QWebL Automation

I'm sure by now many of you have heard of QWebL Automation and the terrific contests that was put on by them this past month. If that wasn't enough their bold tag line certainly peeked my interest in the company.

"On August 19th Home Automation Will Change Forever" - QWebL

The marketing campaign was so good in fact I found myself checking their website 3 or 4 times yesterday hoping they'd finally lift the curtains and reveal their wares. Unfortunately that was not the case as they must have run into some last minute technical issues and now the countdown is working its way upwards. It's sad to see them miss their deadline, I only hope they can fix whatever it is that is holding them back quickly as a lot of people are interested in seeing what QWebL can bring to the home automation party.

So here I am sending some good karma to QWebL.

* UPDATE *

They have decided to wait until CEDIA to unveil their products, more information can be found on their website.

Add TV-Show Data in Video Browser

A common question asked is "where do I get metadata for TV Shows?" for Video Browser.  Currently the only supported method of gathering TV Show metadata is the official Ruby script. I'll try my best to explain this process and a couple tricks I've learned from the community.

NOTE: I guess I should also put in a word of warning, this is an easy process with many steps which makes it complicated. Metadata gathering is definitely targeted towards advanced users, hopefully in the future someday Sam and I can refine this process to be more universally accepted.

Before You Begin

1. You must have Ruby installed on your system. You can download Ruby here: Ruby Download

I downloaded Ruby and installed it in the following location "C:\Ruby"

2. Download the TV Scraper script file here: tvdb_scraper.rb

For simplicity sake I saved the script file under "C:\Ruby\tvdb_scraper.rb"

Now We Are in Business

Video Browser looks for the following TV folder structure:

"TV SHOW \ SEASON XX \ FILES"

eg. "E:\TV\Heroes\Season 1\s1e01-Heroes-Pilot..."

Once you have the folder structure setup you can use the following command to gather metadata, under command prompt:

Ruby [PATH to tvdb_scraper file] [PATH to TV Show to Update]

eg. ruby "C:\ruby\tvdb_scraper.rb" "E:\TV\Heroes" -r

There are two switches "-r" and "-f" explained in more detail below:

• -r: This refreshes the metadata for all TV Shows
• -f: This renames episode filenames to: Episode Number - Episode Name format. It is especially important that you verify the metadata collected is correct first before using this command.

Now under command prompt you can run the following command to grab metadata.

Creating An Automated Process

One of the issues I had with the Ruby scrapper was that it relied extensively on me typing in command line, which being a developer is no problem, but was a real hassle for the non-tech savvy family members. To overcome this I use batch files (.bat).

This is what my bat file looks like:

ruby "C:\ruby\tvdb_scraper.rb" "E:\TV\Heroes" -r
ruby "C:\ruby\tvdb_scraper.rb" "E:\TV\Heroes" -f
Pause

AS you can see I customized my bat file for a specific TV Show, the reason I chose to do it this was is that many times I want to only update one series, so combining every tv show into one bat command would be first a waste of processing, and second a waste of time.

I put my customized autoscraper.bat file under the root of each tv show:

eg. E:\TV\Heroes\autoscraper.bat

Now when someone adds more tv shows from Itunes, all they have to do is launch the bat file (via double click) and it gathers the appropriate metadata for that episode. Much more easier for the wife, and lets be honest if it makes the wife happy that's half the battle!

Questions, comments? Feel free to ask questions or get help at http://videobrowser.ch/

Video Browser - Addin for VMC

I've been playing around with the Video Browser addin, from Sam Saffron, for about a week now and I love it. I had a need for this functionality since I first got my hands on Vista Media Center.

I felt the need to tweak a few things so I decided to join the development of Video Browser. In any case my first goal was to remove the black background and switch to a transparent background.

 

Which was great .... at first .... but then you know I thought it kind of looked a little cheesy. I mean everyone and their dog has a transparent background, what this application needed was something with a little more pop. So I began (re)-searching and eventually I came across a background which I liked much better.

It looks much better don't you think? With the background issues out of the way I began to focus on the main screens. One of the things that drew me to Video Browser in the first place was the lean/mean interface (all killer no filler). My main goal here was to further enhance clarity.

Sometimes when working on a media center application as a developer you become so
concerned about the open-screen design (think open-floor design for you real estate types) that you forget it's ok to have some boundaries. I was going down the wrong path until I made a u-turn and sorted that out, screenshots tell a better story than words:

Now for the bad news, the only person who has this is me - sorry Sam! I got a few issues to sort out which will work themselves out in time. Comments feedback are welcome at the Green Button Forum.

MCML Samples

Today Olcay Buyan and I released our MCML Samples project with the Media Center community. This project provides real world examples of vista media center-like controls written in mcml.

We hope that sharing this project will alleviate a lot of that frustration by allowing anyone to use/modify these samples for any purpose, be it personal or commercial or other.

There project includes a variety of controls with full source code, providing a rich control/view item set for novice developers. Our goal is that new developers will spend less time worrying about how to make a radio button, menu bar, etc. and focus more time on how to better their applications to provide maximum value for their customers.

The end goal is better media center products which brings more interest to media center which in turn helps all of us devs. Anyway I have rambled on long enough you can download the project from here:

Download MCML Samples source code here: http://www.codeplex.com/mcml

Olcay Buyan, MCML Samples Co-Author: http://www.mcedev.com

Live Mesh

Live Mesh where the heck were you when I was in college? Unified data management is something that I've needed since ... well ... seems like foever. I remember there were many a time where I would be FTP'ing into my home machine to retrieve a file I had forgotten to take with me that day.

Now that I am removed from that environment I still find myself manually syncing files most commonly by sending myself an email with the necessary files in the attachment. I could really care less about the social aspects of live mesh but there is a lot of potential in sharing content with others.

 

FEATURES GALORE

I haven't even gotten into the other features of the mesh such as:

• Unified Device Management
• Unified Application Management
• Centralized Management

MORE INFORMATION

If you want to learn more Amit Mittal has a good introduction to Live Mesh found here.

Other useful links include:

• Mesh.com
• Live Mesh Team Blog
• CNet: Making Sense of Live Mesh

Testing Live Writer

It's been a long time since I've posted anything on this blog, I've been pretty busy with my move to the UK that I haven't had near enough time to devout to this blog. Currently things are starting to settle down a bit and I'm testing Windows Live Writer on this blog, if everything works out that will mean a lot less headaches for me and more frequent updates in the future.

Blu-ray Xbox 360 Planned By Microsoft

Smarthouse.com.au is reporting that a new Blu-ray periheral is being planned by Microsoft, here . If any more confirmation of HD-DVD's death was needed here it is. I for one am just glad this whole nonsense of two competing formats is finally resolved. Hopefully now content makers can focus on making content thats worth watching.