ATTAC TV plugin installation quick guide - jamontes/plugin.video.attactv GitHub Wiki

This guide tries to explain how to install and configure the ATTAC TV plugin for XBMC.

Installing XBMC.

First of all, we have to get installed and configured the XBMC software.

It can be directly downloaded and installed from the original web page at XBMC Download page, or if you have a Raspberry Pi, you can install a custom XBMC image as OpenELEC, or Raspbmc. Depending of the system selected, you will have to follow the installation steps described in the corresponding installation guide for each one, but in general terms, is as much straight forward as any other software application.

Once XBMC is installed in your system, you can proceed with the quick configuration start, to customize the XBMC according to your preferences. The starting point to do so is the XBMC WIKI, where you can find all the documentation and guides. Besides that you can find other guides and howtos from the web, as This guide of MakeUseOf that I find it very complete, or the much more deep techy howto from YouAreSuchAGeek, probably consulted in case of hardware configurations.

However, the most important steps here (from the plugin point of view) are to configure the internet connection parameters (if you are using an standalone dedicated equipment with a custom embeded XBMC system image for it, as such of OpenELEC), and the internationalization settings (from System->Settings->Appearance->International), from where you can setup the system language, and the timezone and country.

After setup the XBMC configuration (no more than 10-15m), we can proceed with the plugin installation from the official repositories.

Installing the ATTAC TV plugin.

Once the XBMC applications is installed and configured, the plugin installation is very straight forward.

From the main menu, go to the Videos->Add-ons.

As you probably have nothing installed yet, you will see just the option Get More... That's the option we are going to use.

If you click over this only option, you will enter into the list of the wonderful world of XBMC official video plugins available (around 200 plugins). From all these you will choose the ATTAC TV plugin, as showed in the following picture (please, do feel free to look around and play with all of them they call you, as the plugins are the most valuable features of this wonderful application).

Once selected the ATTAC TV plugin, a new window will pop up with the plugin Add-on Information. This Add-on Information window will allow us to install, and afterwords configure the plugin.

We select the Install option, and after a short while, the ATTAC TV plugin will start the installation process, downloading the ATTAC TV plugin, as well as other plugins on which it depends on, as the Youtube, Vimeo, and BlipTV plugins, all of them developed by The Collective. Those plugin dependencies are required because the ATTAC TV alter-videos are hosted on those video streaming providers, as well as Dailymotion, but in the latter case there is no dependency required, as the ATTAC TV plugin can handle them by its own.

Note: at the time the ATTAC TV plugin was developed, there wasn't any Dailymotion plugin available into the official repositories. That's the reason why I handled the Dailymotion videos natively by the plugin itself.

The whole plugin installation process from the repositories takes around a couple of minutes, during those you can see as the plugin dependencies are installed on first place, and finally the ATTAC TV icon is showed into the bottom right corner messages window.

After the process is completed, you will see on the plugins listing entry the word Enabled, as showed by the following image:

Now it's time to configure our plugin. Let's select again the plugin to get into the Add-on Information window, and from there, select the Configure option. You will see something like showed in the following image:

If your main language is one of the four language (English, French, German, and Spanish) videos provided by the ATTAC TV site, and that language is the same as the system language previously configured into XBMC, then you are all right and have nothing more to do with the plugin configuration (as the default language option is just the System default). But let's suppose you like to keep the XBMC application installed by it's system default language (i.e. English), but you want to see the Spanish videos provided by the ATTAC TV web site. Then you have to change the Language to ES, as showed int the following image, and then press OK to save the changes:

Note: the Debug option is for trouble shooting and issues report, and by default is disabled, because it isn't necessary under normal working.

Now, it's time to use our plugin for first time :-)

If we go back up to the main menu and then select again the Videos->Add-ons, you will see now as the four plugins are installed, as you can see on the following image:

Now, if we select our plugin, it will search the video catalog from the ATTAC TV web site for the language we just configured into the plugin, and show the videos in a comfortable video list.

You can navigate forth and back along the whole video catalog provided by the web site. If you select one of the videos, it will start to play after a few seconds after fetching the video source from its hosted stream provider.

From the play mode, we can get into the context menu (using the remote control or by a moving the mouse pointer around the screen) so you can see the video information (duration, name, source, etc...) as well to change the video settings (audio, video aspect, subtitles if available, etc...)

Note: if the video is hosted by a media streaming provider, other than Dailymotion (as Youtube, Vimeo or BlipTV), then you will probably will see for the first time the pop up Add-on settings menu of the corresponding plugin. This is the normal behaviour, as the plugin has never run before, and it tries to get configured for first time with your custom preferences, as video quality, audio preferred channel, and if available and selectable, the preferred subtitles by default (as in the case of the Youtube plugin, very useful if the subtitles aren't burned into the video track).

On way to short cut this is by configuring the denpendecy plugins as we already did with the ATTAC TV plugin.

To do this we must get out from the plugin (going back with the remote or mouse control) up to the main menu, and from them select System->Settings->Add-ons->Enabled Add-ons->Video Add-ons, and the select one by one the BlipTV, Vimeo, and Youtube, changing from the Configure option the plugin preferences (for Vimeo and BlipTV, the default options should be fine, but the initial configuration is required anyway by those plugins).

Once you have saved the Add-ons preferences for those plugins, no more configurations are required to see all the videos from the ATTAC TV site.

Note: sometimes, the Youtube videos cannot be played. This is because the youtube web site internals change from time to time, leading the Youtube plugin to fail on the video URL collection. Fortunately, the Youtube changes are frequently reported by the community to The Collective, so in a matter of few days, they come back with a new version supporting the Youtube changes. The amazing thing is that the plugins installed are automatically updated from the official repositories as soon as they are available and our XBMC is connected to the internet. This is valid as well for the ATTAC TV plugin, so no more manually downloads nor configurations are required to keep the installed plugins updated.

For any error or issue reported about the ATTAC TV plugin, please follow the instructions described into the XBMC forum thread opened for this plugin Forum thread suport.

Enjoy it!

 Jose Antonio Montes (jamontes).