Updated version for MediaPortal 1.1.1 (1 Viewer)

[Oxan]

Re: AW: Updated version for MediaPortal 1.1.1

yer i saw some bugs and copied code in from new to old. is his stuff JUST css changes? can you tell me is your stuff providing a web services interface to the tv server AND a web app that talks to mp via this web service. i couldnt see any refs to web service though only had brief look.

His changes are the new stylesheets and new images (and changing the references to the images, as they're now .png files).

Basically my stuff (really gemx's, i just fixed some bugs) consists of 5 parts:

• the webserver (Cassini)
• a Setup project
• a plugin for SetupTV to configure it
• a plugin for the TvServer that starts/stops the webserver
• the webapp, which can be split into 2 parts:
  • The backend classes, which communicate with MediaPortal and the database, and which are exposed through the SOAP interface (mainly in App_Code)
  • The webinterface, which calls the backend functions (mainly in htdocs)

 

[wolfi_b]

AW: Updated version for MediaPortal 1.1.1

I have installed this version at MePo 1.2.0 Alpha.
VLC is always showing the same TV channel whichever channel i select in MPWebServices. Is this Version not compatible with MP 1.2.0 Alpha?

 

[Koen Zomers]

I'm a bit confused with all the projects on Media Portal that live on this forum. Is this product the next release of the idea in this topic and gemx his webservice release?

I just grabbed the latest version of the sourcecode of this product from the codestore and am now browsing through it. Not too disrespect all the great people who have put a tremendous amount of time in creating this, I'm a bit shocked by some things I see in the source code. Again, no disrespect, but it looks like the developers have a non Microsoft .NET background and are therefore missing some knowledge on how stuff works in the Microsoft .NET platform. Some samples are the "Authenticated" property in the session state property bag. .NET has built in functionality for this, so don't do this. This setup has great security implications. Also using the config.xml file which is plain and clear available via the webbrowser and exposes for example the admin username and password in clear text is really a big nono. Again, .NET has built in functionality for storing application settings. I also see ref params for types which are by reference by default, strings for example. Passing parameters by reference is a C++ thing which should be avoided at all cost in Microsoft .NET. Also ASMX is old Microsoft .NET 2.0 style webservices. You should use Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) instead which offers much more flexibility and security out of the box.

I would gladly offer a helping hand to improve this product even more. Apparently there is a huge demand for it. I'm not saying I know everything about Microsoft .NET, but it's my daily profession and I achieved 11 Microsoft .NET certifications so far, so I think I will be able to contribute some knowledge in this project.

Oxan, are you currently the only developer on this product or is there a team behind this? Could you use a helping hand in this product?

 

[bodiroga]

I'm a bit confused with all the projects on Media Portal that live on this forum. Is this product the next release of the idea in this topic and gemx his webservice release?

I just grabbed the latest version of the sourcecode of this product from the codestore and am now browsing through it. Not too disrespect all the great people who have put a tremendous amount of time in creating this, I'm a bit shocked by some things I see in the source code. Again, no disrespect, but it looks like the developers have a non Microsoft .NET background and are therefore missing some knowledge on how stuff works in the Microsoft .NET platform. Some samples are the "Authenticated" property in the session state property bag. .NET has built in functionality for this, so don't do this. This setup has great security implications. Also using the config.xml file which is plain and clear available via the webbrowser and exposes for example the admin username and password in clear text is really a big nono. Again, .NET has built in functionality for storing application settings. I also see ref params for types which are by reference by default, strings for example. Passing parameters by reference is a C++ thing which should be avoided at all cost in Microsoft .NET. Also ASMX is old Microsoft .NET 2.0 style webservices. You should use Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) instead which offers much more flexibility and security out of the box.

I would gladly offer a helping hand to improve this product even more. Apparently there is a huge demand for it. I'm not saying I know everything about Microsoft .NET, but it's my daily profession and I achieved 11 Microsoft .NET certifications so far, so I think I will be able to contribute some knowledge in this project.

Oxan, are you currently the only developer on this product or is there a team behind this? Could you use a helping hand in this product?

Hi KoenZomers!!

It's nice to see that someone with great knowledge about programming is interested in improving the WebServices applications for Mediaportal. I'm not a programmer but I have talked to different developers about this stuff and here it is what I get:

- This is the subforum of the gemx's MPWebServices plugin. Gemx's is a Mediaportal team developer who build this great tool some time ago and now has little time to improve it and add new features.

- The first person you have to contact is DieBagger! He was going to improve the actual state of gemx's WebService applications and he is the person who open the thread you are referring to. I don't know which is the actual state of his progress, but his first thoughts were to take gemx's plugin (the plugin which's source code you have) and improve it with all the features that where discuss in "Consolidate Mediaportal Web Applications" thread.

- Mike Lowrey and KayDiefenthal are developing a WMC application based on gemx's MPWebServices plugin. You can see the topic in which they are talking about here.

- There are also more developers that are using their own's WebServices plugin, but in my opinion it's not a great idea, it would be much better to have a great, powerful and flexible plugin with different clients attached to it. You can have a look at Cheezey's iPiMP (you can see his proyect in google code), two other guys are developing another webservices api and a android remote controller here, Shukuyen is developing a iPhone app with it's own plugin called wifiremote,... (I don't remember more proyects)

As you can see there is no coordination between the proyects and everybody is working alone, so it would be great if someone could take the lead of the proyect and improve/or make a great WebService API to unified the other clients (WMC app, android and iPhone apps, Web app,...).

The other possibility is to leave MP1 WebService as it is and start thinking from scratch about a new a better done WebService for Mediaportal 2. If you are interested in this option, you can contact Mediaportal2's Albert developer or open a new thread in Mediaportal 2 subforum: here. This can be the best option as in a few months most of Mediaportal developers are going to move to Mediaportal 2 development and MP1 is going to be improved mostly be users. Also you have the advantage of the more powerful and flexibiliy of MP2

Many thanks for your interest in all this proyects and I hope you can finally help with you knowledge to improve Mediaportal's WebServices. Thanks.

Best regards,

Aitor

 

[Koen Zomers]

Thanks for your extensive and clarifying post, bodiroga! I'm already in contact with Mike Lowrey and KayDiefenthal on the Windows Media Center Plugin. As the matter of fact, that was my entry point to be involved in this Media Portal stuff. I was looking for a plugin for Media Center myself. As I began digging deeper into the information available on this forum, I found out the same as you are describing in your post.. many superb ideas, but totally uncoordinated and therefore lots of variations of stuff out there that is either half built or built too specifically for one goal. I just pulled some of the assemblies from Media Portal itself through Reflector and the base they offer looks quite nice. So in my opinion all there is to it is to create a very lightweight SOAP and/or REST wrapper around it and offer it to the mass to create client applications against. Whether this is to be a Windows App, Windows Service, Website App, Mobile App on whatever platform in whatever programming language, it doesn't matter since SOAP and REST are language independent standards. Based on my first impression this shouldn't be too much work. In my opinion all webservices that have been created so far are polluted with an overkill of samples and willing to be next-next-finish-ready. That should not be the goal for the webservice. There should not be a cassini webserver in it, there should not be a plugin in it, there should not be a webapplication in it. No! Just a webservice to roll out over an IIS farm which communicates with Media Portal. Any other fancy interfaces or stuff should be separate projects which communicate with the webservice.

 

[Oxan]

Re: AW: Updated version for MediaPortal 1.1.1

I have installed this version at MePo 1.2.0 Alpha.
VLC is always showing the same TV channel whichever channel i select in MPWebServices. Is this Version not compatible with MP 1.2.0 Alpha?

I haven't tried yet, but seen your experience with it I don't think it works

I'm a bit confused with all the projects on Media Portal that live on this forum. Is this product the next release of the idea in this topic and gemx his webservice release?

I just grabbed the latest version of the sourcecode of this product from the codestore and am now browsing through it. Not too disrespect all the great people who have put a tremendous amount of time in creating this, I'm a bit shocked by some things I see in the source code. Again, no disrespect, but it looks like the developers have a non Microsoft .NET background and are therefore missing some knowledge on how stuff works in the Microsoft .NET platform. Some samples are the "Authenticated" property in the session state property bag. .NET has built in functionality for this, so don't do this. This setup has great security implications. Also using the config.xml file which is plain and clear available via the webbrowser and exposes for example the admin username and password in clear text is really a big nono. Again, .NET has built in functionality for storing application settings. I also see ref params for types which are by reference by default, strings for example. Passing parameters by reference is a C++ thing which should be avoided at all cost in Microsoft .NET. Also ASMX is old Microsoft .NET 2.0 style webservices. You should use Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) instead which offers much more flexibility and security out of the box.

I would gladly offer a helping hand to improve this product even more. Apparently there is a huge demand for it. I'm not saying I know everything about Microsoft .NET, but it's my daily profession and I achieved 11 Microsoft .NET certifications so far, so I think I will be able to contribute some knowledge in this project.

Oxan, are you currently the only developer on this product or is there a team behind this? Could you use a helping hand in this product?

Hi,

I am not related to the topic you quote (in fact, this is the first time I see it), but I really like the idea. This isn't a really offical release of MPWebServices, but I just integrated all patches flying around, fixed some reported bugs and updated the DLLs to the ones from Mediaportal 1.1.1, to have it work.

At the technical side, you're right (at least for me). I'm basically a Linux user and PHP/Python programmer and haven't done much with .NET (nor am I planning to do something with it). But because Linux just sucks for multimedia (mainly because of missing drivers...), I decided to use MediaPortal+Windows for TV. Btw, in my version, I moved the config.xml outside the document root of the webserver, so at least that issue is fixed.

My changes (basically the source of this version) is available on github, and I'm currently the only developer (aside from gemx, but he's busy with other things). I'm willing to accept any patches that make sense, so you can help. The problem is that I'm also quite limited in my time, so I haven't worked a lot on it yet, aside from fixing the things that I use (SOAP interface and streaming).

I think it's the best to discard this project and just focus (with all of us) on the MPWeb code layer. I don't know the current state of it, but it seems like there are only some HTML designs yet. If someone with experience in .NET (you! ) would set up the basics, I'm glad to help with it. I think it's important to start with a working basic library (the MPWeb Code Layer), so that people can start building stuff on top it and help improve it. It would also be nice to design the API in a way that would allow it to easily port it to MP2, so all the apps that are going to use it also work with MP2. That would be really nice when MP2 gets stable.

There should not be a cassini webserver in it, there should not be a plugin in it, there should not be a webapplication in it. No! Just a webservice to roll out over an IIS farm which communicates with Media Portal. Any other fancy interfaces or stuff should be separate projects which communicate with the webservice.

I totally agree with the rest of your post, but I think having to install and configure a separate webserver after the webservice is just painful. We should provide the option, but also bundle some kind of webserver.

For more information, you can just ask (or send me a private message, possibly in Dutch, i'm sadly not that good at English).

 

[lightman]

is there any news about this, somebody building a new release?
or unknown?

 

[Oxan]

is there any news about this, somebody building a new release?
or unknown?

Well, I do not plan to do further development of this plugin, but I will make a release compabitle with 1.1.2 soon. Of course everyone can take the sourcecode and continue development

There is some effort going on to create a new unified webservice, but I lost track of it. It should be floating around in the forums here.

 

[Koen Zomers]

Mike Lowrey is working on a new WCF service as we speak. The first internal glance I had at it looks very promising. The topic in which this is discussed is https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/webservice-mobile-access-537/whats-happening-hometvserver-mce-client-tv-server-82442/index5.html. You could also check with Mike on the status.

 

[bodiroga]

Mike Lowrey is working on a new WCF service as we speak. The first internal glance I had at it looks very promising. The topic in which this is discussed is https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/webservice-mobile-access-537/whats-happening-hometvserver-mce-client-tv-server-82442/index5.html. You could also check with Mike on the status.

Koen Zomers, now we have an entire subforum for discuss the webservice plugin and the different mobile remotes. Here you have the link:

WebService and Mobile Access - MediaPortal Forum

Your contribution will be really appreciated

Best regards,

Aitor