Plugin: SageTV Web Interface V2 for Jetty

[mkanet]

Thanks so much for trying... I had version 0.98 installed the first time I tried it, but didnt have the mozilla plugin installed. I did try at least pointing the stream to the VLC 0.98 executable with no luck. I decided to download a newer version when installing the mozilla plugin. No worries... I appreciate your help.

While I have your attention... I was really hoping you could please just take a little time and look into adding a simple Send email reminder feature under the "Detailed Information" webpage of the webserver. I mentioned it earlier; and hope I'm, not bugging you... but I though I'd try again to explain the value of such a feature.

For example, imagine clicking the Send email reminder button when reading about a TV show on the sageTV webserver and only type in the email address of the recipeint and an optional short message... the recipient would get an email from your personal email account which reminds them of a TV show with the details of it and the coolest part of all... with two hyperlinks... Record Show and Add to Favorites... one to These are the same hyperlinks that the below webserver buttons do.



You could use the existing mail.jar file (which includes classes for SMTP, authentication, servers, account name for SMTP/pop3 ports; even ssl, etc) and have the user put this information in the existing and working mailaccounts.xml Mailaccounts is fully functional for pop3... just not for SMTP. If I'm not mistaken Dirk, "flachbar" had something do with the @email feature thats been around forever; I'm sure he would be happy to help answer questions.

Anyway, maybe some smart people here might think this is also a useful feature; and since we may have already what we need to add it, why not. TitanTV thought of this idea over a decade ago on their website when I used to use my first ever HDTV PC tuner... HiPix.. RIP.

Thanks again for all your help and time.
-Micheal

Originally Posted by jreichen

I've seen it suggested elsewhere that you downgrade VLC to 0.98.

I don't officially support the web player under either TJWS or Jetty. I've had nothing but trouble with VLC, making it difficult for me to support anybody else Having said that, if someone can trace down a bug to something specific that won't require a lot of time I'll fix it. I wish I had better news but for now that's the situation.

[Slugger]

Originally Posted by mkanet

For example, imagine clicking the Send email reminder button when reading about a TV show on the sageTV webserver and only type in the email address of the recipeint and an optional short message... the recipient would get an email from your personal email account which reminds them of a TV show with the details of it and the coolest part of all... with two hyperlinks... Record Show and Add to Favorites... one to These are the same hyperlinks that the below webserver buttons do.

Do you want to provide hyperlinks into your SageTV installation for recording/adding favourites or do you want the hyperlinks to point to a friend's separate installation? If the latter then that's a problem because the show and airing ids will not be the same. I suppose you could provide a search based URL for recording, but still not 100% guaranteed to work. There are workarounds, but not obvious ones.

I don't think this feature is too difficult to implement, but just enough of a PITA + the fact that I don't need/want it that I would stay away from it. If you found someone to tackle this then I'd recommend using my SageAlert plugin and just add the ability for the web server to send alerts to a SageAlert instance. The bonus with that approach is that all the email notification is already done for you. The web server code would just need to import the SageAlert RPC client jar and fire the alerts as desired. On the other hand, implementing a separate email sol'n allows for a much more customized feature set geared specifically towards this use case, but at the cost of a lot more work.

[jreichen]

Originally Posted by Slugger

Do you want to provide hyperlinks into your SageTV installation for recording/adding favourites or do you want the hyperlinks to point to a friend's separate installation? If the latter then that's a problem because the show and airing ids will not be the same. I suppose you could provide a search based URL for recording, but still not 100% guaranteed to work. There are workarounds, but not obvious ones.

Good point Slugger. I hadn't thought of ids. The issue I've been thinking about is if a link were to be included in the email, what should be the server portion of the URL.

Originally Posted by Slugger

I don't think this feature is too difficult to implement, but just enough of a PITA + the fact that I don't need/want it that I would stay away from it. If you found someone to tackle this then I'd recommend using my SageAlert plugin and just add the ability for the web server to send alerts to a SageAlert instance. The bonus with that approach is that all the email notification is already done for you. The web server code would just need to import the SageAlert RPC client jar and fire the alerts as desired. On the other hand, implementing a separate email sol'n allows for a much more customized feature set geared specifically towards this use case, but at the cost of a lot more work.

Either way it probably requires enough effort and time to the point where I would end up putting it on the V3 wish list.

[mkanet]

Thanks guys for thinking about this idea. I can't take the credit for it... its been a popular feature on titanTV for a decade now. The hyperlinks were my idea; and, didnt mean to take away from the focus of the main point of of the feature suggestion.... which is to email anyone ....even if those people that dont have sageTV that might be interested of a movie/show/special coming up; or want to be reminded of it. I dont know how hard it is to add just an email reminder with optional messge... (without any hyperlinks) but that's really all I was suggesting... if the hyperlinks or some way to add it to the recording would work; then fine; otherwise, it would be great to just send a quick note with all the details from the detailed info screen + an optional message. I know at least through batch files its very easy to send smtp messages... I have no clue how difficult it is to do via our webserver with the mail.jar we have.

Anyway thanks again for thinking about it....

Edit: It looks like titanTV changed the way they send this reminder now... but they still have a way to send the reminder via email through their webpage.

Originally Posted by jreichen

Good point Slugger. I hadn't thought of ids. The issue I've been thinking about is if a link were to be included in the email, what should be the server portion of the URL.

Either way it probably requires enough effort and time to the point where I would end up putting it on the V3 wish list.

[cncb]

Originally Posted by jreichen

It's in the latest snapshot. Go to the webserver/snapshot folder to download it and try it out.

The new system message alert status is working great. Thanks.

[jreichen]

Originally Posted by cncb

The new system message alert status is working great. Thanks.

Great, thanks for letting me know. I don't have Vista so I can't run your gadget. Have you ever thought of writing a Google gadget? They can be run on several platforms (e.g. my Linux KDE desktop) and on Google's site. Just wondering.

[Fuzzy]

but not on a vista/win7 desktop.. ;-) besides, the google gadgets on igoogle are neat and all, but it's not like anyone spends any time ON iGoogle... I'm there long enough to type in a search string and press go...

[cncb]

Originally Posted by jreichen

Great, thanks for letting me know. I don't have Vista so I can't run your gadget. Have you ever thought of writing a Google gadget? They can be run on several platforms (e.g. my Linux KDE desktop) and on Google's site. Just wondering.

I did check out Google's sidebar quite a while ago but I didn't like how it automatically indexed my hard drive for searching and it seemed like you could only turn this off after the fact (could not get the sidebar without desktop search). I'm not sure how much of my Sage gadget would be reusable. I think Google gadgets also use javascript but the "SDK" is different and you would need to find a different XML parser to use (I use Microsoft's in the gadget).

[Islander]

Thanks for this great addition to SageTv.

It works great for me with the following two exceptions:

1. I do not seem to be able to turn the extenders (HD200) off from the main page. I am able to send media to the extenders just not turn them off. Pressing the option does not appear to have any effect on the extenders power state.

2. The RSS for upcoming movies does not work for me. The one for the upcoming recordings does so I am not sure why the upcoming movies one comes up blank.

I did go through this thread but was not able to find anything related to this or I missed it somehow.

[jreichen]

Originally Posted by Islander

Thanks for this great addition to SageTv.

It works great for me with the following two exceptions:

1. I do not seem to be able to turn the extenders (HD200) off from the main page. I am able to send media to the extenders just not turn them off. Pressing the option does not appear to have any effect on the extenders power state.

I haven't used this much. I'll look into it this weekend.

Originally Posted by Islander

2. The RSS for upcoming movies does not work for me. The one for the upcoming recordings does so I am not sure why the upcoming movies one comes up blank.

I did go through this thread but was not able to find anything related to this or I missed it somehow.

Hmmm..... I have the same problem. I'll see if I can track down it down.

[jreichen]

Originally Posted by jreichen

I haven't used this much. I'll look into it this weekend.

The web server is sending the 'poweroff' command but that doesn't appear to be working. 'killall miniclient' looks like it works better. I verified it on my HD200 but I'd appreciate if others could use telnet to verify this on their HD100's and HD200's as well before I release it. In addition to that, it looks like the web server's Java implementation for telnet needs a little work before this will work.

Keep in mind, if you run the 'arp -a' (Windows) or 'arp -an' (Linux and Mac) commands on the server and they don't include the extender then the power off and reboot commands will not work.

Originally Posted by jreichen

Hmmm..... I have the same problem. I'll see if I can track down it down.

This is fixed and will be included in a new snapshot that I'll upload shortly.

[ellweber]

All is running well for me but I am unable to see where the .war is deployed. Back when I had this running with the TJWS I had made a few mods to the menu stricture to better suit my system needs but now I am unable to see where the appropriate files are placed.

I can see that the Mobile Web Server config is located in jetty:webapps, where is this one and also the BMT .war going?

Thanks,

Lynn

[jreichen]

It's being extracted to the system temp directory. Anything that is customized where the war file is extracted will be overwritten every time it's upgraded and when SageTV is restarted. You'll need to replace the file whenever those events happen.

[ellweber]

Thanks for the quick reply. I did find them finally in the the user:Local Settings:Temp directory. I'll know to look further next time!

Lynn

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by jreichen

It's being extracted to the system temp directory.

Actually I have a minor complaint with this. It seems like a somewhat nonstandard use of the temp directory since these files aren't actually temporary in the sense of "safe to delete". In fact if you use the Windows Disk Cleanup Wizard, it can break the web server by deleting "temporary" files that are more than a week old but still needed by the web server.

This has happened to me several times, and it took me a while to figure out why the web server always seemed to be broken if I hadn't used it in a while. I finally resorted to editing the context file to deploy the app somewhere other than %Temp%, and that solved my problem for now. But it would be nice to have a more permanent solution that won't be overwritten next time I upgrade the app.

Maybe this complaint properly belongs in the Jetty thread, since it applies to any Jetty app that doesn't explicitly specify a deployment directory.

[ellweber]

I too would prefer to see it deployed to a place where I already have backups automated. The Mobile WebServer is neatly deployed to the Sage directory structure, would it be reasonable to do the same with the Nielm WebServer?

[Slugger]

Deploying the war into a specific, known directory (such as jetty/webapps) will break the hot deploy feature on Windows or at least it's known to. When you tell the war to explode to a specific dir and try to redeploy hot then you end up with file locking errors on Windows (not always, but usually). For this reason, I always choose not to specify the target dir in the context file and let Jetty choose. Jetty happens to choose the system configured tmp dir, which is probably wrong, but that's what it does. Since Jetty does not overwrite on a hot deploy then each upgrade will always succeed (when you don't specify a target dir in the context file).

If you don't care about hot deploy breaking on Windows or you don't use Windows (afaik, the file locking issue does not exist on Linux and presumably OSX) then feel free to mod the context file and specify a location for the deployment (see mobile web or BMT for an example on how to do it).

[GKusnick]

Originally Posted by Slugger

Jetty happens to choose the system configured tmp dir, which is probably wrong, but that's what it does.

OK, I'll take it up in the Jetty thread then.

[Islander]

Quick question. (for imported files to be added as sage recordings)

Is there anywhere in the edit shows (I cannot see it) where I can enter the Season and Episode #'s so that I can properly do sorting by Season and Episode? I know that this can be done in the BMT web application but that is the only thing so far that requires me to switch over to it to input that info and I would prefer to do be able to do it all in one application without having to switch over. Possible? Thanks.

[Fuzzy]

Season and Episode are not SageTV properties. They are custom properties used by BMT (and obviously, some other imports, like TVE). Since they aren't built into the base sage system, they aren't available in the Web UI.

And for the record, you don't have to 'switch over' to BMT's web app. You can seamlessy run both at the same time, in fact, if you are already using teh jetty version of the sage web ui, then BMT will be even simpler to install.