MediaPlayer Plugin/STV Import: Winamp Media Player Plugin

[Narflex]

The embedding isn't a limitation of SageTV though. It's WinAmp that doesn't do it. (SageTV exposes the HWND of the video component which allows embedding of video, visualizations or other graphics...it's how SageTV's internal MediaPlayer works when it's not in VMR9 mode) Just wanted to make that clear.

[deria]

Originally Posted by Narflex

The embedding isn't a limitation of SageTV though. It's WinAmp that doesn't do it. (SageTV exposes the HWND of the video component which allows embedding of video, visualizations or other graphics...it's how SageTV's internal MediaPlayer works when it's not in VMR9 mode) Just wanted to make that clear.

Yes, I should probably have been more clear in my post. The issue with embedding is with Winamp, not with SageTV. Getting access to the window in SageTV and drawing stuff to it is very doable; its trivial, actually. It's just that theres no way to tell Winamp to use a specific window to draw to. It's not really something Winamp is particularly suited to doing.

It would certainly be possible with one of the opensource media players that support visualizations. I like Winamp, though, so thats the player I chose to support. (The visualizations for WMP are boring for the most part, and I haven't seen any other media players with nice visualizations that are easily remotable.)

[deria]

For those who do not want to wait until the next release of this plugin to be able to control their music while the full-screen visualization is running, I've put together some simple instructions for how to enable the controls:

NOTE: This will all be in the next release, which will be sometime in the next week or so (christmas is a busy time). These commands are all pretty easy to add if you pay attention to what you're doing, but if you don't feel comfortable going through these steps then you should probably just wait for the next release of the plugin.

1) Press control+shift+f12 to open SageTV Studio.
2) Scroll down to the "WinampHelperMenu" menu.

Repeat the following two steps for each type of control you want to add:

a) Drag a Listener widget (the little speaker) onto the "WinampHelperMenu" menu.
b) Drag an action widget (the little wrench) onto the new listener widget.

To add a play control:
a) Right click the listener widget and set the "listener type" to "Play".
b) Click the action widget, press F2 to edit its content, and type "Play()" followed by <enter>.

To add a pause control:
a) Right click the listener widget and set the "listener type" to "Pause".
b) Click the action widget, press F2 to edit its content, and type "Pause()" followed by <enter>.

To add a mute control:
a) Right click the listener widget and set the "listener type" to "Mute".
b) Click the action widget, press F2 to edit its content, and type "SetMute(!IsMuted())" followed by <enter>.

To add a next-track control:
a) Right click the listener widget and set the "listener type" to "Channel Up/Page Up".
b) Click the action widget, press F2 to edit its content, and type "ChannelUp()" followed by <enter>.

To add a previous-track control:
a) Right click the listener widget and set the "listener type" to "Channel Down/Page Down".
b) Click the action widget, press F2 to edit its content, and type "ChannelDown()" followed by <enter>.

To add a volume-up control:
a) Right click the listener widget and set the "listener type" to "Volume Up".
b) Click the action widget, press F2 to edit its content, and type "VolumeUp()" followed by <enter>.

To add a volume-down control:
a) Right click the listener widget and set the "listener type" to "Volume Down".
b) Click the action widget, press F2 to edit its content, and type "VolumeDown()" followed by <enter>.

To add a fast-forward control:
a) Right click the listener widget and set the "listener type" to "Skip Fwd/Page Right".
b) Click the action widget, press F2 to edit its content, and type "SkipForward()" followed by <enter>.

To add a rewind control:
a) Right click the listener widget and set the "listener type" to "Skip Bkwd/Page Left".
b) Click the action widget, press F2 to edit its content, and type "SkipBackwards()" followed by <enter>.

To add a fast-forward #2 control:
a) Right click the listener widget and set the "listener type" to "Skip Fwd #2".
b) Click the action widget, press F2 to edit its content, and type "SkipForward2()" followed by <enter>.

To add a rewind #2 control:
a) Right click the listener widget and set the "listener type" to "Skip Bkwd #2".
b) Click the action widget, press F2 to edit its content, and type "SkipBackwards2()" followed by <enter>.

If you want to be -really- fancy and add the ability to jump to a track by number, do the following:

a) drag an attribute widget to the "WinampHelperMenu" menu
b) right-click the new attribute and click "properties"
c) change the attribute name to "ChannelSurf"
d) change its value to "" (type the quotes)
e) drag two new listener widgets to the "WinampHelperMenu" menu
f) right click the first listener widget and set the "listener type" to "Numbers" and the name to "ChannelEntry".
g) right click the second listener widget and set the "listener type" to "select".
h) drag an action object to the "ChannelEntry" listener, then click on it, press F2 to edit it, and set its text to "ChannelSurf = ChannelSurf + ChannelEntry" (without the quotes).
i) drag an "if" widget to the "Select" listener
j) click on the "if" widget, press F2 to edit it, and set its text to "Size(ChannelSurf) > 0" (without the quotes).
k) drag a branch widget to the "if" widget
l) click on the branch widget, press F2 to edit it, and set its text to "true" (without the quotes)
m) drag two action widgets to the branch widget
n) click on the first new action widget, press F2 to edit it, and set its text to "ChannelSet(ChannelSurf * 1)" (without the quotes).
o) click on the second new action widget, press F2 to edit it, and set its text to "ChannelSurf = """ (without the outer pair of quotes).
p) drag the second new action widget onto the first new action widget (using the left mouse button) -- which will result in a copy of the second new action widget appearing as a child of the first action widget

[mkanet]

Does Windows Media Player support this? Have you seen the Geforce visualization for WMP?

Originally Posted by deria

Yes, I should probably have been more clear in my post. The issue with embedding is with Winamp, not with SageTV. Getting access to the window in SageTV and drawing stuff to it is very doable; its trivial, actually. It's just that theres no way to tell Winamp to use a specific window to draw to. It's not really something Winamp is particularly suited to doing.

It would certainly be possible with one of the opensource media players that support visualizations. I like Winamp, though, so thats the player I chose to support. (The visualizations for WMP are boring for the most part, and I haven't seen any other media players with nice visualizations that are easily remotable.)

[deria]

Originally Posted by mkanet

Does Windows Media Player support this? Have you seen the Geforce visualization for WMP?

It might be possible with Windows Media Player, but I doubt it. And yes, I've seen G-Force, but it is a commercial product and I wanted my plugin to be useable by anyone for free.

I think for actual embedding of the visualization you would need to go with something thats open source where you had complete access to the visualization data and the visualization drawing functions. It would be pretty non-trivial to implement, I believe.

[m0ng00se30]

Anyone seeing that the new MVP client is broke if you use the winamp plugin?? Launching music on the MVP makes the file play on the machine that Winamp runs, and its not rendered on the MVP. Deria any ideas if this is workable problem, or we'll have to have one of the other!

Thanks

--Mike

[deria]

Originally Posted by m0ng00se30

Anyone seeing that the new MVP client is broke if you use the winamp plugin?? Launching music on the MVP makes the file play on the machine that Winamp runs, and its not rendered on the MVP. Deria any ideas if this is workable problem, or we'll have to have one of the other!

Thanks

--Mike

I don't have an MVP, but I would think that it would not be workable because you can't run third-party software on the MVP (not Windows software, anyway, and Winamp is a Windows application). I'll ask Jeff about it and see if they did something special to make that happen. I have a feeling that what they probably did was build in music playback support into the software that they install and run on the MVP (ie: the kernel of the device). I'll see what I can find out, though.

[m0ng00se30]

Thanks for checking... maybe its something you both and figure out.

--Mike

[Narflex]

To fix the problem with it using the WinAmp plugin on an extender just copy all of the media_player_plugin_class properties you added to your Sage.properties file into your RemoteClients.defaults.properties file and set them all to blank. i.e.
media_player_plugin_class/mp3=
media_player_plugin_class/wma=

(I guess you could just go with mp3 since that's the only music file format supported on the MVP currently)

[mikesm]

The right answer here seems to be a transcoding engine in the server that transcodes audio on the fly to a format that the end device can process. This is very important if you have small client devices around, much less a MVP client.

I use Twonkyvision's media server for this to server UPNP clients like the MP101 from my linux fileserver, though it runs under windows too. You can check it out at http://www.twonkyvision.de/UPnP/index.html
The slim devices slim server does this too, though not as universally as the twonkyvision server does.

I would LOVE to see such a generic on the fly transcoding engine for audio in SageTV. That way it could work with the MVP, but also serve UPNP devices too. Doing the same for video could be a LOT more work, though the CPU requirements are probably managable if you are going from a heavily compressed format like MPEG-4 or DIVX to a less heavily compressed format like MPEG-2 (that the MVP supports). This makes it hard to run over wireless networks because you are pushing more traffic over the connection than you would with MPEG-4, but it's probably the only reasonable tradeoff you can make, as realtime MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 transcoding is only something very heavy duty hardware can do...

Right now to support MVP's and audio clients and HD takes a lot of integration of various pieces. If Sage packaged all this up and make installation more straightforward, a ton of installers would move to that as unified media center platform.

Thanks,
mike

[deria]

I have released version 1.8 of this plugin.

1.8 (enhancements) / 17-dec-2005

-added support for play, pause, rewind, fast foward, large rewind, large fast forward, stop, mute, volume up, volume down while a full screen visualization is being displayed.
-added support for jumping to a specific track in a playlist by entering the track number and pressing select while a full-screen visualization is being displayed.
-updated documentation for SageTV 4.1

NOTE: If you installed a previous version of this plugin, you should execute the following procedure (standard .STV/.XML users only; users of SageMC should ignore this note).

1) Press Control + Shift + F12 to open SageTV Studio.
2) Scroll down to the "WinampHelperMenu" menu.
3) Right click the "WinampHelperMenu" menu, and click "Expand Children".
4) Scroll down to the bottom of the "WinampHelperMenu" menu and (while holding the SHIFT key) click on the last part of the menu (an action item that reads 'ChannnelSurf = ""'.
5) Press your DELETE key.
6) Scroll up to the "SongbyArtist" menu and expand it.
7) Expand the "MenuContainer" panel.
8) Expand the "Buttons" panel.
9) Expand the "If" statement (the one that reads "IsMusicFile(GetCurrentMediaFile())").
10) Expand the "Visualizations" menu item.
11) Highlight the "WinampHelperMenu" link under the "Visualize" menu entry, and then press DELETE to remove it.
12) Repeat steps 6-11 for the following menus:

"AlbumDetailPage"
"Music by Artist"
"MusicSongTitle"

At this point all traces of this plugin will have been removed from your .STV/.XML and you should be able to do a complete fresh installation of the plugin.

[deria]

I've had a report from one user that 1.7/1.8 is randomly crashing for him and when it does the SageTV UI vanishes as well. I've had no other reports like that, though.

I thought it might be a good idea to post and ask some questions:

1) Is anyone experiencing crashes during the transition from one track to another? If so, does SageTV UI close?

2) Is anyone experiencing crashes involving Winamp?

If the answer to either of these questions is yes, please PM me. I'm not sure if its the plugin or something else, but I'd definitely like to know if its one user only or multiple users.

[Keith]

I've had random crashes as well. Although mine has been crashing at random times while watching TV (Sage Recordings) - and the Sage UI closes. I've been meaning to to a complete re-install of Sage but I haven't got around to it yet. It never crashes while playing music...but now that you mention it, all the crashes have been in sessions where I've played music then watched Sage recordings afterwards.

[mattsm]

Hi thanks for all the hard work, I just have one problem. The time for the songs is not being reported at all. It just says 0:00, everything else seems to be working fine. Any ideas?

-Matthew

[geogecko]

Originally Posted by Keith

I've had random crashes as well. Although mine has been crashing at random times while watching TV (Sage Recordings) - and the Sage UI closes. I've been meaning to to a complete re-install of Sage but I haven't got around to it yet. It never crashes while playing music...but now that you mention it, all the crashes have been in sessions where I've played music then watched Sage recordings afterwards.

I have the exact same thing happening. I don't know if it was related to playing music before watching a show though, but I've had the Sage UI vanish for no reason. Other times, I've turned the TV on, only to find that Sage wasn't even running?!%#@

Not sure what the problem is. I turned on error logging to try and find out, but you know how that goes, as soon as you try and debug something it seems to work just fine...so far, 3 days now, and no crashing...

[m0ng00se30]

I too have seen, well I was in another room, but when I came back at the end of an album... Sage was gone. I don't run the service so I lost about 10 minutes of House last time, but I have seen this several time. I can't say if its during a song, during a transistion, or at the end of a song. I've just come back to a windows desktop, and it always been while playing music. Winamp is alway there with the last song Q'd up.

--Mike

[GbrNole]

i've had that issue and also the very similar issue of winamp and sage concurently starting up and sage startup killing itself before the menu screen.

i sometimes wonder if foobar2000 might be a better toy to play with though the vizualizations are limited at best?

[deria]

Originally Posted by Keith

I've had random crashes as well. Although mine has been crashing at random times while watching TV (Sage Recordings) - and the Sage UI closes. I've been meaning to to a complete re-install of Sage but I haven't got around to it yet. It never crashes while playing music...but now that you mention it, all the crashes have been in sessions where I've played music then watched Sage recordings afterwards.

That sounds like a SageTV issue, actually. The music player is only active when a song or playlist is playing, and when thats done it gets destroyed by SageTV and thats the end of the line. If you are experiencing crashes outside the music player, you should look outside the player for the reason (unless something very, very, very wierd is going on with garbage collection but I doubt it).

[deria]

Originally Posted by mattsm

Hi thanks for all the hard work, I just have one problem. The time for the songs is not being reported at all. It just says 0:00, everything else seems to be working fine. Any ideas?

-Matthew

The duration is calculated by SageTV, so if it does not understand a file type, it will either not calculate the duration correctly or not calculate it at all. The plugin actually includes two functions available to STV developers that they can use to always get the right elapsed time and duration, but so far none have elected to use those functions.

[deria]

Well, it sounds like a few people at least are experiencing crashing. The symptoms seem different, so I think some of the crashes are unrelated, but several people have said now that they start an album and come back to find SageTV closed. The only changes in recent versions were to a) support unicode filenames with special characters and b) change the way a file is loaded so that the load routine waits for Winamp to actually finish loading the file.

I'm going to add more diagnostic code, I believe, and also see if I can reproduce this problem on my own system be playing some really long playlists.

There should be a new version up today.