How to install xbmc module for Python

python api module xbmc
Dananjaya picture Dananjaya · May 11, 2011 · Viewed 12.9k times · Source

I tried to find the setup script from xbmcscripts.com but apparently that site is down. Neither 'easy_install' gives a desirable result. I'm running Ubuntu 11.04 and xbmc (Media Center) is installed and working alright. What I basically need is the ability to import the xbmc module in Python console/script like this,

import xbmc

url = '<a link to a .flv file goes here'
xbmc.Player(xbmc.PLAYER_CORE_DVDPLAYER).play(url)

Thanks!

Answer

Bruce van der Kooij picture Bruce van der Kooij · Jun 18, 2011

I haven't done any XBMC development myself but I thought I'd take a look at this.

From what I can tell XBMC ships with its own Python interpreter (/usr/lib/xbmc/system/python/python24-i486-linux.so) and the xbmc, xbmcgui and xbmcplugin libraries are not available outside of XBMC itself.

As for the easiest way to develop for XBMC with regards to experimenting, testing and debugging. Here's some tips:

  • Running XBMC in a window and always on top might be handy (use \ in fullscreen mode)
  • Any print statements inside an add-on/script end up as notices in the log (~/.xbmc/temp/xbmc.log)
  • You could create an add-on that exposes a Python shell from within the context of XBMC (that you communicate with over say Telnet)

There are references scattered around to something that used to be on XMBCscripts.com referred to as an "XBMC emulator" which apparently implemented the functionality of those libraries outside of XBMC but I can't find it anywhere.

Relevant documentation:

External links:

Related questions

JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

I am getting error Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0) when trying to decode JSON. The URL I use for the API call works fine in the browser, but gives this error when done through a curl request. The following is …

Read More
Making a request to a RESTful API using python

I have a RESTful API that I have exposed using an implementation of Elasticsearch on an EC2 instance to index a corpus of content. I can query the search by running the following from my terminal (MacOSX): curl -XGET 'http://…

Read More
WhatsApp API (java/python)

I am looking for WhatsApp API, preferably a Python or Java library. I've tried Yowsup, but could not get my number registered; I am based in India and I am not sure if that has got anything to do with …

Read More