Enhanced Web Admin

[UncleJohnsBand]

I read through all 45 pages of this thread and unfortunately didn't get a definitive answers for what I was looking for. I was getting a little groggy at the end so I apologize in advance if I missed it...

Also, I haven't installed the Enhanced Web Admin yet, not knowing if it fits my needs, so if it's something that's obvious (like the live tv question), I apologize again.

Here's my questions:
-- I saw that recorded programs can be viewed using VLC. Does VLC have to be setup on both the client pc and the gbpvr server? It looks like it only needs to be setup on the client pc, but from reading yet another 50 pages on the VLC site, it sounds like they require VLC to be running on the server in streaming mode so the client can connect to it. Or is this something completely different?

VLC only needs to be installed on the client.....you do not need to load it on your GBPVR Server.

-- Can I view Live TV using the Enhanced Web Admin? I found the ExternalRecorder plugin -- can this be used to continuously record to a file that can then be viewed (via VLC) by clicking a button in Enhanced Web Admin?

I am not familiar with wht this plugin does. To my knowledge you can not view Live TV via the Web Admin at this time.

-- Can the Enhanced Web Admin tell gbpvr to change channels (if viewing Live TV is possible)?

Thanks!

See above.

[normanr]

answering a bunch of questions all at once:

cubsfan: you don't need to rebuild if you change .aspx,.css,.gif,.jpg files, you have to rebuild if you edit a .aspx.cs or .cs file. All the source code is provided, so you can edit anything to your hearts content. If you do anything useful, send it to me so that it can be included with the next version released.

habile: are you running the web admin under gb-pvr or under IIS? what version of OS are you uisng? What paths are you storing your recording on? (local disk, mapped drive, network UNC path, etc)

soulslinga: the streaming is _intentionally_ limited to a certain bandwidth (5MBps at the moment). This is so that the gb-pvr is not overloaded by bad clients trying to rip the video as fast as possible. As UncleJohnsBand says, MS Media Player doesn't do a good job with streaming videos because it caches the entire video in memory/disk before it starts to play it. Imagine a 600mb or even a 1.2gb recording being cached! (There's a possibility here that the bandwidth limit could be configurable via the admin page, so that you can configure the speed that you prefer)

Rafbo: VLC: only client, gb-pvr does it's own server side streaming. LiveTV: this is a pending feature request. It will be much easier to watch something that is already recording (piggy back), than to start a new LiveTV recording from the web interface or change channels. FYI - External Recorder was built to record a network stream to file (not the other way around).

Koenie: true, it is possible to 'fake' watching livetv, by starting a recording, and then watching it over the network. Perhaps in future this will be done automatically by the web interface.

Side note: The web admin interface can be skinned fairly easily (check out the themes subfolder). If anyone wants to/has done so, please post your skin/theme on the wiki

[betlit]

well basically its not a bug... more like chain of circumstances (and of course me *g*)

yesterday, i managed to start recording the _same_ movie twice in webadmin.

i sheduled the movie in webadmin... and for some reason the cell of the tv guide did not turn red (a cache/opera problem... but since i love opera i wont switch to another browser and: MYBROWSER$ is allways better than YOURBROWSER$. end of discussion *g*).

ok, i thought for some reason opera/whatever ignored my click on the record button and simply repeated the procedure... after the second time, the cell truned red --> everything ok it seemed.
but then i switched to the statistics page and saw that two of my tuners are recording the movie.
the gbpvr-tray-app did confirm this, but gbpvr itself showed the movie only once under pending. i was able to cancel it in gbpvr... the recording vanished but one of the two tuner went on recording.

as it seems that this is a browser-related problem i do not really expect that this is "fixed"... but should the 'servlet' (<-- how is this called in asp.net?) not again check such things?

greets

betlit

[normanr]

i sheduled the movie in webadmin... and for some reason the cell of the tv guide did not turn red (a cache/opera problem... but since i love opera i wont switch to another browser and: MYBROWSER$ is allways better than YOURBROWSER$. end of discussion *g*).

to refresh the base page this is the code:

Code:

window.opener.document.Form1.submit();
window.close();

This is only done after the recording is scheduled. Can you check if you then refresh the main page manually that it sees it as marked to record? Do you think an extra delay will help? Any other ideas?

[betlit]

Can you check if you then refresh the main page manually that it sees it as marked to record? Do you think an extra delay will help? Any other ideas?

jep, if i hit f5 the page reloads and everything looks ok. i did not spend much time on this (and i am unable to import the visualstudio project into sharpdevelop...) but i will continue.

as i said... its most probably a problem with opera... e.g. if i click on a show, the program information window apears. if i close it (does not matter how (scheduling, close-button, ctrl+f4, etc...)) and click on another (or the same) show, a javascript error appears stating a type mismatch somwhere in popup.js (opera is not able to display the line when the script is in an 'external' js-file).
must be some problem with the window-object opera seems to handle wrong...

[normanr]

jep, if i hit f5 the page reloads and everything looks ok. i did not spend much time on this (and i am unable to import the visualstudio project into sharpdevelop...) but i will continue.

as i said... its most probably a problem with opera... e.g. if i click on a show, the program information window apears. if i close it (does not matter how (scheduling, close-button, ctrl+f4, etc...)) and click on another (or the same) show, a javascript error appears stating a type mismatch somwhere in popup.js (opera is not able to display the line when the script is in an 'external' js-file).
must be some problem with the window-object opera seems to handle wrong...

well you don't need to get it into sharedevelop to edit popup.js. Try sprinkling it with alerts, to see how far it gets, and let me know which line is causing issues. My guess would be that it's the win.close() line, but I'm not sure why.

Once you fix/disable that bug, check the following: If you schedule a recording, and then scedule another recording immediatly thereafter. Do the recordings show up after the second one is scheduled?

[habile]

answering a bunch of questions all at once:

Thanks Norman

habile: are you running the web admin under gb-pvr or under IIS? what version of OS are you uisng? What paths are you storing your recording on? (local disk, mapped drive, network UNC path, etc)

Web admin is running under gb-pvr with autologin, although I do have an Apache server available so I might well try it under that and save some resources .

Running on XP Pro with recordings being stored on local disk K: (K:\media\Family\Videos\Recorded to be precise).

Thanks again,
C.

[habile]

Hi all - totally new here so apologies if this is a FAQ.

I've never been able to get the statistics page to work - I receive the following message without fail:

?
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: ?

<snip>
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:1.1.4322.2032; ASP.NET Version:1.1.4322.2032

OK, so I managed to fix this after a judicious Google search. I found reference to an invalid COM registration and the fix was supposed to be running: regsvr32 C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v1.1.4322\WMINet_Utils.dll

But this didn't work so I manually edited: {HKLM}\SOFTWARE\Classes\CLSID\{A8F03BE3-EDB7-4972-821F-AF6F8EA34884}\InprocServer32.default to be the path above instead of mscore.dll to which it was pointing.

I have no idea why this happened or why regsvr32 didn't fix it but now it's working so who cares

Thanks,

C.

[normanr]

OK, so I managed to fix this after a judicious Google search. I found reference to an invalid COM registration

Nice! Good to hear. Thank you Google

[Rafbo]

Thanks normanr, UncleJohnsBand, and Koenie for the feedback on vlc.
I installed the Enhanced Web Admin and vlc and it works great for watching recordings.

Rafbo: VLC: only client, gb-pvr does it's own server side streaming. LiveTV: this is a pending feature request. It will be much easier to watch something that is already recording (piggy back), than to start a new LiveTV recording from the web interface or change channels. FYI - External Recorder was built to record a network stream to file (not the other way around).

Koenie: true, it is possible to 'fake' watching livetv, by starting a recording, and then watching it over the network. Perhaps in future this will be done automatically by the web interface.

I guess I didn't read the External Recorder docs right --- or maybe I was *hoping* it worked the way I thought. I can use vlc to play the Live TV buffer file, but if I change channels, the buffer filename changes as well. It would've been nice if the buffer filename just stayed the same, that way vlc just keeps displaying whatever was in the file. I was thinking External Recorder "redirected" the video from gbpvr into a file, but I guess not?

So basically, to watch Live TV, this is what needs to happen:
- gbpvr sends all live tv video to a file which doesn't change names when the channel is changed,

- Enhanced Web Admin has a button that launches the live tv buffer file (which should be easy since the filename doesn't change) using the same .m3u functionality as used for playing recordings,

- AND there needs to be an option to "watch" as well as "record" when clicking on the tv guide in Enhanced Web Admin, so you can change channels that way. Don't know how it would tell gbpvr to change channels though, but I'm sure there must be some way to do it...

And that's all there is to it!

Boy, I sound like one of my clients... "can we just add this feature... and just this one more thing... and this would be easy to code..." lol

Thanks for all your hard work!