Serviio

First of all: Thanks for the great piece of software! I use it in the Kids bedrooms with their Sony Bluray players (ticks me off that Sony did not tell me that they do not support the NTFS file system)

I am not sure if this can be done - but here is goes.

My setup is this:

Custom built Intel Core i3 Media Server with 12TB, feeding Movies, TV Shows, Images and Music on a Gigabit Network to the following:
- 1 Zotec ZBox with Win7 64/64 Gig SSD running XBMC/Boxee - my main HTPC (haven't decided which I like best yet)
- 1 Patriot Box Office in my bedroom
- 2 Sony Bluray players in Kids Bedrooms (the reason I use Serviio)
- 2 Desktop PC's
- 2 Laptops
- 1 Net-book
- 1 Sony Dash (Chumby device)
- 2 Ipod Touches (Going to setup Air Video Server for these - haven't yet though)
- 1 IPhone 3G
- 2 Xbox 360's
- 1 PS3
- 1 Wii
- 1 PC Emulated Arcade Machine
- 4 Original XBox's all modded with Xcecuter CE chips running XBMC (not using anymore - but thinking of setting one back up in Kitchen since i can use Serviio to stream HD to it.)
- 1 Insane Hydro bill hehe.

I guess the list is more for bragging rights. The reason for the post is concerning the Sony DASH. The DASH is a nice little piece of hardware that allows you to play 100's of free flash based widgets (Games, Weather, Social Networking, Online Video, etc) on a 7" touch screen. But what it DOES NOT do is play video off of the local network via a direct connect to the network shares or to a DLNA server. It does play video from numerous streaming sites like YouTube and such - so it does have the ability to play Video.

It also has NetFlix built in. So my question is this: Would there be a way to have Serviio hi-jack the NetFlix requests from the Sony Dash and serve up movies from the local media server instead? Are the streams from NetFlix and the Serviio DLNA similar in nature? This would also work with any other piece of hardware out there that has the ability to play NetFlix movies but does not have the ability to connect with a DLNA server or a network share (probably not to many devices fall in this category though).

I hate it when a piece of hardware has the ability to do more then the Manufacturer allows.

Thanks for reading

There would have to be some kind of proxy which would translate requests from the device into a DLNA requests. Definitely not something that I'll be doing but could be an idea for someone else to write that kind of program - it could then be used by any DLNA server.

Ah well - it was worth a shot asking.

Hmmm what language would I need to write in? I like to see if things are possible and put myself to the test every now and then!

java then its multiplatform complient

awesome! I know java w00t! hmm... so how can I get a hold of the netflix requests now, guess this will be the tricky part

Im know noting about programming video stuff, but I do know a thing or too about networking, Hi-jacking the netflix connection would be the easy part, all you would need to do is figure out what server the device is trying to connect too, modify your computers hosts file to point it too your proxy server. Or if you run your own DNS server, you can override the address from there.



Too figure out the netflix protocall, you could attempt some packet sniffing, and see what commands are being sent and reverse engineer it, Assuming its not encrypted.

http://developer.netflix.com/
Might be a good place, gives you all you need to know about making your own Netflix Client... should be enough to reverse engineer and create a basic Netflix Server...

as for language, there are many too choose from, use what you know you can do the job in