Adding A Quality Setting

This section will show you how to add a custom setting for your plugin. We will add a setting to choose the maximum quality we want to play from videobb.

The only quality values I have seen from the site are ‘240p’ and ‘480p’ but we will also add a ‘Maximum’ value which will just play whatever the maximum quality is in case there are higher resolutions.

See also

For more information on how plugin settings work please see PluginSettings

Settings XML

First off we need to tell XBMC what settings we want for our plugin. This is done by implementing PluginSettings and overriding the get_settings_xml() method.

We have already said we are implementing PluginSettings so lets add the following code to override the method:

def get_settings_xml(self):
    xml = PluginSettings.get_settings_xml(self)
    xml += '<setting label="Highest Quality" id="MyVideobbResolver_q" '
    xml += 'type="enum" values="240p|480p|Maximum" default="2" />\n'
    return xml

• Line 2 - This adds the default settings (currently only ‘priority’)
• Line 3-4 - This is a valid <setting \> tag that you would put in resources/settings.xml of a addon. Here we make an enum which will return 0, 1 or 2 depending which value is set. By default it will return 2 which corresponds to ‘Maximum’. The setting id contains the class name of your plugin followed by an underscore and the name you want to refer to this setting by. We will retrieve this setting with the name ‘q’.

That was easy enough! When the module is loaded, the resources/settings.xml for script.module.urlresolver is rebuilt including each plugins settings.

Addons using script.module.urlresolver can display the plugin settings for editing by calling urlresolver.display_settings().

Go to ‘t0mm0 test addon’ in XBMC and select ‘resolver settings’ and you should see your new setting in the ‘myvideobb’ category. Now if you look at the contents of script.module.urlresolver/resources/settings.xml you should see the generated file with the definition of your new setting in it.

Using the Setting

It isn’t much use having a setting if we don’t use it! So lets add some code to use it to determine what stream to play.

Change the last section of code in get_media_url() to the following:

    #find highest quality URL
    max_res = [240, 480, 99999][int(self.get_setting('q'))]
    r = re.finditer('"l".*?:.*?"(.+?)".+?"u".*?:.*?"(.+?)"', json)
    chosen_res = 0
    stream_url = False
    if r:
        for match in r:
            res, url = match.groups()
            res = int(res.strip('p'))
            if res > chosen_res and res <= max_res:
                stream_url = url.decode('base-64')
                chosen_res = res
    else:
        common.addon.log_error('myvideobb: stream url not found')
        return False

Note that we only had to add oneline and change one other:

• Line 2 - This is a completely new line. It reads the setting and translates it into a value usable as a test for the maximum resolution.

  The first part [240, 480, 99999] sets up a list of values that we want to choose from. The second part [int(self.get_setting('q'))] gets the setting from XBMC, which will be 0, 1 or 2 and uses it as an index of the list we set up in the first part of the line. We use int() because all settings are returned by XBMC as a string and a list index must be an int.

  It might be simpler to think of this line as the following equivalent code (comments assume that the setting has not been changed from its default value of ‘Maximum’):

  options = [240, 480, 99999]
  q = self.get_setting('q') # q is now '2' (a str)
  q = int(q) # q is now 2 (an int)
  max_res = options[q] # max_res is now 99999 (an int)
  

• Line 10 - this line has been changed to add the condition and res <= max_res. This just makes sure that the stream URL is only selected if it is the highest quality URL that is below or equal to the quality setting.

Now try changing the the settings and visiting the test links you created in ‘t0mm0 test addon’ in XBMC. You should see (by pressing ‘o’ once the video is playing) that the correct quality is chosen.

Don’t forget that not all streams have all qualities available. If there is no version with a low enough quality the plugin will not resolve the URL, but if there is not a high enough quality version you will get the highest available.