Is it possible to get movie/tv/music/image scrapers ala XBMC?

[Setzer Gabbiani]

Other than creating a shortcut that launches XBMC that is :)

[Setzer Gabbiani]

Also, I know there's Hulu, Netflix, etc but they're all pay services. Although then again, I guess free ones can't be officially supported, since those are a legal grey area.

[SM Sith Lord]

I'm not sure how grey the area is for sites that have free movies.

However, Hulu has a whole lot of free shows without paying for the premium service.

There is some XBMC integration, but I need to do some testing on it to make sure it's all in working shape. The XBMC features that are built-in include: automatically using DVD cover images from your XBMC database, and playing back movies on XBMC via the HTTP protocol on up to 4 screens.

I know that the XBMC playback works fine, but I haven't tested out the the DVD cover images yet.

Btw, XBMC scrapes TheMovieDb.org for movie info, which is also the database that AArcade scrapes. So the images that XBMC finds will probably be the same ones that AArcade finds as well.

[Setzer Gabbiani]

What I mean is something where you look up a movie or show, and it allows users the choice of different hosts to stream the movie/show from. Although I don't think that having the ability to stream that stuff right out of the box would be very legal. Although I do see potential with f2p games, since those are definitely legal for everyone to access (it would just be a matter of individual game owners, whether they allow direct linking to their games, or if they require a link to their site, or they don't allow linking at all). There are also services that do stream free video content legally, such as WWE Network (or whatever the free WWE stream is called, I just know that WWE itself owns it), College Humor (fanmade videos), etc.

[SM Sith Lord]

That is sort of how Anarchy Arcade works. Not all of the functionality has been implemented yet, but basically multiplayer movie watching works like this:

First, there is no screen sharing or peer-to-peer file sharing in AArcade. You'll never be directly streaming your screen to other people because too many people would use that to violate copyrights, in addition to technical limitations.

Watching movies in Multiplayer is exactly like watching YouTube videos together in Multiplayer, except that people might not all be streaming the movie from the same place. What I mean by that is some people will be streaming the movie from Netflix, while others are playing it from a DVR or off of their hrad drive. All AArcade has to do is synchronize the start of the movie, and everybody will be watching the same movie playing from what ever medium they have it on.

Note that AArcade does everything it can to not force you to use specific services. I mention Netflix because it's great for movies, but the goal is to make anything that runs in your browser or plays in your media player compatible. This means that Hulu, Amazon Prime, WWE Network, and everything else. You don't need to change how you use your computer just to use Anarchy Arcade.

By the way, the WWE Network is a subscription service like Netflix. 9.99, 9.99, 9.99! (That is something the crowrd chants lol.)

So no matter how your friends organize their media libraries or what services they use, all AArcade has to do is synchronize the start of the playback and everybody will be watching their own copies of the movie. This means there is no file sharing, no screen streaming, and no chance of people exploiting it to illegally share copyrighted movies with eachother.

Now, it's true that maybe you'll be watching the Special Edition streamed from Amazon Prime while your friend is streaming the normal cut from Netflix and you might get a little out of sync. There is no way to avoid this without opening AArcade up for exploitation.

Free2Play games work great in AArcade, just as well as paid games. If you try to launch anything you don't have access to, AArcade will show you a list of places you can go to get it including the Steam Store and other major sites, plus you can add your own favorite sites so it generates links to the search results pages for the item.

As far as watching other people play games LIVE on the in-game cabinets, Anarchy Arcade has an awesome feature called Over-The-Shoulder Spectating. It lets you literally stand behind the person in the arcade and watch them play their game on a live stream directly on the cabinet. All the player needs is to know how to stream to Twitch.tv and everything else is automatic. A Twitch.tv logo appears over the heads of anybody who is live streaming their gameplay so everybody in the server knows to watch. If you haven't heard of Twitch.tv yet, it's a video game streaming service that lets other people watch you play live.

By the way, scrapers are what the scripts are called that grab DVD image URLs, screenshot URLs, video stream URLs, and other information about a particular movie or game from online websites & databases. Anarchy Arcade scrapers are addon scripts written in JavaScript. I have already written scrapers for YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, TheMovieDb.org, and a few other sites. The community will be able to create their own scrapers for any site they want. Maybe this is the answer you were looking for. :)

[Setzer Gabbiani]

I think I understand now. I can choose which programs to use, it's just a matter of finding out how to make it work with Anarchy Arcade. I used XBMC Frodo not too long ago (Gotham was out, but most addons weren't working for Gotham), and I would use addons to watch College Humor, as well as watch MLP videos and listen to music. So although some of the stuff (especially watching MLP videos) cannot be officially supported, there is a way out there to set it up so I can still launch the service directly from a shortcut. It's just a matter of going into XBMC and finding out which service it was that launched it.

[SM Sith Lord]

If it was a website, such as College Humaor, you should be able to just go to the video you want to spawn in the in-game browser and click the Spawn Now button. The thing is, without a College Humor data scrapper written, it will spawn the video as a website instead of an embedded video. You can still watch it in-game, it's just that it won't take up 100% of the cabinet's screen like it does for YouTube videos (which does have a data scrapper written for it already.)