support for Canadian/North American sites (2 Viewers)

ronsonol

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  • April 2, 2007
    178
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    Kingston
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    Canada Canada
    Thanks for the new site additions. I am seeing weird behaviour when I have unblock-us dns enabled on my Mediaportal PC.

    With unblock-us dns active I cannot watch videos. For example, if I try a show from (history, showcase, hgtv, slice) I get a 30 secs clip warning about my location not being in Canada. If I try to watch these same shows in my Firefox browser on the same PC with unblock-us active - they all work fine.
    It is only inside MP/OnlineVideos I cannot watch them.
    OnlineVideos.log: OnlineVideosPlayer: Play 'http://static.smdg.ca/videoPlayer/Unavailable.flv'
    MediaPortal.log: [OnlineVideos] You are not in a geographic region that has access to this content.

    If I disable unblock-us DNS, I can watch the shows inside MediaPortal.
     

    corporate_gadfly

    Portal Pro
    May 17, 2011
    396
    136
    Home Country
    Canada Canada
    Thanks for the new site additions. I am seeing weird behaviour when I have unblock-us dns enabled on my Mediaportal PC.

    With unblock-us dns active I cannot watch videos. For example, if I try a show from (history, showcase, hgtv, slice) I get a 30 secs clip warning about my location not being in Canada. If I try to watch these same shows in my Firefox browser on the same PC with unblock-us active - they all work fine.
    It is only inside MP/OnlineVideos I cannot watch them.
    OnlineVideos.log: OnlineVideosPlayer: Play 'http://static.smdg.ca/videoPlayer/Unavailable.flv'
    MediaPortal.log: [OnlineVideos] You are not in a geographic region that has access to this content.

    If I disable unblock-us DNS, I can watch the shows inside MediaPortal.
    I think the best thing to do is to post debug logs with and without unblock-us. Perhaps some of the URLs used within the MediaPortal site utility are different from what the browser uses.
     

    corporate_gadfly

    Portal Pro
    May 17, 2011
    396
    136
    Home Country
    Canada Canada
    Thanks. Here are the debug logs.
    The difference is in the following URL:
    Code:
    http://release.theplatform.com/content.select?pid=ijVZHxwlkz_55U64faiaWru9Ztv6KkmD&format=SMIL&mbr=true
    When I access that URL from a US IP, I get the Unavailable.flv. When the same URL is accessed from a Canadian IP, proper SMIL is returned.

    I am sorry, but you might be out of luck. It will be very disruptive and time-consuming to figure out why this works from the browser (probably because it uses a different URL to get the SMIL). That URL (and hence the site utility) is used in a base class for some of the other site utilities (with differing configuration parameters).

    I have had an earlier report about this exact same issue. If I have some time, perhaps I will dig into the differences between the browser and MediaPortal site utility.
     
    Last edited:

    ronsonol

    MP Donator
  • Premium Supporter
  • April 2, 2007
    178
    23
    Kingston
    Home Country
    Canada Canada
    Thanks. It is likely an issue with unblock-us.
    They must assume all geo queries, in this case from theplatform.com, should return US as location. They have a setup option to select Netflix location, and changing that to Canada doesn't help.
     

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