Have XBMC Atlantis 2 Beta on my old Xbox. PlayOn works great. Just the typical issues as stated in the forums, overall very impressed. New life for my old xbox.
My only problem is with Mplayer not starting the videos. I have to play using DVDPlayer then use either MPlayer or DVDPlayer.
I have a netflix silverlight enabled account so the netflix service has not worked for about 2 weeks now, but it worked great before i signed up for the beta.
I just installed PlayOn! 2.59.x for use with my XBOX original running XBMC and couldn't be happier. Thus far HULU and Netflix have worked great, as does CNN (though their quality and offerings are poor). The only issue I've had is that CNN doesn't appear to work though I haven't spent any time to find out why. I get a list of the categories, but never see any list of the actual videos offered.
Regardless, getting HULU and Netflix on my XBOX is awesome. Totally worth $30 as long as the software continues to work with at least these two channels.
Replying to myself. I've still had no issues with actual video playback. However, I do have frequent issues where XBMC appears to "hang" while browsing categories in HULU, CNN, etc.
Click HULU, Channels, Food and Leisure, Food and Leisure, Food and Beverage, Great Cocktails, and XBMC just shows the spinning wheel graphic for many, many minutes. I'm not familiar with how to determine what the issue is. But I'm assuming PlayOn is just lagging scraping the HULU website and feeding that back to XBMC. Unfortunately there appears to be no way to cancel the process via XBMC except to power the XBOX on/off.
I'm unsure why PlayOn has issues feeding this info the XBOX instantly as the PC PlayOn is installed on can browse the HULU website instantaneously.
It would be good if:
* PlayOn included some sort of admin/log panel so you can see exactly what PlayOn is doing on the PC for troubleshooting purposes
* XBMC included some way to break the ongoing process of waiting on PlayOn to feed it the data
* PlayOn included some sort of timeout where after 60 seconds (or some configurable time period) it would send the necessary data to XBMC to time out the connection, as if the server is no longer available or something. That way the process would cancel automatically, and you simply try it again. Saves you from having to power cycle the XBOX.
This sounds like a bug in XBMC. There are already timeouts for the DLNA requests. If for any reason PlayOn takes a long time to gather Internet-based data, it will timeout within usually 10-15 seconds.
I updated to the latest TCH XBMC release for the XBOX and that seems to have fixed my laggy/hung processes getting directory/thumbnail feeds from PlayOn! However, it's introduced playback issues I didn't have before. Now when selecting a video it starts to cache, I see a reference to demuxing, then no playback starts. I click the same video again and it then plays instantly. It's like it drops the playback initially. I also had a HULU movie playback die abrubtly half way through with no error message displayed, which I hadn't experienced before.
But navigating the lists via PlayOn is now likity split as I would have expected. So I gained a little and lost a a little.
Clearly there's a lot of dependencies for this to work flawlessly, not the least of which is the media player being used. I was hoping for an effectively seamless turnkey solution that would provide the online content as if it was actually being served from local files. It's not quite there for me yet.
My Mom uses XBMC on the XBOX as well, if you can believe that, and I'll be installing PlayOn! for her sometime this week to test. She's excited to be able to have Food/Home type shows ala Hulu which she claims is worth a $30 one-time fee, buggy or not.
I have 8 days of the demo left, I would like to get this working so I can decide whether to buy it or not. If it works well enough I'll be buying one, possibly two copies.
I can see the content (names, descriptions, cover art) but can't get the videos to play. I've always been able to watch the videos on my PC. I can see in my Netflix accounts "Recent Activity" that I've watched some streaming videos, all the videos listed were attempted with PlayON so I know it's very close to working.
I've opened port 63478 on my PC as it seems to be a port PlayON used and that's not helped.
I am submitting a support request in the hopes that the log shows something simple that I'm doing wrong.
Note there is an actual Hulu XBMC video plugin available. Doesn't provide CBS, Netflix, etc. but seems to work much better in regards to playback of the actual Hulu content than PlayOn does for this platform. No odd caching/demux errors, too many failed items in playlist errors, etc. The videos just play.
And it is very nice, with the option of choosing the resolution. Playon however seems to have a better resolution streaming. The way Playon lays out the selections I like better than the XBMC plugin, in my opinion. Playon just works while multiple selections for the XBMC plugin is necessary before the wanted content is streamed. However, the plugin is great when you don't want to host a Playon server via Windows all the time and makes the Xbox more portable.
Also, there is a CBS plugin for XBMC as well. Now I'm using Playon for Netflix only now.
I have the latest (Atlantis Beta 2) XBMC running on AppleTV. Playon works great, modulo the press play twice issue already described. Browsing works very nicely. Of the various devices I've tried with PlayOn (Popcorn Hour, Linkplayer, N800) this offers the best user experience (so far).
I've gotten playon to stream netflix on two different xbmc boxes. It seems to work rather good as of 2/11/09, not sure about a few days before this. I usually have to hit play twice, but not a big deal. There are a few netflix movies that won't play, but its possible they wouldn't stream from the site either.
I could never get the hulu plug-in to actually play a video on the xbmc.
Can you or anyone who has gotten this the work on a original xbox with XBMC tell us what you did to get this to work.
I have installed the Playon on my XP computer. My Xbox 360 works great, but I can't seem to get the orig xbox to work. I have
installed the hulu plugin into the plugin folder for the XBMC. I can see the the channels and videos, but when I click to play i get message, retrieving directory, 0 file found. no video is played, but goes back to see the list of available videos.
I am using XBMC-SVN_2009-01-25_rev17349-T3CH build.
I know this thread is old but I just wanted to that the above two people for their information. It was as easy as they say to get xbmc to recognize the playon interface and get it working properly.
Works great and I love it.
Gave me the reason to give up on Vista MCE. (Netflix playback)
The XBMC User thread for PlayOn:
http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=36218
Works great on my XBMC install.
My only problem is with Mplayer not starting the videos. I have to play using DVDPlayer then use either MPlayer or DVDPlayer.
I have a netflix silverlight enabled account so the netflix service has not worked for about 2 weeks now, but it worked great before i signed up for the beta.
I just installed PlayOn! 2.59.x for use with my XBOX original running XBMC and couldn't be happier. Thus far HULU and Netflix have worked great, as does CNN (though their quality and offerings are poor). The only issue I've had is that CNN doesn't appear to work though I haven't spent any time to find out why. I get a list of the categories, but never see any list of the actual videos offered.
Regardless, getting HULU and Netflix on my XBOX is awesome. Totally worth $30 as long as the software continues to work with at least these two channels.
Replying to myself. I've still had no issues with actual video playback. However, I do have frequent issues where XBMC appears to "hang" while browsing categories in HULU, CNN, etc.
Click HULU, Channels, Food and Leisure, Food and Leisure, Food and Beverage, Great Cocktails, and XBMC just shows the spinning wheel graphic for many, many minutes. I'm not familiar with how to determine what the issue is. But I'm assuming PlayOn is just lagging scraping the HULU website and feeding that back to XBMC. Unfortunately there appears to be no way to cancel the process via XBMC except to power the XBOX on/off.
I'm unsure why PlayOn has issues feeding this info the XBOX instantly as the PC PlayOn is installed on can browse the HULU website instantaneously.
It would be good if:
* PlayOn included some sort of admin/log panel so you can see exactly what PlayOn is doing on the PC for troubleshooting purposes
* XBMC included some way to break the ongoing process of waiting on PlayOn to feed it the data
* PlayOn included some sort of timeout where after 60 seconds (or some configurable time period) it would send the necessary data to XBMC to time out the connection, as if the server is no longer available or something. That way the process would cancel automatically, and you simply try it again. Saves you from having to power cycle the XBOX.
This sounds like a bug in XBMC. There are already timeouts for the DLNA requests. If for any reason PlayOn takes a long time to gather Internet-based data, it will timeout within usually 10-15 seconds.
PlayOn Administrator
I updated to the latest TCH XBMC release for the XBOX and that seems to have fixed my laggy/hung processes getting directory/thumbnail feeds from PlayOn! However, it's introduced playback issues I didn't have before. Now when selecting a video it starts to cache, I see a reference to demuxing, then no playback starts. I click the same video again and it then plays instantly. It's like it drops the playback initially. I also had a HULU movie playback die abrubtly half way through with no error message displayed, which I hadn't experienced before.
But navigating the lists via PlayOn is now likity split as I would have expected. So I gained a little and lost a a little.
Clearly there's a lot of dependencies for this to work flawlessly, not the least of which is the media player being used. I was hoping for an effectively seamless turnkey solution that would provide the online content as if it was actually being served from local files. It's not quite there for me yet.
My Mom uses XBMC on the XBOX as well, if you can believe that, and I'll be installing PlayOn! for her sometime this week to test. She's excited to be able to have Food/Home type shows ala Hulu which she claims is worth a $30 one-time fee, buggy or not.
I have 8 days of the demo left, I would like to get this working so I can decide whether to buy it or not. If it works well enough I'll be buying one, possibly two copies.
I can see the content (names, descriptions, cover art) but can't get the videos to play. I've always been able to watch the videos on my PC. I can see in my Netflix accounts "Recent Activity" that I've watched some streaming videos, all the videos listed were attempted with PlayON so I know it's very close to working.
I've opened port 63478 on my PC as it seems to be a port PlayON used and that's not helped.
I am submitting a support request in the hopes that the log shows something simple that I'm doing wrong.
Note there is an actual Hulu XBMC video plugin available. Doesn't provide CBS, Netflix, etc. but seems to work much better in regards to playback of the actual Hulu content than PlayOn does for this platform. No odd caching/demux errors, too many failed items in playlist errors, etc. The videos just play.
http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=42041
Also, and possibly most notable, there's magically no commercials when watching Hulu with the XBMC video plugin.
And it is very nice, with the option of choosing the resolution. Playon however seems to have a better resolution streaming. The way Playon lays out the selections I like better than the XBMC plugin, in my opinion. Playon just works while multiple selections for the XBMC plugin is necessary before the wanted content is streamed. However, the plugin is great when you don't want to host a Playon server via Windows all the time and makes the Xbox more portable.
Also, there is a CBS plugin for XBMC as well. Now I'm using Playon for Netflix only now.
Good luck,
Noisome
I have the latest (Atlantis Beta 2) XBMC running on AppleTV. Playon works great, modulo the press play twice issue already described. Browsing works very nicely. Of the various devices I've tried with PlayOn (Popcorn Hour, Linkplayer, N800) this offers the best user experience (so far).
I've gotten playon to stream netflix on two different xbmc boxes. It seems to work rather good as of 2/11/09, not sure about a few days before this. I usually have to hit play twice, but not a big deal. There are a few netflix movies that won't play, but its possible they wouldn't stream from the site either.
I could never get the hulu plug-in to actually play a video on the xbmc.
Can you or anyone who has gotten this the work on a original xbox with XBMC tell us what you did to get this to work.
I have installed the Playon on my XP computer. My Xbox 360 works great, but I can't seem to get the orig xbox to work. I have
installed the hulu plugin into the plugin folder for the XBMC. I can see the the channels and videos, but when I click to play i get message, retrieving directory, 0 file found. no video is played, but goes back to see the list of available videos.
I am using XBMC-SVN_2009-01-25_rev17349-T3CH build.
The Hulu plugin has nothing to do with Playon. To use playon you need to add your playon server as a upnp video source.
thats right on your xbox goto video upnp servers and add playons upnp server. works very well.
I know this thread is old but I just wanted to that the above two people for their information. It was as easy as they say to get xbmc to recognize the playon interface and get it working properly.