Thanks to an invite from Tom Sella of Boxee and Boxee’s recent support of Tiger (which I shouldn’t need for too much longer, as I’ll be coming up to speed with Leopard soon), I was able to conduct some tests using the stream pack and the alpha version of Boxee.

Some of the feeds—such as RTR Planeta, displayed above—tended to bomb out and crash the application from time to time. I need to submit a bug report for when I get a chance, and it’s something that didn’t seem to happen with the Atlantis beta of XBMC for OSX. Overall, though, the pack seemed to work quite well.

One slight annoyance I discovered between all OSX variants of XBMC (and XBMC itself) was the extremely slow buffering of each stream before finally displaying. Granted, XBMC on the Xbox did take its time, but not nearly as much as it seems to on the OSX varieties.

Yes, indeed, XBMC-TV should in fact work with Plex for OS X. In fact, it should work with any XBMC port that retains STRM functionality.

Unfortunately, due to a fire which destroyed the apartment above ours in late June—and left ours an almost total loss due to the water, mold, and smoke—my own XBMC-modded Xbox was destroyed, and until further notice no updates will be made to XBMC-TV. (Once I get 10.5 on my Macbook, I’ll likely install Plex and resume compiling and testing XBMC-TV using that instead.)

You can get the latest pack here.

The latest version offers a clean sweep; I reviewed every single stream over the past 72hrs and removed any streams having problems at the time they were tested. As a result, there are far fewer streams than normal in this release. The ‘Adult’ and ‘TV Shows’ categories have also been removed; all were defunct at the time they were tested.

On the upside, however, the signal-to-noise ratio has been vastly improved and many new streams have been introduced in their place. More will be added for the next release as they’re verified.

Updated 08/16/2007

• STRM (stream) file pack for XBMC 1.1+
• 407 Streaming TV Feeds from 90 countries around the world
• Contains live and recorded streams
• Most verified working; some may be part-time stations, others may go down intermittently. Compiling these is an inexact science.
• Contains Windows Media, NullSoft NSV, and RealMedia streams.

To Use:

1. Extract ZIP into a directory on your PC/Mac.
2. Upload that directory to the Xbox (on mine, F:\)
3. Add source under “My Videos” pointing to the directory
4. You should be all set at this point. Enjoy!

If you find this pack useful, simply drop me a line to let me know how useful you find it. For maximum compatibility (due to the dynamic nature of XBMC’s player), the latest version of XBMC is recommended, although many of the streams will work on most any 1.1+ version.

Download: XBMC-TV, Round VII (80kb) | RSS Feed
Submit New XBMC-TV Streams / Report Bad Stream
→ Haven’t modded yet? The Black Art of Xbox Mods

Note: Before reporting ‘broken’ streams, please test several times over a week-long period at different times of day, as some stations are very intermittent and would prefer not to remove a valid stream.

One of the grueling things I do in order to keep XBMC-TV updated is to manually check out the various international streams I have on file. Sometimes, along the way, I’ll come across some peculiar (and at times familiar or even humorous) sights or scenes, as you’ll see below:

The Underwear Gnomes have nothing on these folks (from what was presumably a sex-ed lesson on Korean TV Station ‘EBS’):

→ continue reading "Int'l Television Can Get Interesting"

(Update: To get the latest release, visit this entry.)

Here it is, finally: The sixth release of XBMC-TV, the definitive international TV stream pack for Xbox units running Xbox Media Center. It’s been a long time coming, but the number of stations available has increased by over 100 since the last update and this doesn’t even factor in the number of defunct stations I removed. Enjoy.

Updated 07/24/2007

• STRM (stream) file pack for XBMC 1.1+
• Now up to 668 Streaming TV Feeds in 106 categories: Countries (104), Adult (1), and TV Shows (1)
• Contains live and recorded news, entertainment, talk shows… You name it, it’s probably somewhere in here.
• Most verified working; some may be part-time stations, others may go down intermittently. Compiling these is an inexact science.
• Contains Windows Media, NullSoft NSV, and RealMedia streams.

To Use:

1. Extract ZIP into a directory on your PC/Mac.
2. Upload that directory to the Xbox (on mine, F:\)
3. Add source under “My Videos” pointing to the directory
4. You should be all set at this point. Enjoy!

If you find this pack useful, simply drop me a line to let me know how useful you find it. For maximum compatibility (due to the dynamic nature of XBMC’s player), the latest version of XBMC is recommended, although many of the streams will work on most any 1.1+ version.

Download: XBMC-TV, Round VI (131kb)
Submit New XBMC-TV Streams / Report Bad Stream
→ The Black Art of Xbox Mods

Note: Before reporting ‘broken’ streams, please test several times over a week-long period at different times of day, as some stations are very intermittent and would prefer not to remove a valid stream.

...very soon, in fact! I’ve spent a good lot of time over the weekend removing outdated and bad feeds, and introducing new ones. So far, I’ve been able to get through about half the countries in the collection. Look for it to show up sometime this coming week.

On the NWS4Cast front, I’ve managed to get the connectivity in place, the SOAP schema read in, and start parsing out and formatting forecasts; however, it’s going to take some thought as to how I want to package this up in the future, given the inherent space constraints and new requirements this new build will require. Right now it requires two separate parsers between the XML and SOAP feeds, which I need to reconcile down to one before I feel comfortable releasing it.

In any case, I’ll more than likely release two versions: a basic package containing only NWS4Cast without forecasts, and one with everything bundled in—with the option to turn off forecasts, if desired.

Edit: I have a La Crosse WS-3610 coming in to replace my Discovery Channel STX-7000, so perhaps another version of NWS4Cast for personal weather stations isn’t entirely out of the question…

Fatal Farm’s “alternate” TV intros from the 80s and 90s is enough to keep one laughing for hours.

The Golden Girls and Alf entries are especially worth checking out.

In not-so-funny news, my Xbox’s partition table decided to take a dive (presumably) the night before last — after a late-night MST3K marathon — forcing me to repartition, reformat, and rebuild the entire box for the first time since I assembled it in 2005. Not a bad run, if I do say so myself. Not only that, I’ve already loaded around 40GB of content back onto it and it seems the system’s more or less stable again. Thankfully, I had most of the media content backed up on DVD (including XBMC-TV).

The trip with my wife to Chicago over the weekend went well. We signed a 13-month lease for a great apartment in the heart of Wicker Park yesterday, and we’ve only got a few weeks left until the day of the move is here.

Until then, expect a little less activity from me (as if it could be any slower). XBMC-TV was updated again today, but I’m holding off on the release until later this week when I have time to do it properly. Thanks for all the feedback and interest in my obscure little project!

(Update: To get the latest release, visit this entry.)

Technically this should have been Round IV, but this is a pretty big update and I felt like arbitrarily jumping to V.

Updated 01/17/2007

- STRM (stream) file pack for XBMC 1.1+
– Now up to 559 Streaming TV Feeds from 106 Countries (inc. mature streams)!
– News, Entertainment, Movies, etc. Minimal Internet-only stations, but some.
– Most verified working; some may be part-time stations, others may go down intermittently.
– Contains Windows Media, NullSoft NSV, and RealMedia streams

To Use:

1. Extract ZIP into a directory on your PC/Mac.
2. Upload that directory to the Xbox (on mine, F:\)
3. Add source under “My Videos” pointing to the directory
4. You should be all set at this point. Enjoy!

If you find this pack useful, simply drop me a line to let me know how useful you find it.

Download XBMC-TV (139kb) | Submit New XBMC-TV Streams
→ The Black Art of Xbox Mods

(Update: To get the latest release, visit this entry.)

Updated 01/07/2007

- STRM (stream) file pack for XBMC 1.1+
– Now up to 508 Streaming TV Feeds from 105 Countries!
– News, Entertainment, Movies, etc. Minimal Internet-only stations
– Most verified working; some may be part-time stations, others may go down intermittently
– Contains both Windows Media and RealMedia streams

To Use:

1. Extract ZIP into a directory on your PC/Mac.
2. Upload that directory to the Xbox (on mine, F:\)
3. Add source under “My Videos” for the directory
4. You should be all set at this point. Enjoy!

NOTE: Some German feeds through 1tv.de may throw demuxing errors. The experimental mplayer.dll pack here manages to fix this for the most part. However, as with the use of any experimental software, proceed with caution.

Download XBMC-TV | Submit New XBMC-TV Streams
→ The Black Art of Xbox Mods