WilE, have you given up on your XBMC move yet?
I ran XBMC for years, and recently started using it again for one of my upstairs clients - it's an Acer Revo atom PC, and I find the XBMC "Live" OS (i.e. the one with XBMC on top of a stripped down, optimized Ubuntu build) performs the best on that hardware. Plus, you know, it's free I just updated to the Dharma 2 beta, in fact. I'm telling you all this just so you know I'm not trolling you.
As fine as XBMC is at some things - first-rate skinning engine, media libraries are native, designed to be fully configured inside the application, a pretty decent UPnP client, etc - Netflix and Hulu support are not among them. I find your plugin, and Hulu Desktop (via the Multishortcut plugin) to be far better than the UPnP (via Playon) system that XBMC relies on. I've been working with it for weeks now and the best I can say about it is "clunky" - and that's when it works.
What I am saying is UPnP via Playon sounds neat, and at first glance sure seems to support a lot more in the way of online media, but in day to day practice it doesn't live up to the hype. It's ugly, the interface to browse media is bare-bones and confusing, and at least 50% of the time if not more videos either don't play or play for a few minutes, then stop. It's not just me - their forums are full of experiences like this. Whether it's them, the XBMC UPnP client, some combination thereof (XBMC isn't even a supported client by them) I don't know but in the end I don't care either, it's not nearly stable enough to use day to day.There's no chance my wife would even attempt to use it, even assuming she remembered how and where to navigate to the UPnP sections in the first place.
In MePo, on the other hand, all I do is set up a shortcut that says "Hulu" or "Netflix" and lo and behold, you click them and they launch exactly what they say they do. Everything works, and the browsing experience is much nicer.
Your plugin really is superior to any other implementation of Netflix on any media center software anywhere. Seriously. The only thing that beats it is the native, proprietary versions Netflix themselves do for Windows Media Center, PS3, etc. It's a tremendous achievement and I hate to see you give up on it out of frustration because of burnout or whatever. Playon on XBMC is not the solution. Heck, if you are that enamored of it why not help with the MePo UPnP client - dev on that has started and stopped several times over the years.
I'd really like to see you continue development of this and other plugins. If you need help, I can pitch in, even provide hosting for the search feature if needed - contact me if you are interested.
I like the idea of separating the instant watching from the 'other' lists. How about putting them on a second page with a button on the instant page that links to it.
I did some lookup in the thread and found couple other people who had the same issue. So, the issue is limited to just the Netflix top 25/100 category titles only. When I find the title via search, I am able to add it to the instant queue. Is there a fix for that?
About the sub-account, I am not sure if I understand this. When I configured the plugin, I did the authorization based on the "Authorize" button and *not* via the "Authorize Sub-account" button. Does that matter? How can I check with Netflix about this setting? Sorry if this is a basic question.
I wanted to post the complete logs, but I didn't know how to attach a file to the reply. Sorry about that.
-sheish
I did some lookup in the thread and found couple other people who had the same issue. So, the issue is limited to just the Netflix top 25/100 category titles only. When I find the title via search, I am able to add it to the instant queue. Is there a fix for that?
Hmmm, I thought this was fixed in 1.3. I will have to look into that issue...
About the sub-account, I am not sure if I understand this. When I configured the plugin, I did the authorization based on the "Authorize" button and *not* via the "Authorize Sub-account" button. Does that matter? How can I check with Netflix about this setting? Sorry if this is a basic question.
On the Netflix website you can create sub-accounts (for mailed dvd's only.) It sounds like your issue is not related to this though...
I wanted to post the complete logs, but I didn't know how to attach a file to the reply. Sorry about that.
-sheish
When you click Reply or Quote buttons to respond to the thread, there is a plus sign [+] you can click on to attach files.