Control one extender from another extender

[rajczi]

Is there any way that I can control what is playing on one extender from another extender? I have a whole house audio system that is connected to a receiver in the closet with my sage server. I would like to put an SD extender in there and use it as the audio source of the system. The closet is currently headless and I would prefer to not have to go upstairs to configure what the system is playing. I have extenders on all the TV's in the house and would like to be able to bring up an album or playlist and send that play command to the other extender. I know that individual media can be played this way through the web UI, but can it be done with an extender.

Any suggestions would be appriciated...

Chris

PS I run SageMC on my extenders.

[rajczi]

I also considered using a tuner and piping the audio out to the receiver and setting the lineup channels for that tuner on empty channels in my lineup. That way, when I change to that channel on any TV, it tunes that box to the channel I want from the provider. That will work, but I would prefer to be able to do this with my music collection instead...

Thanks in advance,

Chris

[CollinR]

It should be possible but I do not know the message to tell it to start playing a specific playlist.

I do this quite a bit, I use a Dell Axim x51v wifi as a truely universal remote. I can control any client connnected from it however if you cannot see the screen navigating would be all but impossible.

You might be better off having winamp or ? do it. Look at the EventGhost project and see what media players they have high level of support for.

You can do this directly from the webserver interface.

You can have the server call this if you have the webserver installed.

Playlist:
http://IP:PORT/Sage/PlaylistGenerato...istName=STONES

or

Specific File:
http://IP:PORT/Sage/player.html?fnty...FileId=1828604

You can do this with wget from the local MVP/Placeshifter but you would need a way to set it all up.

Those will open in WMP or VLC on the server, just plug the server's soundcard into your amp and provide a login.


EDIT:
Actually with the webserver and an MVP connected to your reciever you can.

http://IP:PORT/sage/MediaFileCommand...FileId=FILEID#

[Fonceur]

Originally Posted by rajczi

Is there any way that I can control what is playing on one extender from another extender?

Another alternative would be to use SageTCPServer (link in my signature) to do that. You would have to modify the SageTV UI yourself though, as I am interfacing with it from a whole other application (MainLobby plugin)...

[spvoyek]

I posted essentially the same question a few months ago. Here's the link:

http://forums.sagetv.com/forums/showthread.php?t=34198

Please keep us updated if you get something working. This is still something I'd like to do, but it's not a high priority project yet.

[CollinR]

Originally Posted by Fonceur

Another alternative would be to use SageTCPServer (link in my signature) to do that. You would have to modify the SageTV UI yourself though, as I am interfacing with it from a whole other application (MainLobby plugin)...

Nice and new to me, I will start playing today.

EDIT: Where is the documentation?

[wbarber69]

what would also be nice is a way to sync up audio from all clients and be able to listen to music through the whole house and even control what is playing from anywhere. Perhaps have a menu button on the music screen to connect to other clients.

[Fonceur]

Originally Posted by CollinR

EDIT: Where is the documentation?

It has been in Beelzerob's hands for a while, but here's a copy... I also included the latest build.

[nielm]

It can also be done in the STV, by calling the Java API with a different UI context (this is because both extenders UIs run in the SageServer process)

Imagine extender1 has UI context 11111, and extender2 has UI context 22222, then in the STV you can have an Action like:

sage_SageTV_api("22222","CloseAndWaitUntilClosed",null)

to remotely stop playback on the other extender.

To start a specific playlist, you first need to find it:

playlist=GetElement(FilterByMethod(GetPlaylists(),"GetName","My Playlist",true),0)

and then play it -- note that Watch needs a Java Array as an argument, and DataUnion creates a Vector, so toArray is used to convert it.

sage_SageTV_apiUI("22222","Watch",java_util_List_toArray(DataUnion(playlist))

(this type of code gets very messy very quickly -- writing Studio code to call java code to call other Studio code... You may be able to write cleaner code with GKusnick's wrappers...)

Playing an album requires clearing a playlist (normally the now playing), creating it and adding all the tracks to it. This can all be done in local UI code (except for finding/creating the remote NowPlaying playlist), then call apiUI as above to start playback.


Note that the 'Now Playing" playlist is always local to the UI, which means you need to get and clear the remote UI's "Now Playing" playlist via the java apiUI call, but once retrieved, items can be added to it simply using the normal Studio functions.

playlist=sage_SageTV_apiUI("22222","GetNowPlayingList",null)
sage_SageTV_apiUI("22222","RemovePlaylist",java_util_List_toArray(DataUnion(playlist)))
playlist=sage_SageTV_apiUI("22222","GetNowPlayingList",null)

[spvoyek]

nielm, you read my mind! I was just coming here to post a request for you to provide some insight on this subject. I was hoping that your webserver was providing this "play on <device>" functionality by asking the Sage Server process to do it and that we would be able to duplicate that functionality in an STV without the need for anything extra like the SageTCPServer.

[nielm]

I am afraid that I can only provide pointers...

One other thing you may need to do is execute a Action widget tree from the other extender's UI, with some local variables preset...

eg in the default STV, there is an action tree for starting playback of a show, going to the playback screen:

"REM Watch, jumping directly to OSD for playback"

This action tree needs the local variable 'Airing' set referencing the Airing or Mediafile that you want to watch...

So if you have a local variable 'Airing' in the local UI's context, you can use AddStaticContext to set it in the remote UI's context...
you then need to find the widget tree to execute...

sage_SageTV_apiUI("22222","AddStaticContext",java_util_List_toArray(DataUnion("Airing",Airing))
AllRemoteActions=sage_SageTV_apiUI("22222","GetWidgetsByType",java_util_List_toArray(DataUnion("Action"))
WatchActionWidget=GetElement(FilterByMethod(AllRemoteActions,"GetWidgetName","\"REM Watch, jumping directly to OSD for playback\"",true),0)
sage_SageTV_apiUI("22222","ExecuteWidgetChain",java_util_List_toArray(DataUnion(WatchActionWidget))

Messy isn't it