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I am trying to make a mobile application for my Samsung Smart TV that would not only open one of the apps on the TV (e.g. Netflix, Pandora, Hulu etc.), but would also take in the 'extra parameters' to directly play the multimedia content for me on the TV rather than simply opening the app on the TV and me having to select what I want to play manually through the remote control.

Can any of these apps be invoked with 'extra parameters' (like, content id, song name, song id, TV show id, etc.) to play them directly? thanks!

Updated the question post Jeremy's response:

I used Wireshark on my android phone to trace the POST request that goes to Netflix on my PS3 to play a movie. The request is posted below. I am trying to reconstruct this POST request to play the movie "programmatically".

I see that the request has parameters "hmac" and "ciphertext", but I do not see any reference to the "movie_id" or anything like that in the POST parameters. I know that Netflix uses DIAL protocol.

Can someone help me understand how I can attempt to reconstruct the POST request and reverse engineer the request parameters?

enter image description here

Darth.Vader
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  • It looks like there are two POST requests. Is the 2nd one relevant? – Jeremy White May 27 '14 at 18:45
  • Either way, I don't recognize the format of the protocol being used here. I wonder if it's something that is custom to PS3. The fact that they are passing off your user id & device id suggests they may be doing something in the cloud, after the app has launched. – Jeremy White May 27 '14 at 18:49

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Some of those apps do support the DIAL (DIscover And Launch) protocol, which allows for launching an app with parameters. Unfortunately, there are a few factors you have to deal with.

  • the format of the parameters is going to vary between each of the apps
  • the format of the parameters may be very hard to discover (try using a web proxy like Charles)
  • the handoff of parameters may occur in the cloud, rendering your use-case impossible

There is an open-source effort to normalize some of these launching commands. You should take a look at Connect SDK. They don't yet have support for Samsung, though.

Jeremy White
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  • I used Wireshark to trace the POST requests that go from my android phone to Netflix on my PS3. I have updated the question above based on your suggestions. Can you please respond. Thanks. – Darth.Vader May 27 '14 at 17:54
  • Thanks, Jeremy! Does that mean that for LG, connectSDK does provide a way to have a *deep linking* with one of the video streaming apps (like Netflix or Hulu)? – Darth.Vader Nov 07 '14 at 00:16