script.module.urlresolver is a XBMC addon which provides a URL resolving service to other addons. It exposes a simple interface (urlresolver) whcih allows other addons to send it a URL to webpage associated with a piece of media content, which urlresolver then transforms into a direct URL to the actual media file. These addons do not need to know anything about the file hosts or even which host is being used.
This makes it very easy to make addons which point to files(or streams) hosted on a wide variety of filehosting services. It also allows plugins to be written to extend functionality by supporting new file hosts or streaming sites. Once a resolver plugin is written and installed, it is then available to any addon which uses urlresolver.
This tutorial will show you how to make a new plugin to support a file host. We will be building a fully functional plugin to allow the resolving of URLs hosted at http://videobb.com (which is included in script.module.urlresolver) from analysing the site to writing and testing the code.
This module will be much more useful if many developers provide resolver plugins (I do not have time to write plugins for every site!), so I have tried to make resolver plugins as simple as possible to write. However if you can think of any improvements don’t hesitate to get in touch with me via the project site at https://github.com/t0mm0/xbmc-urlresolver.
So the first thing to do is to make sure you have the required tools. Luckily this is normally pretty straightforward! For most sites you will be able to work out what is going on from looking at the HTML source and monitoring what files are downloaded by the page. For both of these, I use Google Chrome and so this is what I will describe, but the same things can be accomplished using Firefox with the Firebug plugin.
Sometimes (although not required for this site) if the site uses the rtmp protocol rtmpdump, rtmpsrv and rtmpsuck are very useful tools.