UbuStream v2.0 - Beta

[ubu]

The download for v2.0 on the Wiki doesn't seem to work as it goes to a login page.

Also, on the system requirements page, the downloads act the same way.

This plugin looks pretty cool so I wanted to give it a try.

I haven't published v2.0 yet. I'm still working on the wiki pages. The pages you're referring to are not yet available from the wiki sidebar menu under "Plugins". They're not "official" pages yet. Still under construction.

You can either download the current "stable" version (v1.6 I think) from the wiki or you can join the beta program for v2.0 and download the latest version from this thread. It's in pretty good shape now so you're not taking much of a risk.

[garetmax]

I normally just go to all recent changes instead of the sidebars so thats how I saw those.

I'll give the v2.0 beta a try.

Thanks Ubu

[ubu]

So here's the latest cut. I'm hoping you all deem this to be ready for prime time. Lots of bugs fixed. Some new features. Some cosmetic stuff. And some smoothing out of the usability stuff.

New since the last bug fix release:

• Export to PLS, M3U and PLX (for data interchange between UbuStream users, etc.) playlist files. So, together with the Import function, you can now really move stuff around!
  
• Play Group button on the main menu builds a playlist on the fly (containing all the stations in the group) and then feeds it to the player. Very handy, I find for watching the vid clips downloaded by HTPCGB's CNN DynSource app. You can watch all the clips from a section and hit the skip button on your remote if you get bored and want to move to the next clip.
  
• The Details button now works, bringing up a scrollable text box with the station description, player and url in it.
  
• The config app's Help function now actually provides help. Bit of a cheat, the way I did it. Check it out.
  
• You can copy an existing station by entering a new name in the name field of an existing one. You'll get a new station with all the same attributes as the first one.
  
• File Open button on the station url field - to point up the fact that it doesn't need to be an url - it can be file (mp3, avi, etc.) or a playlist, even.
  
• Button to open the WWMP web site on the WWMP config screen.
  
• There's more but that's all I can remember.:p

I've also written new wiki pages (not linked to the wiki Plugins sidebar yet) with a slightly "different" approach to page navigation. Unfortunately, I had another round of changes after I built them, so they're already out of date.

You will have to visit the new UbuStream plugin page, because that's where you can download this latest version.

EDIT: You will need the latest version of GbpvrUiElements.dll to run this build. After installing the wiki version, you should download the latest patch and copy the files in the zip (including GbpvrUiElements.dll) to the appropriate folders.

This build seems pretty stable, but its gone through a lot of changes in the last week so please let me know any bad things ASAP. Thanks to all of you for helping me debug this new version and also for some really excellent suggestions, both in this thread and via PM. Most of your ideas have made it into this build.

[HTPCGB]

I apologize for my absence over the last few days; I've been busy again.

Looks great! I notice that the context menu shows up if I right click on the player window and I can switch to fullscreen from there, so I'm guessing there's a way to have your app respond to a fullscreen parm?

It's not that the app can't go fullscreen, it's just that when it is fullscreen the keypresses aren't handled in the same way. (You can't exit anymore by hitting back/exit on the remote.) I'm looking into it.

I'd love to take a look at the source so I can see how you are doing the magic.

The source is attached.

Will this be a separate app or do you plan to have a single app that embeds the appropriate player depending on the stream type? If the latter, how will the app know which player to embed?

I think having seperate apps would be best. The user would then have a choice between the regular players and their embedded counterparts in the config app.

EDIT2: I know VLC has Flash video support (.flv files, anyway) but I've heard it's a bit flaky. If it does work OK, maybe the above idea is overkill. Haven't had time to try it.

It is a bit flaky with some .flv files when it comes to pausing and seeking. Otherwise it's fine.

Speaking of VLC, would your installation app be able to distribute a copy of axVLC and then run a REGSVR32 command? For some reason, when VLC installs the axVLX.dll file it doesn't get registered.

The beta and the wiki look good; I'll update my CNNdynsource to populate the "Websitex:" field.

Regards.
HTPCGB

[ubu]

It's not that the app can't go fullscreen, it's just that when it is fullscreen the keypresses aren't handled in the same way. (You can't exit anymore by hitting back/exit on the remote.) I'm looking into it.

Bummer. I see the problem. Your app no longer has focus since, when it goes fullscreen, it's in a separate window (with a different title). And, when the remote sends the Esc keystroke, it can't find a window with the title "GB-PVR" that currently has focus. I suppose, when you switch it to fullscreen mode you could "find" the window it opened and change its title to "GB-PVR". If you're interested, I've got some Win32 code (that I had to write to solve my "losing focus when playing audio minimized" problem) that might help.

Also, what does the "windowlessVideo" property do, as opposed to the "fullScreen" property? Would that run it in your window, instead of a new one? I found this on the M$ site:

By default, an embedded Windows Media Player control renders video in its own window within the client area. When windowlessVideo is set to true, the Windows Media Player object renders video directly in the client area, so you can apply special effects or layer the video with text.

Another thought: what would happen if, instead of asking WMP to go into fullscreen mode, you simply temporarily changed the Location and Size properties of the WMP control to fill your entire form? Wouldn't that have the same effect?

I think having seperate apps would be best. The user would then have a choice between the regular players and their embedded counterparts in the config app.

Certainly simpler for the first cut. It would at least mean that people wouldn't need to do any "special" configuration for their remote control to work.

But, looking to the future, one advantage of running as a dll would be that it could communicate things back to UbuStream while it was running. For instance, people who use UbuStream for audio streams and like to play it minimized have asked if I could display "Buffering.. ", "Connected...", etc. on the main UbuStream screen. Right now, I have no way of knowing. I can start a player and, since I know what process it's running in, I can kill it. But that's all. If it ran as a dll, it could have a "RequestStatus" method I could call. (And, depending on the user's choice, I'd either fire off a regular player in a new process, as I do now, or call a method to start your player in a new thread.)

The best of both worlds (IMHO) would be for you to implement the player as a dll, so it can be integrated into other apps - like UbuStream, but then, if you wanted the ability to execute it stand-alone, write a simple .exe wrapper app that calls the dll. (The UbuStream config form, for instance, is part of the Plugin dll so it can be called by the GB-PVR config program. But, to allow it to be run outside of GB-PVR as well, I've provided UbuStreamConfig.exe which is a trivial wrapper.)

It is a bit flaky with some .flv files when it comes to pausing and seeking. Otherwise it's fine.

The main problem seems to be finding the .flv files on the target site. Often the actual URL seems to be hidden behind some script that you can't see.

Speaking of VLC, would your installation app be able to distribute a copy of axVLC and then run a REGSVR32 command? For some reason, when VLC installs the axVLX.dll file it doesn't get registered.

No problem. I'm using WinRAR for the setup program and it lets you run commands right after installation, so we could set up a batch file (or a .Net app to do the same thing).

The beta and the wiki look good; I'll update my CNNdynsource to populate the "Websitex:" field.

That's great. If it's not too much extra trouble, maybe populate the "Description=" line too. I'm finding the "Details" button is a very useful feature for my BBC news clips and it would be excellent if CNN had them too.

[HTPCGB]

Hey ubu,

I've noticed two more things:

1. If I delete a group and answer "yes" to both prompts, the treeview will disappear. If I then press refresh I get one of those ugly .net exception popups.

2. I don't know if this was implemented in the latest build, but I've just noticed that the streams in a group are automatically sorted alphabetically. I personally prefer viewing them in the order listed in the .plx (chronologically in the case of the CNN streams). Would it be possible to have an option to toggle this feature on and off for specific groups?

I found this on the M$ site:Another thought: what would happen if, instead of asking WMP to go into fullscreen mode, you simply temporarily changed the Location and Size properties of the WMP control to fill your entire form? Wouldn't that have the same effect?

I tried that a while back for the CNN Videos plugin. If I remember correctly, scaling up the video to fit the entire form in a maximized state had worse quality than setting the video to fullscreen mode. Could you please attach a snippet of your WIN32 API code?

But, looking to the future, one advantage of running as a dll would be that it could communicate things back to UbuStream while it was running. For instance, people who use UbuStream for audio streams and like to play it minimized have asked if I could display "Buffering.. ", "Connected...", etc. on the main UbuStream screen. Right now, I have no way of knowing. I can start a player and, since I know what process it's running in, I can kill it. But that's all. If it ran as a dll, it could have a "RequestStatus" method I could call. (And, depending on the user's choice, I'd either fire off a regular player in a new process, as I do now, or call a method to start your player in a new thread.)

Makes sense, I will add it to the list of things to do. However, we should probably get an official release of Ubustream out the door and then start working on these features.

The main problem seems to be finding the .flv files on the target site. Often the actual URL seems to be hidden behind some script that you can't see.

At the moment, I have a working google video scraper that finds the .avi and .flv urls on a google videos page. The only other problem with .flv's is that VLC first downloads the whole file before doing anything with it. This is especially annoying with large multi-MB files. However, the .avi replica that google provides solves this problem nicely.

That's great. If it's not too much extra trouble, maybe populate the "Description=" line too. I'm finding the "Details" button is a very useful feature for my BBC news clips and it would be excellent if CNN had them too.

The attached version populates the "Website" field but I haven't found time to work on the "Description" field yet.

Regards,
HTPCGB

[ubu]

Couldn't resist tinkering. The UI was bugging me so I've changed it (quite a lot). So here's one last patch:

[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND] (This should be applied to the most recent version you downloaded from the wiki. Copy the dll to gbpvr\Plugins and the skin.xml file to \gbpvr\skins\Blue\UbuStream. Copy GbpvrUiElements.dll to the gbpvr directory).

Now you see a group list first. Select a group and you'll see the station list. (Once on the station list you can still use Next Group/Prev Group buttons to navigate, if you prefer, or use the new Groups button to return to the group list). I've also changed the button sequence and tweaked some of the UI elements (hence the new skin file).

For ease of use, I've mapped most of the buttons to remote control buttons/keyboard keystroke combos.
They're listed on the Remote Control Buttons table on the wiki.

One caveat: I'm chasing an elusive bug with the mouse interface in the UI. This doesn't affect remote control or keyboard users. If you use a mouse with GB-PVR and you scroll down to the second page of a list (or of the buttons), mouse selections may yield incorrect results. This may be a problem in one of the libraries I'm using (don't know yet) but it may not get fixed soon. One reason for changing the UI design is to minimize the need to scroll the buttons.
To reiterate: this does NOT affect remote control or keyboard use.

[ubu]

1. If I delete a group and answer "yes" to both prompts, the treeview will disappear. If I then press refresh I get one of those ugly .net exception popups.

I'd added code to stop stations being deleted if they were also in another group (than the one being deleted) and totally screwed everything up. I think it's fixed in this latest patch.

2. I don't know if this was implemented in the latest build, but I've just noticed that the streams in a group are automatically sorted alphabetically. I personally prefer viewing them in the order listed in the .plx (chronologically in the case of the CNN streams). Would it be possible to have an option to toggle this feature on and off for specific groups?

Always worked that way. Unsorted, the stations are returned in the order they were added to the XML file. So, if you do a lot of add/change/delete actions, the order can look kinda strange. But for DynSource groups, this won't be the case so they should show up in the correct order. For now, I'll add "Display stations in alphabetical order" as an option that can be toggled gobally. I'll plan on doing it on a per-group basis for v2.1.

I tried that a while back for the CNN Videos plugin. If I remember correctly, scaling up the video to fit the entire form in a maximized state had worse quality than setting the video to fullscreen mode. Could you please attach a snippet of your WIN32 API code?

I'll email you the class I created to do the Win32 stuff.

Makes sense, I will add it to the list of things to do. However, we should probably get an official release of Ubustream out the door and then start working on these features.

Yeah - I was talking v2.1 or beyond. Definitely!

At the moment, I have a working google video scraper that finds the .avi and .flv urls on a google videos page.

Wow! I can't figure out how to build the google .avi URL's by just reading the html (haven't had time to use my "sniffer"). I have, however, got a prototype for a YouTube URL builder/Flash player working. (Implemented as a bastardized DynSource app with a form - total hack!) I'll post it on the DynSource thread when it's a bit more stable.

The attached version populates the "Website" field but I haven't found time to work on the "Description" field yet.

Look forward to it with pleasurable anticipation.

[HTPCGB]

I'd added code to stop stations being deleted if they were also in another group (than the one being deleted) and totally screwed everything up. I think it's fixed in this latest patch.

The bug seems to have gotten worse. If I simply click on the first group in the tree, I get a an exception. If I try to delete the group below that, I get an exception. All the other groups behave normally. Very odd... Edit: Very odd. This only seems to happen when "CNN - World" is the group at the top.

Edit2: I must be a pain in the ass by now, but I just noticed that the new UI keeps throwing exceptions. I keep getting "Error: Method not found: 'Boolean GBPVRUiElements.List.SetSelected(Int32)'." upon trying to navigate.

Yeah - I was talking v2.1 or beyond. Definitely!
Wow! I can't figure out how to build the google .avi URL's by just reading the html (haven't had time to use my "sniffer"). I have, however, got a prototype for a YouTube URL builder/Flash player working.

I'll send you or attach the class that I'm using to scrape google video pages.

Regards,
HTPCGB

[HTPCGB]

And here's the scraping class...