Creating a Radio Page (For FM broadcasts)

[defuicus]

It would nice that this plugin does not use wintv. For some reason, wintv does not run on my computer -- some hardware incompatibility with my asus a7a266 board. And plus I am using a avermedia m150 card, which does have a FM tuner, but I doubt the wintv dll will work with it.

[colin]

For now it will call an external radio app, so provided the radio app has command line arguments, you can esstenially use what ever you want.

The configuration section can be customised to be flexible for this.

as for hooking into a DLL for this, thats needs investigation.

Colin.

[CodeMonkey]

Quote[/b] (colin @ May 05 2004,08:49)]@CodeMonkey:

When do you plan to attack this?  any idea how we could use the radio driver/dll directly to save using the external app?

Cheers,

I was probably going to have some time this weekend.  But if you want to knock it off, then by all means have at it  Initially I was just going to start that radio app that was mentioned earlier.

Going right at the DLL (if there even is one! would be nice but has to many issues (DLLs API which Hauppauge usually doesn't give out and could change at any time, legal issues etc.).  I would probably start looking to see if there is any support for a DirectX mechanism (filter?) for the radio from hauppauge.  Might get lucky.  Worth a email to their tech support anyway.  

Sub, you have any contacts at hauppauge yet that you could hit up for info?

[colin]

@Shappers:

Here you go. try this and let me know what happens Radio Plugin.

Its cheesey but its a start. You have to add in the path to the radio app manually. Will add a dialog box sometime for it. This page will also tell you of issues, etc. that I know of.

Let me know of other issues, etc. I'll fix a few more things, then put of the src code.

Cheers,
Colin.

[Shappers]

Wow, that was fast. I will load it up tomorrow and test it. My HTPC is currently under the desk at work.. thats the only place I can get any peace to work on it

Thanks,

Shappers..

[Shappers]

Hi all,

My testing with this plug-in did not go well unfortunately, when I select one of the preset buttons I get an error box:
"WinTV Radio,
Access violation at address 00422A40. Read of address 00000119."

The WinTV Radio loads in the background however and starts to play it's last tuned frequency. If I click any other buttons it gives the message:
"Radio hardware not present or busy"
It then loads many WinTV Radio icons to the taskbar.

Has anyone else gotton this?  By the way I gave up waiting for the PVR250 USB2 and bought the normal PVR350 card.

Some more suggestions also for future developement:
Rename the main menu button from 'Radio' to 'FM Radio', this would then tie in nicely with 'Net Radio'.
Provide the ability to write in the name of the station so that is displayed instead of the frequency.
Move the 'Main' and 'Stop' button to the top left of the page for consistency with the other functions.

So thanks Colin and hopefully these problems are not too major.

Regards,

Shappers..

[colin]

Hey Shappers,

thanks for the feedback. I think I have solved the memory violation stuff. Anyway, can you try out this

Radio.dll

for me and see what happens. I have only added in a couple of your suggestions. I'll add in the station names over the weekend,

Cheers,
Colin.

[Shappers]

Hi Colin,

Sorry for the delay but here is the results of testing the new dll you gave me. In the first instance it works just fine, I click the first preset and it starts playing the radio, (is it possible to suppress the taskbar when it does this or to keep the GB-PVR program on top)? Then if you directly click on another preset it starts to hang (access violation, hardware not present etc.) the reason being that it is not shutting down the previous instance so it is trying to load the same program many times. If I first click on the stop button then go to another preset then it helps a little and you can maybe get the next frequency this way but then no more. If I look at the taskbar then I can see multiple Win TV radio icons start to build up, which means that the Stop button is not entirely killing the process each time either. If I press stop, then view the taskbar for about 5 seconds with my mouse over the icon then it drops off after a while and then I can continue to select another frequency. If I don't wave my mouse over the icon then it will remain in the taskbar area preventing you from carrying on. So just a minor problem I think in that the Stop button is not correctly shutting down the process, and this also needs to be done if you directly go between different frequncies without first pressing stop.  Thanks again for the effort you are putting into this, it is progressing really fast and I'm sure will be a really useful addition to Subs program.

Regards,

Shappers..

[colin]

Hi Shappers

firstly, the icon in the system tray is an issue with the radio app itself. It is not correctly cleaning up after itself if called from the command line with "/QUIT". Well before I go accusing it I should double check this by manually starting up the radio app, then try and close it from the command line and see what happens.

As a side note, does anyone know if its possible to refresh the system tray so that "zombie" icons can be removed?

secondly, i'll change the code for closing the radio app to wait for it to close before trying to start the radio on a new frequency. What would be nice is from the command line to be able to change the radio's frequency of an already running radio - i'll see if that can be done.

thirdly, I don't suffer from the focus problem as I have Windows setup so that the window that the mouse is over if focused. Again, i'll see if its possible to set the focus back to GBPVR once the radio app has been lanched.

@Sub: would I need GBPVR's window ID to raise this to top level so that it remains in focus?

On a plus note, I have nearly finished adding in the station names so that you can choose to either show the radio stations by frequency or by name. I'll add in a display at the button of the page to indicate which station you are currently listening to.

Cheers,
Colin.

[Shappers]

Great, sounds like you have it all covered  

Can't wait to try out the next version.

Thanks,

Shappers..