2019-01-03, 02:43
I've been trying to create some media stubs mostly to show a message for some items that I can watch through a streaming app on my TV rather than in Kodi. Unfortunately, it looks like if you don't have an optical drive on your device, Kodi simply displays a message saying you need an optical drive. I did find a five year old thread about this:
https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=148591
As well as a PR on github that was abandoned about six months ago:
https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/11655
So since there doesn't seem to be much hope that this fix will make it into Leia, I did a very hacky thing with an addon and stream files to get the desired result. Basically I create a stream file that uses a plugin URL with information in the URL on what I want the dialog box to say. Then the addon displays an OK dialog box with the title and message from the strm file and then plays a 2 second long black video (so that Kodi doesn't throw up errors about unplayable streams). In my brief testing everything works mostly fine, but Kodi 18RC5 does crash on my OSX machine every once in awhile when trying to play the video. Then again, Kodi has never been horribly stable on my OSX machine anyway.
If anyone thinks this would help them, you get get the addon from my github repo at:
https://github.com/pkscout/plugin.whereareyou
I also wrote a little python3 command line tool to generate stream files for TV shows to trigger the addon (or media stub files if that ever works). The github repo for that is mentioned in the readme for the addon. That readme also has the format of the URL, so if you want to generate your own stream files some other way, you can do that.
This is VERY EXTREMELY hacky, but I didn't know what else to do to deal with this use case.
https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=148591
As well as a PR on github that was abandoned about six months ago:
https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/11655
So since there doesn't seem to be much hope that this fix will make it into Leia, I did a very hacky thing with an addon and stream files to get the desired result. Basically I create a stream file that uses a plugin URL with information in the URL on what I want the dialog box to say. Then the addon displays an OK dialog box with the title and message from the strm file and then plays a 2 second long black video (so that Kodi doesn't throw up errors about unplayable streams). In my brief testing everything works mostly fine, but Kodi 18RC5 does crash on my OSX machine every once in awhile when trying to play the video. Then again, Kodi has never been horribly stable on my OSX machine anyway.
If anyone thinks this would help them, you get get the addon from my github repo at:
https://github.com/pkscout/plugin.whereareyou
I also wrote a little python3 command line tool to generate stream files for TV shows to trigger the addon (or media stub files if that ever works). The github repo for that is mentioned in the readme for the addon. That readme also has the format of the URL, so if you want to generate your own stream files some other way, you can do that.
This is VERY EXTREMELY hacky, but I didn't know what else to do to deal with this use case.
