Hi. I am working on a project called View Assist. I would like to have the ability to issue a voice command and have a Channels DVR live video stream open on my VA satellite device. I can handle everything short of knowing how to find the URL that can be passed.
So the question is, is there a web url that can be obtained that will start a live stream full screen playing back in a web browser?
While there are supported APIs for controlling the Channels app, and even inspecting the Channels library of content, there's nothing that just hands off streaming URLs from live channels.
If you want, you can use browser dev tools to inspect the URLs used in Channels. Though these are not technically supported and can change.
You can also search this forum for other ways to fetch streaming URLs for channels using the M3U export endpoints, but again, they're not official either.
So yeah, just search around the forum. We don't care if you use these, but we don't technically support them as they're not official supported features.
Thanks and understood. I did a bit of this and did see the stream URL that contained a playlist or m3u file but seems like you need VLC or similar to use. Looking to have it open in the browser for simplicity
I'll look around though
The M3U is just a text list of the actual URLs, if you look at that with an editor, you'll see the URLs and the standard formula for them.
Most excellent. I'm another life I think I knew that haha
Thanks again for the push. I'm searching now and am asking to make sure I am looking for the right thing. I looked at an m3u file I pulled from inspecting the playing element and it does not have a stream url and has many many parts. I'm guessing Channels segments these streams.
Moreover, what I'm aiming for is something that I can feed the web browser on my Android tablet that will open the streaming video in the web browser and not launch a secondary app like VLC. Is this possible? If so, I'll continue my search.
Totally get that this isn't supported and appreciate any advice you can give. This would be a really cool thing to demo with my project.
It's possible but its all going to depend on the browser being used.
It will have to be transcoded streams though as a browser can not play back what comes directly from an HDHomeRun, because the video format is not supported by browsers.
Read up on this post and thread.