Web based playlist manager (Music only)

[jlewalle]

Hey all... My xbox started acting funny on me so I moved over to MediaPortal last week and have been looking things over. Love what I'm seeing so far.. One thing that I noticed was that there wasn't a builtin web based interface for MediaPortal (one that fit my needs anyway) I don't use MP for DVR purposes, only playing videos and music. I was only able to find the one web UI and it seemed geared towards those using the DVR functionality. Being a developer I sat down and wrote my own.

Basically, it's a drop in plugin that presents you with a web interface for navigating the media shares and building a current playlist, pausing, stopping, next, previous, etc... Anything we wanna add really. It's *very* extensible.

It works by hosting the ASP.NET runtime, so no separate web server is required. I'm very please with how it worked out implementation wise. I weighed the advantages of using the separate web server approach and found I liked this much more.

So anyway, You can get the source and binaries at:

http://jacob.cs.ucr.edu/mediaportal/...anager-0.1.zip

Feel free to post here, message me, whatever if you have any problems. It's very beta, and the installation might be a little quirky. It should work on the lastest head revision and on installations done via the installer. I'm hoping some of you can help beta test things.

For installation instructions, see the WebPlaylistManager/HACKING.txt file in the archive.

Thanks

[samuel337]

I haven't tried it out yet - will do tonight, but looking at the code it looks mighty impressive.

I've been wanting to do something like this for ages using the backend code I wrote for the DVR web interface (.NET remoting, web services). But it looks like you beat me to it with a pretty neat solution.

I'll check it out soon and let you know how it goes, because this is something I'd find useful too - I can't stand creating playlists on a 10-foot screen when I have a computer near me.

Sam

[sprawl]

Hi,

Cool plugin.

Just a thought is Cassini GPL compatible? I have written a small asp.net hosting container to be used for handling uPnP. If there's a problem with Cassini you could probably use my web/http code.

Andreas

[jlewalle]

Originally Posted by samuel337

I haven't tried it out yet - will do tonight, but looking at the code it looks mighty impressive.

I've been wanting to do something like this for ages using the backend code I wrote for the DVR web interface (.NET remoting, web services). But it looks like you beat me to it with a pretty neat solution.

I'll check it out soon and let you know how it goes, because this is something I'd find useful too - I can't stand creating playlists on a 10-foot screen when I have a computer near me.
Sam

Yeah, know what you mean. I'm rarely in the same room, or wanna leave my plasma on to click on things with a wireless trackball. I don't like using it via VNC either.

Let me know how it goes with the plugin. I've found a few bugs so far but they shoudln't be too difficult, I think the hard part is behind us. How did your .NET remoting/web service solution work? I think there's a ton of merit in a web service *AND* a remoting server. What would be nice is if we could standardize them all to a single interface (much how I'm doing with IMediaPlayerService) My motto has always been options options options.

The next thing I wanna add is code behind support, by finding .cs files in the WebRoot and compiling them into the Bin directory. It would be nice if it did this on changes too.

sprawl - Good question, I looked up the license and it's Microsoft' Shared Source LIcense. Not sure how compatiable that is. IANAL - but because of the plugin architecture, if it's left that way only the source included as the plugin should be affected, yes? no? Not sure. Anyway, thanks for the hand, it would be no problem to move to a different web server.

[jlewalle]

I've uploaded a new version:

http://jacob.cs.ucr.edu/mediaportal/...anager-0.2.zip

Will now compile code behind files it finds in the WebRoot (this might be a little quirky though, so keep an eye on things, my apps use log4net and write to the debug stream so dbgview's a good idea, I'll work on a way to get it to also write to the MP log) So I broke Default.aspx into Default.aspx.cs also.

Fixed a bug in the navigator that was making browsing odd.

[RoyN]

If this is what I think it is exactly what i was waiting for (and started developing but didnt have time to get anywhere useful...)

I was looking for something like the xbmc webremote.... I'm going to check this out right now... I'll post my comments...

cheers

EDIT: insgalling right now... do you plano on doing video? I'd like to find a "web-bsed remote" that cn be used just like the one in XBMC was...

[jlewalle]

I look forward to them.

I've been busy with real work lately so I havne't been working on it. I do have a copy I need to upload that let's you change volume, fixes some bugs, etc...

There is one outstanding bug I need to fix, and that's session timeouts cause a crash when you try and repost to the page. Easy to fix just gotta find the time.

jacob

[RoyN]

Cool... Its working!

Apart from the interface being development-ish (fully expected, and I and others can surely help with "skins")... it works fully so far...

some suggestions:

- Option to either "add to playlist" or simply "start playing" a particular file.

- "Top-bar" style status area, maybe using Ajax to update every second or so, including "time elapsed", "FF>>","REW<<", "Play/Pause" buttons, etc...

- Port the same thing to Videos...

I gess I might be able to help out later on in development, but for now I'll let you do everything you plan.

Thanks for your effort so far! b regards!

[samuel337]

Pardon me for being lazy, but I just followed your installation instructions in HACKING.txt and I'm running into a problem:

Installation
---------------------------------------------------------------------

1) Copy the files inside of WebPlaylistManager.Console/bin/Debug into your
plugins/process directory.

2) You need to open the MediaPlayer.exe.config file and find the line that
reads:
<probing privatePath="plugins/windows" />
and change to:
<probing privatePath="plugins/windows;plugins/process" />
You should be good to go.

I can't find a MediaPlayer.exe.config file - where is it?

Also, what's the address that the web app runs at?

Like I said, I'm being lazy and I can't be bothered looking through all your code for the answers :lol:

About your question about the Remoting/WS plugin, the web service is essentially a wrapper for the remoting plugin (it was developed because the original PVR web interface was written in PHP, and so in order for PHP to talk to the remoting plugin, web services were needed - yes I know, I could've used COM but I thought web services were more flexible and others can use it too). The remoting plugin essentially just exposes a class that has a multitude of functions - not very extensible I guess, especially in comparison.

Sam

[jlewalle]

Sure no problem, MediaPlayer.exe.config should be sitting next to MediaPlayer.exe, it's the standard .NET configuration settings source... also it starts up on the default of port 8080 (which you can change in the Standard.xml file that goes in plugins/process along with the webplaylistmanager assembly and webroot directories.

I think a web service is fine in that situation. Anything should be chosen over COM. COM is a developer nightmare, IMHO. Web service is far more useful in the long run.