Watch Revision3 shows on PS3/XBox 360/XBMC in HD

I’m a big fan of Revision3 programming. I really wanted to be able to watch their shows on any media center client (including gaming console media center clients), but I couldn’t find a website that would play Revision3 content in the PS3 web browser. The easiest way (that I know of) to watch Revision3 programming and download new content as it is released is by subscribing to Revision3 shows via RSS feeds or through iTunes. Whenever a new show is released, a link to the show is released via the RSS feed and iTunes will automatically download the podcast. iTunes works good for Windows and Mac users, but Apple doesn’t have an iTunes application that runs on Linux. However, there are several podcast aggregators for Linux that utilize RSS feeds to download the podcasts and save them to you local computer.  Once downloaded, you can stream the media to your media center client using Mediatomb.  Mediatomb is a free uPnP Media Server application that runs on Linux and Mac OS X.

I actually use 2 media server applications: Mediatomb and uShare. uShare is another free UPnP A/V & DLNA Media Server that runs on Linux. It’s fairly easy to setup.  I have found that there are some things that uShare won’t play, but Mediatomb will and vice versa. In general, I found uShare to be very temperamental. Maybe it was something I configured wrong or the version of uShare that I am running (I am running the ushare package from the apt repository for Ubuntu Karmic), but I would constantly receive errors in the upper right corner of the screen while streaming content from my media server (the media would continue playing like nothing happened, I would just see DLNA errors in the upper right corner). Also, uShare would not play Revision3 MP4 podcasts out-of-the-box (I would have to transcode them into mpeg-1). On top of all of that, uShare didn’t recognize when new content was added to the stream folder without a restart of the ushare service (Mediatomb picks it up eventually since it appears to be indexing the content in the background). For instance, if I downloaded a new Revision3 show, my media center client would not see it until the uShare service was stopped and started again on the media server running uShare. After all these headaches and a few others, I decided to try other options for Revision3 programming.

NOTE: For XBMC, you don’t need to download the podcasts if you don’t want to. You can stream the content directly from the Internet using the Revision3 Video plugin for XBMC. However, if you want to download the podcasts, XBMC works with uShare and Mediatomb.

Here’s how to install Podget in Ubuntu and stream Revision3 podcasts to your media center client using Mediatomb:

1.) Install podget and Mediatomb

sudo apt-get install podget mediatomb

2.) Configure podget

Run podget to setup rc and serverlist files from your home directory:

cd
podget ==> (Once it starts to download a podcast, you can kill the podget process, or you can wait until it finishes – whatever you want)

Setup location of downloaded podcasts:

pico .podget/podgetrc

dir_library=/home/username/POD ==> Change if you want them saved somewhere else
most_recent=1 ==> Default is 0, which downloads ALL new material. I set it to download the most recent episode of each show.
cleanup=1 ==> Default is 0, which will keep download podcasts indefinitely (if you have enough space and want to keep the podcasts forever, keep this at 0)
cleanup_days=30 ==> Default is 7 – 30 days is approximately 4 weeks worth of programming, which should be good enough.

(Ctrl+X) ==> To save and exit out of pico

Setup podcasts to download:

pico .podget/serverlist

Comment out the shows that you don’t want and add the Revision3 shows that you want to download. All of the Revision3 shows appear to have this format in an RSS feed: http://revision3.com/showname/feed/fileformat

showname=hak5,diggnation,scamschool,filmriot,rofl,tekzilla
fileformat=MP4-Small,MP4-Large,MP4-hd30,MP4-High-Definition

Here are some examples that I used to download the shows in HD:

http://revision3.com/hak5/feed/MP4-High-Definition Revision3 Hak5
http://revision3.com/diggnation/feed/MP4-High-Definition Revision3 Diggnation
http://revision3.com/scamschool/feed/MP4-High-Definition Revision3 Scam_School
http://revision3.com/filmriot/feed/MP4-High-Definition Revision3 Film_Riot
http://revision3.com/rofl/feed/MP4-High-Definition Revision3 ROFL

(Ctrl+X) ==> To save and exit out of pico

3.) Configure Mediatomb

Edit Meditomb config file: sudo pico /etc/mediatomb/config.xml

Depending on the media center client you are using, you will need to make the following edits to the config file (source):

Playstation 3 (PS3) Compatibility

   <protocolInfo extend="yes"/><!-- For PS3 support change to "yes" -->
   <!-- Uncomment the line below for PS3 divx support -->
    <map from="avi" to="video/divx"/>

D-Link Media Player Compatibility

   <!--
       Uncomment the lines below to get rid of jerky avi playback on the
       DSM320 or to enable subtitles support on the DSM units
    -->
    <custom-http-headers>
      <add header="X-User-Agent: redsonic"/>
    </custom-http-headers>

    <manufacturerURL>redsonic.com</manufacturerURL>
    <modelNumber>105</modelNumber>
        <!-- Uncomment the line below for D-Link DSM / ZyXEL DMA-1000 -->
        <map from="avi" to="video/avi"/>

ZyXEL DMA-1000 Compatibility

        <!-- Uncomment the line below for D-Link DSM / ZyXEL DMA-1000 -->
        <map from="avi" to="video/avi"/>

—
** When you are finished: (Ctrl+X) ==> To save and exit out of pico

Stop and Start Mediatomb:

sudo /etc/init.d/mediatomb stop
sudo /etc/init.d/mediatomb start

Open a web browser and navigate to: http://localhost:49152    ==> Mediatomb may have put this on 49152, 49153, or 49154 (I have seen all of those used).

Click the Filesystem option on the left side.  Navigate to where the podcasts are downloaded: /home/username/POD

Click the + on the right side to add the directory to Mediatomb.

5.) Setup a cron job to check for new podcasts and download them

crontab -e

This will open an editor to create a cron job. Here’s an example of a cron job that you can setup:

# Once a day at 4:15 AM
15 04 * * * /usr/bin/podget -s
# Every 6 hours on the hour
0 */4 * * * /usr/bin/podget -s

Exit out of the crontab and run podget to start downloading the content: /usr/bin/podget -s

There you have it. You can download the Revision3 shows to your PC and stream them in HD to any media center client that works with Mediatomb.

I should note that this is not just specific to Revision3 shows. There are many shows distributed as podcasts that you could do this with. Revision3 produces my favorite shows on the Internet so I used them as the example for this HOWTO.

Sources:

1.) Podget: A Simple Podcast aggregator

2.) Mediatomb – Community Ubuntu Documentation

3.) XBox 360 Media Sharing

4.) Podget howto

5.) uShare streaming to PS3 Howto