MediaPlayer Plugin/STV Import: Winamp Media Player Plugin

[geogecko]

Let me see if I understand this correctly. This plugin allows Winamp to play my music files, but using the SageTV interface? So I never see Winamp? Wow, if this is how it works, I can't wait for some free time to integrate this. I've been waiting for something like this, because I'm too lazy to use Girder to do it. The best thing, is that my VFD has a plugin for displaying song information and a spectrum analyzer!!!

[abasu2003]

Originally Posted by deria

Hmm... that doesn't happen for me at all. Some questions:

1. What STV are you using?

2. Does it only happen on playlists, or does it also happen just playing a single track?

3. There is a program named DebugView which you can get at:

http://www.sysinternals.com/Files/DebugViewNt.zip

If you unzip and run that program (there is no installer and it leaves nothing behind on your system), then start SageTV and try playing a playlist someoutput will be shown in the window. Can you PM me that output?

4. Are your music files stored locally? If not, are they accessed through a UNC path or a mapped drive?

5. Are you using SageTV or the SageTV Client?

I'm not sure how I could have made things worse with the changes -- it went from being totally unreliable on my system to working 100% of the time.

The DebugView output will also help me understand whats going on with the visualization window on your system. The visualization stuff is pretty hack-ish, but the playlist stuff should really be spot-on. In any case, perhaps the answers to these questions will help get things sorted. When testing the playlist though, avoid the visualizations. It should really be two separate runs in order for me to be able to understand whats going on without confusing the issue.

1. Default STV

2 & 3. It only happens on playlists. Would you believe that its not happening anymore. Thats not exactly the case but its not reproducable at all. Since you posted, I haven't been able to reproduce except once and I'm not sure if it was the same error. If it happens again, I'll post the DebugView log.

4. Locally

5. SageTV

Should I go ahead and PM you the DebugView Log for the focus problem? I'll probablyh do it anyway, though looking it at it, it doesn't seem like it will help much.


EDIT: I have been playing around wtih this more and I noticed something. When I take milkdrop off of fake full screen it starts the visualization fine and returns focus to sage, which i guess is what you want except that sage is now in front hiding the milkdrop screen. So it appears that it is returning focus to sage just fine. If i switch to fake full screen, I guess thats when its not working properly? hope that helps.

[salsbst]

abasu, are you using Full Screen Exclusive? I don't know how deria has implemented the visualizations, but I wonder if FSE may present problems.

[Narflex]

Originally Posted by deria

Well, this is the code that I'm using currently to handle the filename:

const char *str = env->GetStringUTFChars(TheFile, 0);
PlayFile(str);

then in PlayFile():

COPYDATASTRUCT cds;

cds.dwData = IPC_PLAYFILE;
cds.lpData = (char *)filename;
cds.cbData = (unsigned int)strlen((char*)cds.lpData) + 1;

SendMessage(WinampHWND,WM_USER,0,CLEAR_PLAYLIST);
SendMessage(WinampHWND, WM_COPYDATA, WPARAM(NULL), (LPARAM)&cds);

I would have expected that to handle Unicode. If you have a function that will work out better, I'd be happy to try it out. Just PM me your code snippet and I'll take a look.

The names of the JNI functions are sort of tricky for this. You should use GetStringChars() if you want to get the 16-bit unicode character string. You use GetStringUTFChars() if you want to get the 8-bit character string.

To correctly support Unicode in JNI, use GetStringChars() and cast the return value to a wchar* and then use the appropriate wide character functions after that.

[abasu2003]

Originally Posted by salsbst

abasu, are you using Full Screen Exclusive? I don't know how deria has implemented the visualizations, but I wonder if FSE may present problems.

no I think. Where is the setting for this? If I run Sage in not Full SCreen I still get the problem but I don't remember how to toggle between FSE and normal.

EDIT: I run overlay and no 3d acceleration enabled so no FSE

[deria]

I've received some feedback from Narflex @ Sage regarding the playlist not automatically moving to the next track when it should. I'll work on it more later tonight and hopefully have a fix soon.

[Flips]

Deria,

This is great! I just about fell off my chair when I saw the announcement over at htpcnews. I'm been waiting a long time for good visualizations (read: milkdrop) in Sage. That was one of my only remaining roadblocks from using Sage as my only front end.

My only concern is how it works with FSE. Unlike what Heffe said, I absolutly need to use FSE to get stutter free HD with my 6600GT. I'm not sure how the plugin is written has anything to do with this, but I'm curious what the results are. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, and I'm not sure when I will be able to get to it.

Thanks,
Flips

[mikesm]

This looks great, but I am confused about one thing. Winamp supports tons more formats than Sage does, but does the GUI to select the music operate from the Sage database or the Winamp database? For example, Winamp has plugins that support FLAC, plus the ability read FLAC tags for metadata. Sage doesn't play FLAC or read FLAC tags into it's media database. So if I load this plugin to Sage, what happens with all the FLAC music info?

Thanks,
Mike

[deria]

Originally Posted by Flips

Deria,

My only concern is how it works with FSE. Unlike what Heffe said, I absolutly need to use FSE to get stutter free HD with my 6600GT. I'm not sure how the plugin is written has anything to do with this, but I'm curious what the results are. I haven't had a chance to try it yet, and I'm not sure when I will be able to get to it.

Thanks,
Flips

The plugin doesnt do anything special with regard to FSE. I don't use FSE and haven't tried it -- but give it a try and see what happens and let me know. If something needs to be changed to support it, knowing sooner would be better than knowing later.

[deria]

Originally Posted by mikesm

This looks great, but I am confused about one thing. Winamp supports tons more formats than Sage does, but does the GUI to select the music operate from the Sage database or the Winamp database? For example, Winamp has plugins that support FLAC, plus the ability read FLAC tags for metadata. Sage doesn't play FLAC or read FLAC tags into it's media database. So if I load this plugin to Sage, what happens with all the FLAC music info?

Thanks,
Mike

I'm pretty sure that you can make Sage read the files themselves into its library through a property setting. I'll try to look up which one. The metadata buried in the file won't get processed, but at least it should be possible to get the files into the list.

[stanger89]

seeker/music_library_import_filename_extensions=.mp3,.wav,.wma

[deria]

Originally Posted by stanger89

seeker/music_library_import_filename_extensions=.mp3,.wav,.wma

There you go. Thanks for pointing that out. I'll add some notes to the documentation about setting that property.

[mightyt]

Very Nice ...

Good one to add to ....

Custom STV Import Modules for SageTV version 4.0

[deria]

I have released version 1.3 of this plugin.

The changes in this version focus on eliminating the gap between tracks when playing back a playlist and avoiding early/late termination of playback for certain tracks.

I've been stress testing it on my system for the last hour now and no songs are exiting early and transitioning from one track to the next in the playlist is instant. I sincerely hope that everyone else has the same experience.

I also added some more diagnostic code to see if I can narrow down the problem that abasu2003 is having with the visualization returning control to Winamp instead of SageTV.

NOTE: This version doesn't have unicode support. I think it may not actually be technically possible to pass a unicode string to winamp for playback. I'm investigating that.

1.3 (bug fixes) / 2-dec-2005

NOTE: The STV has not changed. To upgrade, simply unzip the new package into your SageTV installation folder (typically c:\program files\sagetv\sagetv) while Sage TV is -not- running (close it completely; do not use sleep mode).

-The MediaPlayer will no longer end playback of a track in the playlist before it actually starts (or within a few seconds of starting). This issue was caused by a race condition between two threads (one thread was starting playback, and the other stopping playback because Winamp wasn't actually in its "playing" state when it was expected to be which would normally mean the end of the file had been reached).

-The MediaPlayer should now move to the next track in the playlist instantly (ie: no more gaps between tracks).

-The MediaPlayer will no longer attempt to seek past the end of a track. It now faithfully does bounds checking, and returns the actual new seek position to SageTV.

[mlbdude]

Originally Posted by deria

I'm pretty sure that you can make Sage read the files themselves into its library through a property setting. I'll try to look up which one. The metadata buried in the file won't get processed, but at least it should be possible to get the files into the list.

Probably the best way to view these would be with My Music Files in SageMC. You can browse your music collection by folders so at least you can setup how you want these viewed in Sage.

[mlbdude]

I am trying this out and and having some issues. SageTV and Winamp CPU usage are combines 100% so SageTV becomes unresponsive. It does seem to be working as Winamp plays the selected songs but Sage jsut basically hangs. If I stop playback SageTV CPU usage goes down and SageTV comes back.

[mlbdude]

On further investigation it seems to be for my DRM'd wma's.

[mlbdude]

Also, while I am integrating with with SageMC, I noticed soomething missing from your instructions.

There is a second way to get to the Visualization. The Now Playing icon can be clicked and if the current menu is the Playlist Details menu it goes to the visualization.

[deria]

Originally Posted by mlbdude

I am trying this out and and having some issues. SageTV and Winamp CPU usage are combines 100% so SageTV becomes unresponsive. It does seem to be working as Winamp plays the selected songs but Sage jsut basically hangs. If I stop playback SageTV CPU usage goes down and SageTV comes back.

Thats odd. My CPU usage never climbs over 5 percent. Was this while a visualization was running, or just by itself? Also, does it happen with the default STV for you? I've noticed that SageMC does something internally that causes alot of calls to getState() to occur (not sure what, though).

Was there a recording going on at the time that this happened?

[mlbdude]

Originally Posted by deria

Thats odd. My CPU usage never climbs over 5 percent. Was this while a visualization was running, or just by itself? Also, does it happen with the default STV for you? I've noticed that SageMC does something internally that causes alot of calls to getState() to occur (not sure what, though).

Was there a recording going on at the time that this happened?

Yes this happens in any STV. I don't have any normal wma's to test so far, just my Napster ones. MP3's work great though. No recordings going on.