Revive this add-on

[davidbe]

This add-on has already had a huge history. Many thanks to the original builders & maintainers. 🙏

(This is how I understand the situation:) Last year however, the releases are stopped. DPG media contacted the maintainer because the add-on does not work as the experience on the website / smartphone app. Moreover: there isn't any advertisement. Explained in #394 (comment) As I understand, DPGMedia has been tolerating this add-on, as long it gives also the advertisement.

I've been analysing how advertisement works in the android app, and I think it might be realisable - advertisement are separate streams that need to be played. A few API calls give all the necessary info where to find all those streams and when they have to be played.

Maybe it isn't possible to copy the exact experience on other platforms, but it might be enough.

I want to invest some time in this, but eagerly want some help! Can we gather enough experience and knowledge to revive this add-on?

[michaelarnauts]

Just a quick reply. Feel free to take a closer look at how it works. If you have any concrete questions, I'll try to explain them.

One thing to note is that the add-on basically provides a way to navigate through the content (with the use of menu items), but to play media, it just provides the manifest URL and license server details to inputstream.adaptive. Any special things like interrupting the stream to play midroll ads are difficult to do, since the control of playing the stream is handed over to Kodi itself, and the add-on isn't involved in actually playing the stream.

There was a time when VTM Go was using periods to inject ads, and this wasn't correctly implemented at inputstream.adaptive, causing issues with playback. These things are also hard to solve, since they require changes at the Kodi side, and they aren't always really helpful in helping with this.

[davidbe]

Thank you for the reply. Indeed, I concluded as well that interrupting a stream is hard to do.
That's why I wrote, that it might not be possible to copy the same experience but to do as good as possible. And maybe that might be enough?

There's an XML that gets returned which tells us which advertisement streams (they're just mp4-url's) to play on what time. There are three types: 1/ advertisement before the program 2/ advertisement during the program 3/ advertisement after the program.

I assume, but there lacks my knowledge of Kodi, that we can play all type (1) advertisement streams one after the other before the actual program starts and all type (3) advertisement streams after the program. We might split the type (2) streams and put them before & after that actual program.

That might be acceptable? And feasable?