we can have an mtv.co.uk page as well.... I get "go away you're not in the USA" from mtv.com ....

David

[Giles Birchley (gbirchley-a)]

Hi David,

As with every other distribution, fedora too has this problem. I've tried your workaround but I think I just break the code - so I think I'm misunderstanding what you're doing.. would you mind posting the script of your altered bbciplayer.html file so I could see exactly what you've done?

[chrisw (clw-thewests)]

I also have the same problem as described in this report. Just reporting a bit of information that may help:

From within Myth Frontend I didn't refresh the RSS update of the available programs for iPlayer for a couple of weeks and tried to play a program. A message was returned to say the program was no longer available and suggested the next episode. I clicked on this and the program played with no problems. It started in a reduced format but the full screen button was available and worked. I then did an RSS update of the available programs and tried to play the same program and this time got the usual "This content doesn't seem to be working" message

To me this suggests that there is actually no problem with QT webkit and/or Flashplayer playing this content on my system and that the problem really is in the MythNetvision code.

[Thomas Mashos (tgm4883)]

We really do appreciate you opening this ticket to help improve Mythbuntu, but it needs to be closed for a number of reasons. The biggest one is that upstream believes this to be fixed in the latest version. Could you please verify if this issue still exists in the latest version?

Please do not let the closing of this ticket dissuade you from opening a new ticket if this (or any other) problem occurs with the newer versions.