iPhone interface for MediaPortal (iPiMP) - original thread (now closed) (6 Viewers)

[ferzal]

Amazing work on this.

I'm going to install this one way or another but I have a question before I attempt to blow an afternoon doing something that may not be possible.

I have an IIS server (with all the functionality required) on a totally different machine to the TV Server. Is it possible to set up iPimp so that the web application is running from my existing webserver? I know it will take a lot of fiddling if it's even possible but I'd like to make sure it is actually possible before I look at working this out.

I've read the wiki and it does seem unlikely but there wasn't enough info to rule it out completely. Maybe I can point the web app to the TV server and MP Client plugins?

I'd just rather not install a secondary web server on the network (especially on the HTPC) when I have a dedicated one working elsewhere.

 

[cheezey]

Amazing work on this.

I'm going to install this one way or another but I have a question before I attempt to blow an afternoon doing something that may not be possible.

I have an IIS server (with all the functionality required) on a totally different machine to the TV Server. Is it possible to set up iPimp so that the web application is running from my existing webserver? I know it will take a lot of fiddling if it's even possible but I'd like to make sure it is actually possible before I look at working this out.

I've read the wiki and it does seem unlikely but there wasn't enough info to rule it out completely. Maybe I can point the web app to the TV server and MP Client plugins?

I'd just rather not install a secondary web server on the network (especially on the HTPC) when I have a dedicated one working elsewhere.

I think it would be possible but you will lose some functionality specific to the TV server e.g. TVServer status page, Disk status page, transcode status page, recorded program thumbnails. The MediaPortal client functionality should be OK.

What I think you need to do is:

TV Server

1. Run the iPiMP installer, select 'advanced' install and tick 'iPiMP transcode TV server plugin'
2. Share out the folder you selected to store your MP4s

MP Clients

1. Run the iPiMP installer, select 'advanced' install and tick 'iPiMP MediaPortal client remote control plugin'

Web server

1. Copy your TV logos locally.
2. Run the iPiMP installer, select 'advanced' install and tick 'iPiMP web files'
3. Create the folder 'C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal TV Server'
4. Copy Gentle.config from your TV Server into the folder above
5. Create a new website in IIS and poin it to the location of the iPiMP web files
6. Create a virtual directory called TVLogos pointed to the location of the local TV logos
7. Create a virtual directory called MP4 pointed to the shared location of your transcoded MP4s

I'd say give the above a try and see if it works for you. Let us know how you get on.

 

[ferzal]

Thanks for that. That cuts out a huge chunk of time trying to figure out where to start. I'll see if I can get it working at all then I'll worry about what functionality its losing. Nothing to lose but time.

I'll let you know how it goes.

 

[ferzal]

Ok. Some success. Some failure. Once I worked out exactly what permission to use on the server (which only took two errors to figure out) I got a fair bit of success straight away.

What does work:
User interface (after correcting web config for use with server 03 which I'm testing on).
TV Guide.
View Scheduled recordings
Scheduling a recording works although the web app reports back that it didn't.

Haven't had a chance to view transcoded files or direct to transcode yet as I had none waiting (all watched and deleted) but I'm doing that now.

MP Client functionality is hit and miss. But that may be due to the fact that the server technology is a little older. Might work better when I switch it to my Windows 2008 server (which I will do when 1.1 goes stable). Remote, what's playing and send message all work fine.

What doesn't work - anything that wants to communicate directly with the TV server because, it seems, it's trying 127.0.0.1. The IP could be obtained from TV Servers database and I may be able to quickly write that in (haven't looked at any of the code).

The Home button, for some odd reason, doesn't work half the time - mostly from MP Client interaction pages. I'm sure that'll be an easy fix.

Lots of Visual C Socket errors for direct communications which are probably related to the IP problem. I'll have more of a check but it should be easy to work out and get functioning in full in which case this will be quite an addition because people will be able to load this into web servers and control their TV server (and MP clients for fun) when out on the roam. And stream their recorded shows through. Eventually live TV down the track by the sounds.

Your installer wouldn't dump any files on a system without any mediaportal installed (either that or it didn't like server 2003). Not sure which was the problem there. I just dumped them in via mapped drive.

Very promising.

A lot more testing and fiddling to go but I think I'll get it functioning even in Server 2003.

 

[cheezey]

NIce to hear you're having some success. In web.config there is

<add key="HOSTNAME" value="SERVER" />

Change the value of that to the hostname of your TV server.

Also for MP client my Music & My Videos it used the MP client databases so make sure they're populated.

 

[ferzal]

That setting did enable the web application to connect to the TV Server (at least to some degree) but it still doesn't return results as expected. I expect this could be due to my Windows 2003 server not fully supporting the latest .NET libraries (not easy to update such an old config without breaking everything else). This might work in Server 2008.

There are no errors for most results. I just get "unknown" returned but where there was previously an error connecting to 127.0.0.1 I no longer see errors. I can see TV Card status and partial info in Disk Status (but see a VisualBasic error when attempting to go further specifying that input string was not in a correct format).

Telling the server to start transcoding doesn't work. Probably a similar problem without an error report.

I've just noticed that all the code is compiled so I can't fiddle with anything at all to get it working or break it more.
I'll see how much more I can get working by fixing things on the MP Server/Client side (database etc) and see if it's worth trying on Server 2008. Any guesses as to whether that would be more successful?

 

[cheezey]

Disk status - this gets the disks used by your recordings by querying the TV server - this bit will work, it then interrogates and displays your local disks - this is why it fails on your setup.

Similarly with transcoding it assumes that it is running on the TV server directly. You could use the transcode plugin instead though.

The code is compiled but it's available on google code should you wish to compile it yourself.

Do you get results when browsing TV Guide / Recordings?

How about accessing your MP clients?

I don't think it would be much better on 2008.

 

[ferzal]

I can access TV Guide, see scheduled recordings and set recordings. I can't stream the mp4s for some reason though. iPimP reports that nothing is transcoded.

I have transcoded the files manually as I can't get the TV Server plugin working correctly with a recording directory that is not the default. I don't even see error messages at this point. The plugin does report it's watching the correct folder but nothing happens either when directed to transcode "now" or on schedule. That's not a huge problem as yet since I still use another program to stream files (transcoded on the fly) so I'll work it out later.

MP Client functionality seems ok from the testing I've done.

For the most part it does what I want in that I can see the guide and set recordings etc. I'm just trying to get full functionality sorted now for when all the addons come together in the future so that I'm ready to go. Or give up and install on the TV Server with the Apache server and a non-standard port.

I might have a bit of a look at the source. That should enlighten me as to what I can and can't do or workaround.

Thanks for the help so far. More later.

 

[joz]

I just got my iPhone today and was already peeking a bit around here cause this seems really cool.
Only one thing is not clear to me yet, I've been reading the wiki just now but I already have apache, mysql etc setup. Will this installer cause me troubles? It seems like you're installing an own distribution of apache which I do not really need, already got 2 fully capable webservers running (apache and iis).
Besides that I do also have forthterecord installed which might cause me some issues?

Any other tips for this noob's welcome too

for all of your effort!

 

[cheezey]

The installer does support installing the web files only in case you have your own web server. I have uploaded the iPiMP.conf which you can look at and use if you want to use your own apache setup, you will need the mod_aspnet module to run it though. The post above also has a few instructions on using IIS too.