I had holiday between Christmas and New Years, and pulled myself together and finshed up the Digitally Imported streaming music plugin for XBMC, finally hitting version 1.0.

This was actually quite lucky I had started work on it again as XBMC 11.0 Eden: Beta got release – which works great – and as Digitally Imported changed their website design at New Years, meaning: the plugin broke.

Version 1.0 means I’ve implemented all the functionality I originally set out to do:

• Streaming of 96k public streams
• The option to choose A-Z sorting or let the streams be displayed in the order they are at di.fm
• A configurable cache function of stream URLs, for faster loading of the streamlist when using cached version + to not hammer DIs webserver (6 hours cache by default)
• Unique channel icons for every channel – thank you to Ari Shohat from Digitally Imported for permission to use them
• Premium login and premium streams
• Premium users have the option to choose between 256k and 128k streams
• Premium users may choose to use their ‘My Favorites’ playlist, only showing the streams they want

Download Digitally Imported XBMC plugin v1.0

What you need to do:

• Make sure you have at least XBMC 10.1 – codename Dharma (XBMC 10.0 should work too)
• Download Digitally Imported XBMC plugin v1.0
• Unpack the archive, inside the archive is a folder called plugin.audio.di.fm, move it to one of the following locations, depending on your OS. Some unpacking programs extracts to a folder with the same name as the file it extracted from, meaning you could end up with a plugin.audio.di.fm folder within the plugin.audio.di.fm folder – Inception style – and that could screw things up.
• Linux/Ubuntu – ~/.xbmc/addons/
• Windows – C:\Users\<your_username>\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\addons\
• OS X – ~/Library/Application Support/XBMC/addons/
• From XBMC, the plugin is configured by left clicking or pressing C on the Digitally Imported folder in the music add-ons category and choosing Add-on settings.

Around New Years Eve, di.fm changed it’s design, and thereby the plugin “broke”, or at least couldn’t find what it was looking for anymore.

Irony would have it that I had already started working on implementing the Premium settings the day before New Years, so I was made aware of the changes the day after.

I expect version 1.0 of the plugin to be out next weekend, around the 8th of January, with Premium, stream quality (premium has 256k and 128k) support and the option to use your ‘My Favorites’ playlist.

Download the updated Digitally Imported XBMC plugin v1.0 here

I found a bug that made it so the plugin diden’t really respect it if you had set it to never refresh the cache, which gives a significant speedboost when accessing the channellist.

Download Digitally Imported XBMC plugin v0.71

Download the updated Digitally Imported XBMC plugin v1.0 instead

Instructions for installing the plugin can be found at http://qualisoft.dk/2011/07/di-fm-digitally-imported-xbmc-plugin-v0-7/

A totally unofficial and unendorsed XBMC plugin.

For quite some time now, I’ve been wanting to start coding Python, also I’ve been a longtime member of Digitally Imported‘s excellent streaming music service that at the time of writing this post, has 38 channels to choose from.

So I decided to combine those two things and write a DI plugin for the awesome open source media center XBMC, which coincidentally uses Python.

The plugin is in what i would call stable beta as I’ve seen no more bugs, the beta label is more to show that I want to do more with the plugin.

Currently it only supports the public streams in 96kb/s in MP3 format, the plan is to add support for Premium streams (256kb/s).

For now, it’s just a file download, but in the future I plan to have it added to the official XBMC repository, so it can be downloaded directly from within XBMC.

What you need to do:

• Make sure you have at least XBMC 10.1 – codename Dharma (XBMC 10.0 should work too)
• Download Digitally Imported XBMC plugin v0.7
• Download the updated Digitally Imported XBMC plugin v1.0 instead
• Unpack the archive, inside the archive is a folder called plugin.audio.di.fm, move it to one of the following locations, depending on your OS. Some unpacking programs extracts to a folder with the same name as the file it extracted from, meaning you could end up with a plugin.audio.di.fm folder within the plugin.audio.di.fm folder – Inception style – and that could screw things up.
• Ubuntu – ~/.xbmc/addons/
• Windows – C:\Users\<your_username>\AppData\Roaming\XBMC\addons\
• OS X – ~/Library/Application Support/XBMC/addons/
• From XBMC, the plugin is configured by left clicking or pressing C on the Digitally Imported folder in the music add-ons category and choosing Add-on settings.

It has a few settings, like sorting from A-Z or keeping the order they’re show in at frontpage of di.fm, and choosing to never refresh the stream cache, resulting in the channellist gets shown much faster.

The plugin has been tested on XBMC 10.1 running on both Ubuntu 10.10 – Maverick Meerkat and Windows 7, so I’m crossing my fingers for similar results with your system. If you encounter any problems, a note in the comments would be greatly appreciated.

The story

I finally got around to buying a ITX machine to use as a dedicated Media Center. in the form of XBMC – and Ubuntu as the OS of course.

The mobo is a Zotac IONITX-F-E with a 1.8ghz dual core CPU, NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GPU, which is powerful enough to run 1080p video.

I started out by installing Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal, the installation went flawless as expected and I installed all the packages I needed – that basicly only consisted of XBMC and the propritary NVidia driver, but the system just seemed kinda sluggish, especially notable when scrolling in a terminal.

The problem was that even though I activated the propritary Nvidia driver, it said “This driver is activated but not currently in use” under System->Administration->Hardware Drivers.

The Nvidia driver enables you to use VDPAU, which is hardware acceleration of video, essential to showing MKV and MP4 video.

After a long night, installing packages I’ve never heard of and adding various lines to the xorg.conf, under advice from forums where people had proclaimed having the same problem, I still weren’t able to make Ubuntu 11.04 use the NVidia driver, so I ended up installing Ubuntu 10.10 – Maverick Meerkat and ahhh…. bliss.

The propritary driver now finally worked as it should and the system didn’t seem sluggish anymore.

What you need to do

• Get Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat – don’t bother with 11.04 (for ION based machines at least, as the NVidia driver seems to be broken under 11.04 at the moment)
• Set the GPU in the BIOS to have more then 64mb of RAM, I suggest maxing it out to 512mb or as close to as possible
• Enable the propritary NVidia drivers from System->Administration->Hardware Drivers
• Add the XBMC launchpad PPA and install XBMC from the terminal
• sudo add-apt-repository ppa:team-xbmc
• sudo apt-get install update
• sudo apt-get install xbmc
• Install the VDPAU driver to enable HW accelerated video
• sudo apt-get install vdpau-va-driver
• OR download and install a newer .deb from http://www.splitted-desktop.com/~gbeauchesne/vdpau-video/pkgs/i386/
• Change it so the integrated soundcard uses both HDMI and analog output by choosing Digital Stereo (HDMI) Stereo + Analog Stereo output, instead of just Analog Stereo Duplex (see screenshot below) from the Sound Preferences
• If you have problems with the sound, try the following from a terminal
• sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-alsa-2.6.35-22-generic alsa-utils
• Lastly – and optionally -  add XBMC to System->Administration->Startup Applications

I’d just like to add, that this worked for ME on MY setup, so please bear that in mind.