MediaPlayer Plugin/STV Import: Winamp Media Player Plugin

[CyRex]

So I was wondering, now that we can use WinAmp to play media files, would there be an easy way to integrate CD playing into the mix somewhere, even if its played through WinAmp?

Or at least have WinAmp spit back the track # / time to Sage to display?

[computer33]

This works great! It even kept my winamp plugin "Toaster" and they look great together with Sage.

Excellent, Thanks!

[olyar15]

Originally Posted by mlbdude

I think the only way you could get some would be to sign up for a Napster or Yahoo Music trial.

Can't you create your own via Windows Media Player? Under the Rip CD options, you can turn on copy protection.

[mlbdude]

Originally Posted by olyar15

Can't you create your own via Windows Media Player? Under the Rip CD options, you can turn on copy protection.

That may work, but I don't know if that would be the same type of DRM. Worth a shot though.

[deria]

Originally Posted by CyRex

So I was wondering, now that we can use WinAmp to play media files, would there be an easy way to integrate CD playing into the mix somewhere, even if its played through WinAmp?

Or at least have WinAmp spit back the track # / time to Sage to display?

I haven't thought much about CD playing. By default, the plugin is able to play tracks that have a CDA extension (CD Audio). It will treat them the same as any other track. The missing piece of the puzzle would be the ability to auto-detect that a CD has been inserted, and secondly to create a playlist out of the tracks on the CD and tell SageTV to play that playlist. There's technically nothing preventing either of those issues from being resolved right now by any STV author. The easiest solution would be to have a button called "Play CD" which would use a property to determine the drive letter of the CD, scan that drive for CDA files, create a playlist from the files, then tell SageTV to play that playlist. No changes to the plugin should be required for any of that. That approach would allow for full presentation of the music (including visualization, time elapsed, duration, fast forward, rewind, etc.).

Before I think much more of that, I'd like to get a better handle on visualizations. Right now they basically work if you're NOT using FSE. One person has reported that even when not using FSE, when he exits the visualization Winamp has focus instead of SageTV. Is anyone else experiencing that problem?

[deria]

Originally Posted by computer33

This works great! It even kept my winamp plugin "Toaster" and they look great together with Sage.

Excellent, Thanks!

I haven't heard of that plugin. Based on your post, I've taken a look at it and it looks pretty cool. For the curious, its a track change notifier thats pretty configurable. It looks like it basically waits for the track to change, then animates in a little window like you see with MSN Messenger (but this one is skinnable).

[deria]

Originally Posted by olyar15

Can't you create your own via Windows Media Player? Under the Rip CD options, you can turn on copy protection.

I'll try that. If I can reproduce the problem on my system it will be alot easier to solve (because I can change and modify the plugin code as needed without having to worry about breaking it for people or doing test releases or anything).

[GbrNole]

Originally Posted by deria

Before I think much more of that, I'd like to get a better handle on visualizations. Right now they basically work if you're NOT using FSE. One person has reported that even when not using FSE, when he exits the visualization Winamp has focus instead of SageTV. Is anyone else experiencing that problem?

the only time i had that problem occur was when winamp was minimised to the task bar. when i set it to minimize to the system tray that problem went away.

[deria]

Originally Posted by GbrNole

the only time i had that problem occur was when winamp was minimised to the task bar. when i set it to minimize to the system tray that problem went away.

Hmm... thats interesting. I'll recommend that to the other user that was having that problem and see if it works for him as well. Thanks for the tip.

[deria]

Originally Posted by deria

I'll try that. If I can reproduce the problem on my system it will be alot easier to solve (because I can change and modify the plugin code as needed without having to worry about breaking it for people or doing test releases or anything).

I can now reproduce the problem with DRM'd WMA files. I set the copy protect option and ripped a CD, and now when I play back tracks from that CD my CPU rockets to 50 percent (my system has two cores, so it won't go higher than that).

Now that I can reproduce the problem, I'll see if theres anything that I can do about it. It might be beyond my control, but I'll certainly try.

[GbrNole]

i wonder how MS mce 2005 handles the vizualizations? that too uses FSE and basically calls MP10 for it's files and vizualizations. my dad's mce install always has a pause when switching between video modes so i assume it releases FSE mode to each module?

[Muchacho]

I got it working adding mlbdude/use_winamp_plugin=true.

Good luck on FSE... I think to get that working would require a different approach so that the visualization was actually being played through sage, which is peobably a lot harder.

Thanks for the work, hopefully my wife will not notice the change with FSE disabled!

[deria]

Originally Posted by GbrNole

i wonder how MS mce 2005 handles the vizualizations? that too uses FSE and basically calls MP10 for it's files and vizualizations. my dad's mce install always has a pause when switching between video modes so i assume it releases FSE mode to each module?

MSE likely uses a technique called remoting. With remoting, the WMP process (or at least the parts of it that you access to control the media and display visualizations) actually becomes a part of your own process. I've used that technique with WMP in the past. Basically, since its part of your own process and you have exclusive control of the video device, all works well. That won't work with Winamp, however.

[deria]

Ok!

The CPU usage issue with DRM'd WMA files is now fixed. In fact, the problem that was occuring could have affected any type of file if Winamp was slow enough about loading it. I'll be releasing a new release of the plugin after I do some testing to make sure I didn't break anything else.

I'll keep you all posted.

[deria]

I have released version 1.4 of this plugin. It contains the following changes:

-The MediaPlayer will now play DRM'd WMA files (and any other slowly loading file) without freaking out and using the entire CPU. This was caused by a race condition between two threads (basically I was reporting that the file was "loaded" before it actually was, so when SageTV asked for the duration of the track it would return 0 if the track loading in the background loaded too slowly.)

-The MediaPlayer will now no longer allow SageTV to instruct it to seek to a negative position.

-The (ridiculous amounts of) tracing code added to diagnose the problems detected so far has been removed (gives an overall minor performance increase).

-The "track duration" calculation done by SageTV (which is displayed on the "now playing" screen) does not seem to be the duration returned by the MediaPlayer and is therefore not very accurate (and always 0 for a audio file type that SageTV cannot work with natively) -- two new methods have been added to the WinampHelper class to allow STV developers to get the correct track elapsed time and track duration when using this plugin. To use these methods, do the following:

1. In the "BeforeMenuLoad" hook of your menu, add the following items:

-an "if" statement with the text "GlobalWinampHelper == null"
-a branch statement with the text "true" (as a child of the "if" statement)
-an action statement with the text "AddGlobalContext("GlobalWinampHelper", new_WinampHelper())" (as a child of the "true" branch)

2. When you want to get the elapsed time for the track, add an action with the text "WinampHelper_WHElapsed(GlobalWinampHelper)".

3. When you want to get the total track duration, add an action with the text "WinampHelper_WHDuration(GlobalWinampHelper)".

Note that these two functions are only valid for files that are being handled by this plugin and only valid WHILE the plugin is playing a file.

[deria]

The documentation in the first post has been updated.

[mikesm]

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.

What about folder art and such? Not being able to use the metadata in the file is a drag, esp. because Winamp can read it. Might it be possible to do a bulk export of wimap's media database into Sage's? Then any format that has a plugin in winamp could be fully processed by Sage's media library.

Thanks,
mike

[deria]

Originally Posted by mikesm

What about folder art and such? Not being able to use the metadata in the file is a drag, esp. because Winamp can read it. Might it be possible to do a bulk export of wimap's media database into Sage's? Then any format that has a plugin in winamp could be fully processed by Sage's media library.

Thanks,
mike

That would be a different project. The goal of this media-player is not to change the way SageTV parses/analyzes media file metadata. Those are functions of the SageTV library facility and while there may or may not be an interface to the library, it will be for someone else to investigate. The purpose of this media-player is to a) allow playback of all the media types that Winamp supports and b) bring visualizations to SageTV. Those are large enough goals for now.

EDIT: Folder art should work fine as long as the art is in a separate file (ie: not in the media file).

[CyRex]

Is there any reason that playing .m3u or .pls playlists should not be working for me? I was hoping that when I selected them to play, WinAmp would just begin playing the files as streaming audio. When I select them, the pause indicator comes up in the bottom left hand corner of the screen (SageMCE) and nothing plays.

- Dan

[deria]

Originally Posted by CyRex

Is there any reason that playing .m3u or .pls playlists should not be working for me? I was hoping that when I selected them to play, WinAmp would just begin playing the files as streaming audio. When I select them, the pause indicator comes up in the bottom left hand corner of the screen (SageMCE) and nothing plays.

- Dan

All of the playlist handling is done by SageTV. That being said, I was under the impression that SageTV had no trouble playing .m3u or .pls playlists. By default, this media-player doesn't even register to handle playlist types -- so it should be using the default player to do so. Two questions:

1) does it happen with the default STV?

2) does it happen with the default media-player?

3) if you create a playlist inside SageTV does that work?

You could try adding these lines to your sage.properties and/or sageclient.properties file:

media_player_plugin_class/m3u=WinampPlugin
media_player_plugin_class/pls=WinampPlugin

I wouldn't expect that to work though. Let me know the answers to the two questions above though and we'll see where we are.