When i use the 1 minute skip ahead, during recording playback the FF and RW options dont work.

Alright, any of your Skin Developers up for the challange of writing a how to guide? Those that have already developed some fairly sophistacted skins, could collaborate on it, and who knows, we could get some more really cool skins.

I am trying to add a penel to the DVD2MPEG plug-in so that it can display status on the main menu page. The only example I could find to use as a template was the sysinfo plug-in. I;ve tried to modify it and adapt it to fit what I guessed to be the strtcure for panels in .23.8 but I get the following error

See the end of this message for details on invoking
just-in-time (JIT) debugging instead of this dialog box.

************** Exception Text **************
System.InvalidCastException: Specified cast is not valid.
at GBPVR.Public.SkinHelper.getNamedImageNonCached(String name, Hashtable parameters)
at GBPVR.Public.SkinHelper.getNamedImage(String name, Hashtable parameters)
at DVD2MPEGPlugin.DVD2MPEGTask.renderPanel()
at bv.a(Boolean& A_0)
at n.v()
at bv.b(String A_0)
at n.a(Message& A_0)
at System.Windows.Forms.ControlNativeWindow.OnMessage(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.ControlNativeWindow.WndProc(Message& m)
at System.Windows.Forms.NativeWindow.Callback(IntPtr hWnd, Int32 msg, IntPtr wparam, IntPtr lparam)


My render panel routine is

<table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0"><tr><td>Code Sample </td></tr><tr><td id="CODE">
public Image renderPanel()
{
Hashtable args = new Hashtable();

// setup skin helper
XmlDocument document = new XmlDocument();
document.Load(PluginHelperFactory.getPluginHelper().GetSkinRootDirectory() + "\\panels\\dvdtompeg.xml");


SkinHelper myskinHelper = new SkinHelper(document, PluginHelperFactory.getPluginHelper().GetSkinRootDirectory() + getSkinSubdirectory());


string conversionState=" ";
switch (currentRipState)
{
case RippingState.Besweet:
conversionState = "Converting DVD audio";
break;

case RippingState.Decrypt:
conversionState = "Decrypting DVD";
break;

case RippingState.Mplex:
conversionState = "Building MPEG file";
break;
}

args["@ConversionState"] = conversionState;
DateTime currentTime = DateTime.Now;
args["@Time"] = currentTime.ToShortTimeString();
args["@Date1"] = currentTime.DayOfWeek;
args["@Date2"] = currentTime.ToShortDateString();

Image offScreenBmp = myskinHelper.getNamedImage("DVDtoMPEGPanel",args);
Graphics offScreenDC = Graphics.FromImage(offScreenBmp);
offScreenDC.DrawImage(offScreenBmp, 500, 100);
offScreenDC.Dispose();

return offScreenBmp;
}


[/QUOTE]

Any ideas what I am doing wrong?

Thanks

ok ive done most of the coding now, i couldnt get burn video to dvd (it took two hours to prepare a iso just for  4.7gb disk, on a celeron d 330 (2.6ghz), so until i find a faster way, bugger it).  you can press red/yellow for page up, blue cycle thru views, green will fetch the info from imdb (big thanks to Jeff for this, i was to lazy to do it myself . note thou it wont say its fetching it, it will just be unresponsive for a few seconds (on 256k it only took about 2-5 seconds on average), i might make it a seperate thread in the future and have a popup message saying fetching info).  you can press the green button on either a video file/iso or on a directory (a directory is designed for tv shows)

it also has an option to remove the folders name from the file. eg &quot;Enterprise - 2x02 - Carbon Creek&quot; will become &quot;2x02 - Carbon Creek&quot;, which makes it easier to read. there are four different views: list,icons, big icons, and details (one above). you can rip dvds, play dvds, do a direct dvd to dvd copy (will tell you what size dvd is required before it burns (most need dual layer discs, so if you dont have a dual layer burn, check back of dvd first (it will say either DVD5 or DVD9 (dvd5 = single layer, dvd9 = dual layer). um on to rip a dvd you must have a directory structure like DVDs\[genre] so
D:\DVDs\Comedy; D:\DVDs\Romance, etc.

i couldnt be bothered doing a blue skin for it (just dump the &quot;my videos&quot; dir into the skin you are using, if someone can be bothered doing the skins can you email them to me, so i can include them in future releases (ive been programming all night, and i well yeah cant be bothered ).

it also remembers directory views (this a bug in current release of gbpvr (0.238) if you press menu button it wont save this info, will be fixed in next release (well i think it will be), big thanks to KingArgyle for helping with the xml coding.

oh yeah thats it, oh i suppose you want a link to so here it is, once i few bugs (im sure there are some) are ironed out ill send it to sub so he can host it, and then ill do the wiki thingy.

also anyone who doesnt use english can you test this out, im not sure about the xml, i had to remove characters like '&amp;' '+' etc for directory view memory, and well i dont know which other characters i have to remove like the ae one etc.

enjoy

oh also if you press green button on a file like &quot;enterprise - blah blah&quot; and its in a directory \enterprise\filename or enterprise\seasonorwhatever\filename, it will see that its enterprise, so it will download enterprise info, and set it to the enterprise folder not that video file, since you can never get info for an episode (well not from imdb).  just do it and you'll see what i mean.

Jorm and I have been tossing back and forth the idea of a common Utility DLL that can be used to store common functions that all Plugin Developers find themselve writing over and over. The thought is to try to eliminate the duplication of code, and make it even easier for Plugin Developers to write new apps. The plugin community would maintain this, and add or change it as necessary.

The main thing to start this off is what Common things do you find yourself writing or reusing in your Plugins.

The first thing I see are the Various advance search functions that we have come up with. I know that a lot of the web admin searches are very similiar to Jorm's key word searches.

Next would be a set of common functions to retrieve information between the GBPVR database and Jorm's Zap2It extended database. If it is available, then Plugin developers can query between the two with one common interface.

Please feel free to add to this thread, we'd like to guage the level of interest in this.

Currently there is only one PVR application that I'm aware of that has Web Services, and that is BTV 3.5. The concept is good, but their implementation of it has faultered because of their licensing restrictions on usage. Why create web services, when we have a good Plugin API as it stands now. Mainly for network communication between applications. This way applications can be written that can remotely access GBPVR services to do various tasks, like schedule a recording, retrieve a list of upcoming recordings, what is currently recording, Status of GPVR, when is the next guide update, what channels is a program on, etc. This information could then be feed to other applications to used across the network. So if you had two versions of GBPVR running, you could have your server GBPVR recording, but still feed information back to the client GBPVR at your TV.

Another use would be to allow interoperability between other Media server software and GBPVR. If you had Meedio running in another room, and wanted to extract information from GBPVR that is doing your recording, and it resides on another PC, you could use the Web Services to retrieve the information.

A couple of questions for the developers and sub in general, should I proceed down this path, and if so, what would you like to be available as a service. Also, what type of service interface do you want, SOAP and/or REST?

Comments please.

I'd put this on a medium to low priority list item, but it would be nice to migrate away from Access as a database, and move to a middle tier level database such as MSDE or MySQL. As with Access there are no royalty payments or restrictions. MSDE is basically SQL Server, but only allows a limited number of users to access it at a time. MySQL of course is open source, and can be included free of charge.

Setup of these might be a bit more complicated, but some of the benefits might be helpful for plugin/utility developers, as well as database maintenance. Indexing and speed of these two databases is much faster than Access.

In .238, I have the Medium and High settings set for variable video rates with audio at 384, but gbpvr just recorded a couple of things and TMPGENC DVD Author says the audio rate was only 224.

Hello.. I was wondering if somebody would be kind enough to help.

I have WinTV PVR 250
Win MVP
.net framework 1.1 installed
Win XP, SP2 installed

I get an unfortunate error when running initial install:
&quot;Error 1720. There is a problem with this Windows Installer package.............&quot;

Any help would be much appreciated. If additional details are needed please tell me what.

peace,

Gav

Well so far I have been able to access zap2it downloading a big xml file of the data. I parse it apart and populate a new database with the fields.

The problem I am having is I need to be able to compact the database. Any ideas?