PlayOn Channel 9! – PlayOn Plugin for Channel 9

Drewby - Channel9 PlugIn for PlayOn

“I’m a big fan of PlayOn form MediaMall Technologies which is an application that allows you to view videos from popular sites like Hulu, CBS and Netflix on your Xbox 360, Playstation 3 or DLNA-compliant television or set-top-box. I’m also a big fan of Channel9, the “official” unofficial source for developer information from Microsoft.

In a recent release, MediaMall implemented a PlugIn API for PlayOn that allows a developer to add new media sources to the PlayOn menu. Developers have already added several sites including such as Food Network, Adultswim, NBA, NFL, and more (you can get a list here). There is also a generalized player that uses OPML lists of content – there’s a collection of OPML lists here.

I decided to write a PlugIn for PlayOn that would allow me to browse and watch my favorite Channel9 videos and shows. I was delighted to find out that PlayOn is a .NET Framework application and the PlugIn samples were Visual Studio projects. So I already had the skillset to build my own PlugIn.

…

Building a PlayOn PlugIn

The basic functionality of the PlayOn PlugIn is to retrieve a list of videos from some source and translate that list into objects understood by PlayOn. This includes representing some sort of folder structure to PlayOn and then providing the details of a video feed, including the video type (Flash or Windows Media).

There are a couple classes and interfaces provided by PlayOn that you’ll work with when building a PlugIn:

…

I think the easiest way to learn how to use the API is to look at existing PlugIns. There is a good basic sample PlugIn in C# provided by MediaMall that implements these objects. I’ve also provide the source code in both C# and VB for my Channel9 Plugin. You’ll notice that I did quite a bit of refactoring and I also included the Managed Extensibility Framework to make my development of the PlugIn a little more flexible and testable.

…”

MSDN Code Gallery - PlayOn PlugIn for Channel9

“…

PlayOn is software you install on your PC that allows you to browse and watch video from popular websites on your Xbox360, Playstation3 or any DLNA-compliant television or set-top-box. Combined with the Channel9 PlugIn sample, you can now browse and watch your favorite shows from Channel9 on your television.

…

”

 

I’m not, yet, a PlayOn user, but since this was about my favorite weekly cast, included .Net/C# source code, was plug-in based development, and had new stuff like MEF, I just had to mention it. :)