Pocket PC Remote Plugin

[RoyN]

Cool... Well, I have a CQC license, and I'm willing to develop or get the CQC team themselves to support a driver for this...

That said, I do have PHP knowledge and wouldnt mind throwing the programming part of a web-interface together, which could then be later tied to EWA...

I'm not sure what sort of commitment you are looking for, but I think it would be great to have a web-based control system... The first step being an API that can be read (i.e. what is in a certain list, what files are available to be played, etc) and written (play x file from the list, pause, stop, play, go to music, go to video, go to menu, arrow up, arrow left, etc)...

All of this would be very useful for a variety of platforms (i.e. desktop control, cell phones, pocket pcs with wifi, tablet pc's, smart displays with wifi, etc)...

Let me know if you need any more info or ideas, and whenever you have some free time, please do consider... is there anything that myself or some other developer can contribute to make things easier?

Thanks!

[madcat]

I would stand by this request as well, if it helps. As a first step, I would minimize it to something like:
GetCommands which will return the list of buttons on the left side
GetList which will return the list of "objects" on the left
GetSelectedCommand
GetSelectedObject
Play(objectName)

I would prefer to have a callback/event/whatever to know when a selection has changed.
I think with this, plus the "hack" of just sending key-down/key-up (obviously I would prefer to have the complete command list RoyN suggested), one could develop a nice GB-PVR-RC (Remote Control). Be it TCP, Web, etc.

[RoyN]

Yep... also, a GetCurrentScreen or something would be useful... just so you know what screen you are on (menu, audio, video, etc...)

Personally, I'd focus initially on:

Menu,
Audio,
Video,
(complete control, and viewing of list of items available in library, etc.... I think these are the easiest to complete first)...
then,
TV Guide/Live TV controls (Maybe the EWA stuff can be used and integrated - which would be even better)...

My idea would be to wrap all of this in a way similar to XBMC's way... that way it allows us to have "skins", i.e. one for PPC, on for Tablet, etc... which changes the web remote interface...and also allows skins to be ported easily to the web-remote

[sub]

I would stand by this request as well, if it helps. As a first step, I would minimize it to something like:
GetCommands which will return the list of buttons on the left side
GetList which will return the list of "objects" on the left
GetSelectedCommand
GetSelectedObject
Play(objectName)

Its actually not possible for me to do this. GB-PVR has no idea what, if any, buttons are available in any screen (or which are selected). GB-PVR is just given screens as a bitmap by each of the plugins. Each and every plugin and screen would need to be changed if you wanted to get this sort of information.

[sub]

I'm not sure what sort of commitment you are looking for, but I think it would be great to have a web-based control system... The first step being an API that can be read (i.e. what is in a certain list, what files are available to be played, etc) and written (play x file from the list, pause, stop, play, go to music, go to video, go to menu, arrow up, arrow left, etc)...

I honestly believe this sort of functionality would only be used by a very small percentange of users, so I'd wouldnt to commit to huge changes to support (limited time available spread around and all that). This very generic list of features you'd like would potentially be a huge amount of work. You'd be better to request just your couple of highest priority changes, and once I've seen you use them, then we'd look what you'd like next.

You're unlikely to get information list of files on specific screen etc, since this uses unique code on nearly every screen, so would require significant changes by several developers on several screens.

You can already do a lot of stuff with the GB-PVR API (getting lists of programs, getting lists of channels, starting live tv on specific channels, playing audio/video files, playing DVDs, getting/setting the audio playlist or current song in playlist, skipping between tracks in the playlists, switching between fullscreen video/music (vis) and inset window, switching to a specific screen). The best approach for you would be to produce substantial chunk of your software using this already available stuff, and just ask for those things you really need.

EWA is a good example of this - I'm happy to add APIs to support EWA because I know its going to be used, and not a waste of time.

[RoyN]

How would one access your APIs from the builtin webserver? Is there a list of the API's commands? I think with some custom programing, and the ability to say "play \\server\file\file.mp3" or "play directory \\server\album\" would already give me a big start...

I'd then just read over the GBPVR config file and have my webserver app itself find the file lists....

Would it be possible to know what screen is currently displayed? (Just so that the web app can follow what is being displayed on the tv?)

I could do all this in asp, but I'd much prefer php.... is the a Web Service developed to communicate with your API?

Please let me know how you think it would be feasible to get a php app to interface, if you know, and I think I might be able to get something working for my needs (and hopefully others needs too)...

One thing that I was doing (I've just been cleaning up and un-burrying a bunch of old stuff I had started for Mediaportal), is making my remote app, fully compatibly with the web skins already avaialble for XBMC... so popping an XBMC skin along with my program would work to control GBPVR

I hope I can get this re;atively easily... I'd just like to know an easy way of communicating to the API... with Mediaportal I was using the WebServices, and the supported calls that were done on the .Net aspx connector.

PS: unrelated: does the builtin server support php?

sorry for the long post...

[sub]

How would one access your APIs from the builtin webserver?

The source code to EWA is included with each release, so you can look at it to see how it uses the IScheduleHelper API.

Its important to note though that the web server only runs in the recording server, so you wont be play files from there. You'd have to create some plugin that runs in the front end and accepts your requests, and in turn calls the GB-PVR APIs exposed by the IScheduleHelper and IPluginHelper API.

Is there a list of the API's commands?

No, but they're very easy to see by adding a reference to the GBPVRPublic.DLL to you .net application. MSDEV shows all the method calls, and they're pretty simple. For example:

public interface IPluginHelper
{
void PlayVideoFile(String filename);
void PlayAudioFiles(Queue files);
void PlayDVD();
void PlayDVDFromISO(String filename);
void VolumeIncrease();
void VolumeDecrease();
void NextPlaylistTrack();
void PrevPlaylistTrack();
...etc
}

Would it be possible to know what screen is currently displayed?

Yes, I'm fairly sure you can get this.

PS: unrelated: does the builtin server support php?

No, but as I said above, I think you'd want to create you plugin interface elsewhere since you're more interested in the front end than the recording service.

Given this is a .net app, PHP isnt really a good choice of technologies, but you could write some intermediate layer to accept PHP requests if you wanted to.

Its also important to note that there can be several instances of the front end (MVP servers etc), all running the same gbpvr.exe process.

[RoyN]

I've started porting an XBMC web skin and started my underlying application...

I have pretty much covered music and video navigation, and going into directories, etc... It should be fine with shares too... I'm just testing some more stuff such as filtering according to the GBPVR extnesions, and grabbing all the video/music dirs from GBPVR.

If anyone here has any experience with aspx, if they can whip up a script that exposes the functions that sub mentioned

public interface IPluginHelper
{
void PlayVideoFile(String filename);
void PlayAudioFiles(Queue files);
void PlayDVD();
void PlayDVDFromISO(String filename);
void VolumeIncrease();
void VolumeDecrease();
void NextPlaylistTrack();
void PrevPlaylistTrack();
...etc
}

I think I can get functionality pretty easy to work fully for now...

What I need would be an aspx script that runs on the GBPVR server, which would accept 2 parameters (at least for now), command & string, or somethign to this effect... With this, I can call the aspx as if it were a web service, and give myscript.aspx?command=PlayVideoFile&string=c:/videos/myfile.avi or something to this effect....

I can probably tackle this relatively easily from what I've seen on the aspx files in the web directory, but if someone has experience and a free minute, it is probably something very easy.... Just a case or if, to evaluate what the command is, and then a series of calls to the appropriate routine depending on command (i.e. PlayVideo would invoke IPluginHelper.PlayVideoFile and send the argument from my string variable, while Vol+ would just send a VolumeIncrease and discard anything in the string variable)...

That is the basic point... for now I dont see any better way of doing things....(The remote control portion of Mediaportal is basically this....a webserive using soap... my example doesnt use soap for now but could do so easily in future....)

Shots:
1 - Main menu (this is basically one of the XBMC skins, I cant remember the name, but it isny my work at all graphically... I'm just changing functionality to access stuff from within GBPVR)
2 - Showing main music directory
3 - inside subdirectory (notice the up one level link only appears if your below the root music dir like in gbpvr)

[sub]

Good to see you making some progress, but it sounds like you've chosen to mentally block my comments above about the web server running as part of the recording service, where it only records - no playing audio or DVDs etc.

What you'd need to do is develop a plugin for GB-PVR, since the gbpvr.exe process has the ability to do all this stuff, and have that plugin listening requests from your external web interface. This would be relatively straight forward for some one to develop, but might be a couple of days work.

[RoyN]

Nope, I didnt mentally block anything, I just happened to misunderstand....

I'll see if I get my hands on one of the express packages one of these days and develop something small just to answer the web services request...

If anyone has some time and experience on wiritng plugins I dont mind using the help

Anyways, I thought that the web interface would be able to talk to the GBPVR gui not just the recsvc... I get it now...sorry for misunderstanding