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A new MUBI plugin for XBMC/Kodi

Download Mubi (2015) plugin 0.8.zip [updated : 21/3/2015] [** Updated: March 2015 **]

[The source is also now on GitHub]

I really like MUBI a moving 30 day window of hand curated films for the price of a coffee, or as they like to describe themselves ‘an online cinema’.

But despite being a member for some time now and reguarly checking the iPad app for new films. I found myself rarely streaming the films direct from MUBI’s site, as my main film watching platform is a dedicated HTPC running Kodi.

Someone had previously written a very nice and feature rich MUBI plugin for XBMC. However it was now i) broken and no longer being maintained and ii) was built against an older version of the site, prior to the introduction of a 30 day selection window and the phasing out of the old pay-per-film model, so much of it’s funtionality was no longer relevant and/or broken.

But that gave me the incentive to look at using a mix of Beautiful Soup (to handle the scraping, MUBI doesn’t have a public API I assume due to rights issues) and XBMCSwift2 (to make the addon code slightly cleaner and easier to test from the command line).

Anyway, after a couple of false starts, a bit of request/response interrogation using Charles and some trial and error, I managed to get everything working. Although this is my first XBMC plugin, first time using BeautifulSoup or XMBCSwift2 and the second thing I have written in Python of any consequence, so it’s undoubtable a little rough round the edges.

I haven’t pushed this out as an official XBMC plugin, nor do I have any plans to. But if anyone wants to download my code/plugin then feel free to do so. Just don’t ask me (or MUBI) for any support on it, although feel free to add feedback or let me know if it’s broken for you (just don’t expect an immediate fix!). It’s highly likely to break again next time MUBI change their site and I certianly don’t want to get into a cat/mouse situation trying to keep it up to date, especially if they are unhappy with the idea of a 3rd party XBMC plugin accessing their service.

Download Mubi (2014) plugin 0.5.zip [updated : 28/11/2014]

Download from GitHub

You will need a MUBI account to use the plugin, you can sign up for a 30 day trial here.

MUBI XBMC plugin

Thanks to jbaiter for his original plugin which gave me a starting off point for this version. There’s also a couple of lines/patterns that I took verbatim from his original plugin due to their elegance/simplicity.