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Playing a video from plugin¶

Playing (or more correctly referring to) a video can be done in two ways.

Direct URL¶

The simple approach is just to add the direct URL to the movie in the item that the user selects:

page.appendItem('http://example.com/movie.mp4', 'video', {
  title: 'The best movie ever made'
});

For cases when the movie is located on a static URL (like the example above) this might make sense.
However for most real world cases this is not enough. For those cases, you could instead go...

Via a video page¶

In this case the plugin adds a route to a URI that will be used to open the video.

var someid = 123;
page.appendItem('exampleapp:video:' + someid, 'video', {
  title: 'The best movie ever made'
});

This will make Movian open exampleapp:video:123 when the user starts the video.

This page is then responsible for setting up video playback. In its simplest form it could work like this:

plugin.addURI('exampleapp:video:([0-9]*)', function(page, id) {
  page.loading = false;
  page.source = 'http://example.com/videos/' + id + '.mp4';
  page.type = 'video';
});

The plugin is free to do whatever queries or computation it wants to in this function to be able to construct the video URL.

However, if the URL that's actually played by the video player (the URL in page.source) does not match the URI to the page the automatic playback of next video will not work as expected. To remedy this, you should use the videoparam meta URI and provide a canonicalUrl.

The videoparams meta URL¶

Just using a direct URL to play a video file have some deficiencies. Therefore Movian supports a type of meta URL that basically is a JSON object encoded to contain a lot of extra information about the video. To encode the videoparams from an object do like this:

page.source = "videoparams:" + showtime.JSONEncode({
  ...
});

Here's a list of fields that understood in the videoparams object. The only mandatory field is 'sources'.

Property	Type	Description
title	string	Title to display in OSD (If not set Movian will try to infer it from URL)
no_fs_scan	bool	Disable attempt to scan for subtitles in video's folder. Most plugins streaming from internet probably want to set this
no_subtitle_scan	bool	Turns off subtitle scanning (available from 4.9.346). Subtitles explicitly passed in subtitles (see below) are still included
canonicalUrl	string	Static URI that represents the video. This is the URI that will be used for storing restart position, number of times the file have been played, etc And for that to work it must be equal to the page URI for the video. If you use page.redirect - make sure to assign canonicalUrl correspondingly to the first page you begin redirects from. See example below
sources	list	List of video sources. See below for more info
subtitles	list	List of subtitles. See below for more info
icon	string	URL to the icon which will be shown in the bottom bar while video is playing
backdrops	array	List of images for creating a slider show in the icon background of video item. Example: [{url: screenshot1},{url: screenshot2}...{url: screenshotN}]

Additional properties used for subtitle lookup¶

Property	Type	Description
imdbid	string	IMDB ID of movie (if known). The 'tt' prefix should be included
year	integer	Year of the movie
season	integer	Season of TV show
episode	integer	Episode of TV show

Sources¶

Sources is a list of video URLs. The reason for it being a list is that multiple URLs are possible if there are multiple bitrates available. However, right now Movian will always pick the highest bitrate and never switch. (Note that the adaptive bitrate switching in HLS is something else and completely contained within the HLS player part of Movian)

Each source object is formatted like this:

Property	Type	Description
url	string	URL to video file
bitrate	integer	Bitrate in bits per second
mimetype	string	Mimetype of video. If set it will make video start a tad faster as Movian does not need to probe format

Subtitles¶

If the plugin have access to subtitles those can be sent in the videoparams object as well.

Property	Type	Description
title	string	Name of subtitle
url	string	URL to subtitle file
language	string	Subtitle language in ISO 639-2 (Three letter language codes)
source	string	Source of the subtitle (typically name of plugin or similar)

Grand example¶

This example will (obviosly) just play Inception from example.com regardless of the video ID in the URL. But you should get the point.

plugin.addURI('exampleapp:video:([0-9]*)', function(page, id) {
  page.loading = false;
  page.source = "videoparams:" + showtime.JSONEncode({
    title: 'Inception',
    imdbid: 'tt1375666',
    year: 2010,
    no_fs_scan: true,
    canonicalUrl: 'exampleapp:video:' + id,
    sources: [{
      url: "http://example.com/videos/Inception.avi",
      bitrate: 10000000,
      mimetype: "video/x-msvideo" 
    }],
    subtitles: [{
      url: "http://example.com/videos/Inception-eng.srt",
      language: 'eng',
      source: 'example plugin',
      title: 'Best english subtitle'
    }, {
      url: "http://example.com/videos/Inception-swe.srt",
      language: 'swe',
      source: 'example plugin',
      title: 'Best Swedish subtitle'
    }]
  });
  page.type = 'video';
});

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