Enhanced Web Admin

[jsteele]

normanr

Terrific work. Configured my VLC as the default for ".m3u" file types, recorded a program and clicked on the button. VLC opened as it should but nothing played.

But there could be all sorts of possible reasons for that, not the least of which is that I am in my office not on my home LAN :-) so there are undoubtedly some configuration items that I have not taken into consideration. I'll have to try it when I get home which is where I expect it will actually be used.

I have my GB calling my office on a VPN so I get a local IP address for it from here (this isn't really for watching videos, its so that GB can backup the critical files to one of the servers in my office --- one of the perks of having your own business :-)

Anyway, nice work on the interface.

[ecorbin]

Thanks, normanr, for your work on the enhanced web admin. I am giving it a try now and the playlist option is working great. Firefox asked what application to open it with and I chose VLC, which opened the file and started playing it. I am new to VLC, though, and am having one issue with it. I realize that you aren't affiliated with VLC and don't support it, but I'm wondering if you have seen this issue. Each video that I open shows up with a duration that is almost half of the real duration. The video plays fine and I can use the slider to skip around in the video. The times are just off. It actually turns out this is the case whether I open the file directly in VLC (through a networked drive) or use the playlist through the webadmin. For example. last night's "King of the Hill" episode's duration as reported by Windows Media Player is 30:59. VLC says that it is 15:57. Any ideas?

[normanr]

jsteele: the m3u file should have a single playlist entry which should point to the same (but with mode=1 added). When the webserver see the mode passed in then it delivers the mpeg file instead of the playlist. You probably find there's not enough bandwidth for the mpeg to play. You should be able to download it though

[normanr]

ecorbin: no ideas, try get hold of the VLC team. My guess is that the moonlight encoder does a bad job at supplying a guess of what bitrate it is going to be using. I've seen VLC revising it's estimate of the length of the file as it plays.

[dirtygreek]

ah, i'm just retarded. I copied the files to replace the last version, but for some reason all of them weren't hilighted, so I didn't get everything replaced.

works great. thanks!

[jsteele]

jsteele: the m3u file should have a single playlist entry which should point to the same (but with mode=1 added). When the webserver see the mode passed in then it delivers the mpeg file instead of the playlist. You probably find there's not enough bandwidth for the mpeg to play. You should be able to download it though

normanr:
I suspect you may be right about bandwidth. Its a T1 to the office but its only a ADSL uplink from the house about 384KB so it may not like that. But I'm not that familiar with VLC to know if I missed some configuration trick to make it work in that environment. I'm anxious now to get home and try it at 54MB with nothing in the way :-)

I have tried direct file access over the LAN using Media Player and we were able to sustain 2 client PCs playing the same file while GB was doing timeshifted TV and recording another program in the background. Given how it supposedly works this should be a 'piece of cake' with VLC.

(I did try a real stress test the other day and it things did not go well. I tried running timeshift TV, recording a program and ripping a DVD to mpeg all at the same time. My Athalon 3000 was just not up to the task --- frame drops and frame freezes. But that's really beyond what I would expect it to do under normal circumstances anyway.)

Thanks again.

[normanr]

if you ask firefox to save the m3u to disk and then open the file in notepad, is the url correct? if you open that url in firefox and get it to download to disk, how fast is the download? Can VLC play a partially downloaded file?

[UncleJohnsBand]

Nice Job normanr.....this is sweet!

[jsteele]

normanr:

If you are open to a few suggestions fro additional capabilities ---
1. Use HTML frames in the schedule display so that the Date/Time and Forward/Back buttons are always visible regardless of how many channels there are. For example I have about 135 channels defined and it would be nice to be able to see the neaders and the forward/Back buttons when scrolled down to the bottom.
2. A button to force the display back to the current time
3. In Manage Recording provide a button to delete the recording
4. New display similar to the Manage Recordings screen but giving push-button access to all the programs on file including converted DVDs, etc, not just TV recordings.

Just some thoughts to keep you out of the pubs at night :-)

[normanr]

jsteele:
[INDENT]1. Hrm, I could throw a div with scrolling: auto, but firefox ignores that. There is already a copy of the forward/backward buttons at the bottom. How about I just add a copy of the headers at the bottom?
2. If you click the TV Guide tab it will send you back to the current time.
3. With lots of confirmation, I bet! *grin*
4. mmm, full blown access to the same folders as video library right? glutton :p
[/INDENT]