StreamFab and automation

ParadoxGBB

Hello,

I’m evaluating StreamFab for my needs. I like StreamFab very much, but I have a suggestion that could close the gap between this product and other competing products like PlayOn.

The one PlayOn feature that so far I haven’t been able to see matched in other alternative software offerings is the ability to have a subscription that will under the covers check all specific show series chosen by the user. StreamFab appears to offer something similar, but only for YouTube channels.

In order to get this to work, PlayOn runs as a background service and constantly behind the scenes parses and detects changes in underlying HTML. That might be too radical of a change for StreamFab, so I have a proposal that would make it almost just as good for now: automation hooks.

Currently, it seems that StreamFab’s parent executable spawns a new process when you click on a streaming service. For example, if you click on Netflix it appears it kicks off a child process like DRMDownloader.exe –site=Netflix. There you traverse to the page with the video you want and StreamFab will spawn other child processes to extract and process the content, presumably to house a browser and containing extraction to a file.

What would be very useful is to be able to kick off this process with a way to automatically traverse to a specific URL and download (or queue if there are concerns about concurrency) the video contents within. Something like:

DRMDownloader.exe –site=Netflix –url=https://www.netflix.com/watch/81273754?trackId=14170286

This would allow other software projects like mine (CinAdmin --- https://bitbucket.org/ParadoxGBB/cinadmin) to integrate with it with its own notion of subscriptions so that StreamFab doesn't need to implement something like that right now.

This might cause a problem with authenticating to a specific streaming site, but from my tests, it seems like spawning DRMDownloader.exe seems to cache/remember previous credentials if you authenticated before, so I’m hoping that isn’t too much of a problem.

The greater goal is that it minimizes user intervention to be close to a hands-off automated DVR similar to competing products like PlayOn or TiVo. While there’s some consideration on how or whether StreamFab’s regular updates could be reliably be rolled out when folks are more hands-off (PlayOn did automatically update for example) just providing an option for this automation hook would be a great first step in providing a subscription feature that a lot of people really like and use.

As you might have heard, very recently PlayOn made the decision to force their lifetime license holders to install a new, subscription-based payment model app that effectively ends-of-lifes those licenses, much to those users’ dismay. As a result, there are many others in my position so I suspect there’s a lot of business that could come via StreamFab lifetime licenses as there are many threads on the PlayOn subreddit that show that there's a sudden increase in people evaluating alternatives to PlayOn if they're going to have to pay anyway.

Thanks for your consideration! Love your work!

Wilson.Wang

Hi,

Thanks for your good suggestion, to download the new TV Show automatically, it's in the plan.

Wilson

KidJoe

Hi,

Thanks for your good suggestion, to download the new TV Show automatically, it's in the plan.

Wilson
Wilson.Wang

Wilson, this would be a great add! Glad it's in the plan.
I too am a PlayOn user. Having the ability to "subscribe" to a TV series, and have PlayOn monitor for new episodes, add them to the recording queue when available, and download, all in the background, is the reason I stuck with it all these years.

Admittedly I did come to StreamFab for other reasons, having this similar feature in StreamFab would be a welcome and amazing addition!! It would broaden my use of StreamFab.

ParadoxGBB

Hi,

Thanks for your good suggestion, to download the new TV Show automatically, it's in the plan.

Wilson
Wilson.Wang

Thanks so much for the reply. That's super news because maintaining subscriptions is no easy or cheap task!

In the interim, any consideration to my suggestion above? Also, just curious, do any of your executables support arguments today? Is it documented anywhere? It looks like DVD Fab does.

Thanks in advance!

ParadoxGBB

At this point the old PlayOn product (PlayOn Desktop) is effectively obsolete because all of the channels are broken due to shifting sources. I'm debating whether to take them up on their "free" 3 month trial or to swtich over to StreamFab.

Any idea when this feature will be available for folks like me to try/test/offer feedback?

(just to share, I wrote my own episode downloader, but only for non-drm'd sources)

Thanks!