SageTV Media Player Plugin

[Jason]

Originally Posted by deria

This is an interesting thread. I don't like the built-in media player as it pertains to music, so I was planning to replace it. The method I was planning on was to use Winamp and just drive it through windows messaging. That would have allowed for all the usual music player goodness, including full screen visualizations -- but this seems like a more elegant and integrated approach. I'll have to read over the documentation provided in more detail to see if its feasible (because the odds of my writing it in java are... slim) but it would be nice to use a different media player for my music/playlists. Then the only problem I would have is cover art. Thanks for resurecting this thread -- I probably wouldn't have seen it otherwise.

Thank goodness...

As far as the cover art... why not leave it to others? G-Force includes cover/album art and it integrates with WMP.

Here are a few screenpics...

http://www.soundspectrum.com/g-force/album_art.html

-Jason

[stanger89]

Just an FWIW, if I understand what the MediaPlayer plugin API is for, it's really more of a "Decoder plugin" API. It would be more for implimenting stuff like a FLAC/APE decoder, or Tom's Xcard plugin, etc.

[PGPfan]

Deria,

Please take a look at the links that Jason provided for G-force and Whitecap. Thanks Jason!

Both of those (IMHO) would be an ideal implementation into a music player plugin. If you could successfully create such a beast, I bet a significant number of us users would contribute some $ for your efforts. At least I would.

Ideally, it would be an .stvi that could be used with any .stv one chooses. Right now I'm using the great Meekel .stv that Crashless is making.

Thanks!

-PGPfan

[Narflex]

Originally Posted by stanger89

Just an FWIW, if I understand what the MediaPlayer plugin API is for, it's really more of a "Decoder plugin" API. It would be more for implimenting stuff like a FLAC/APE decoder, or Tom's Xcard plugin, etc.

Actually it's meant to be a full media player replacement, not just a decoder. The examples suggested in this thread are all possible.

[mkanet]

This is great news!

[Mahoney]

Has anyone set about this for Windows Media Player yet? Between DRM and the nVidia limitations on what it will decode in which player, I'd quite like to use Windows Media Player; like it or loathe it it does seem to be the "standard" now.

[deria]

Originally Posted by Mahoney

Has anyone set about this for Windows Media Player yet? Between DRM and the nVidia limitations on what it will decode in which player, I'd quite like to use Windows Media Player; like it or loathe it it does seem to be the "standard" now.

Winamp is able to play DRM'd WMA files just fine. you might want to check out my Winamp MediaPlayer plugin.

[Mahoney]

I'm thinking more of video files in the future, and of some limit nVidia have put in their decoder that means it only decodes surround sound audio in an mpeg file properly if it's played in windows media player. I got the impression Winamp is all about music files, not video; right?

[deria]

Originally Posted by Mahoney

I'm thinking more of video files in the future, and of some limit nVidia have put in their decoder that means it only decodes surround sound audio in an mpeg file properly if it's played in windows media player. I got the impression Winamp is all about music files, not video; right?

Well, Winamp can technically do video, but whether its good at it or bad at it I couldn't say. I'm not sure what NVIDIA limitations you're talking about, though. I can play multichannel mpeg files just fine without using WMP.

[stanger89]

Originally Posted by deria

I'm not sure what NVIDIA limitations you're talking about, though.

Nvidia's decoders won't decode AC3 in Sage.

[CadErik]

Originally Posted by Narflex

We've just released the spec publicly for writing a MediaPlayer plugin for SageTV. This information can be found at:

http://www.sagetv.com/2_papers/MediaPlayerPlugins.txt

I'm trying to write a windows media player plugin and integrate the visualization part and I don't really get it. I believe I should be able to get the visualization in any awt or swt window (I'd like to use WMP as activeX inside an SWT Frame and eventually bridge that). But I don't understand where this part is "plugged". I'd like to have something clean that works in any fullscreen or not fullscreen mode.

Thanks

Erik.

[GKusnick]

Here's a technical question about the interface. Which part is it that triggers the FilePlaybackFinished hook in Sage? I'm guessing it's a particular value (or transition) of getState(), but so far I'm not having much luck figuring out which one. (EOS_STATE does not seem to do it.)

Thanks for any info.

[ARMYB77]

Wow,
This information was released over 18 months ago now and still the only plugins that have been made are all for Music. No one has implemented it's full advantages of video capabilities.
I think GKusnick made some great leaps with his WMP and Parser for WMAs. Does anyone know how hard it would be to modify his source to include WMVs?

With this plugin I see in our future the possibility of a Napster plugin, or maybe something for Zune.

With WMV added to this feature it would give the possibilities of adding VOD such as Netflix, Vongo, CinemaNow, and Movielink.

I talked with Vongo and they seem interested in the possibilities of adding a plugin for SageTV, and MediaPortal.

I understand that it would probably be hard to add DRM support to SageTV core without having to deal with Microsoft. But a plugin is a simple solution. It is worth donating to anyways.

Thanks,
Armyb77

[stuckless]

Does anyone know if a MediaPlayer Plugin could provide simple DVD playback in the Placeshifter client? If so, then I'd consider writing a plugin to provide that support.

[bcjenkins]

This should be fairly straightforward to do if all we're talking about is playing a movie. If you're talking about accessing menus etc, I think it gets harder.

(This from a guy who is not a programmer)

You need something installed on the system to play the movie (VLC?) and then pipe it into the transcode process for the place shifting session. Here's how VisualHub on the Mac does it:

'/Applications/VisualHub.app'/Contents/Resources/play_title '/Volumes/VISUALHUB_DVD/''VIDEO_TS' 1 1 1 2> /dev/null | '''/Library/Application Support/Techspansion/'vh131ffmpeg -y -i - -threads 4 -s 640x480 -r 29.97 -vcodec mpeg4 -g 200 -qmin 5 -b 2048k -async 50 -acodec libfaac -ar 48000 -ac 2 -ab 128k '/Users/bcjenkins/Desktop'/'VIDEO_TS'.temp.mp4 2>> /tmp/vhtemp/1219694381/visualhub_time ; echo done > /tmp/vhtemp/1219694381/visualhub_working

B

[stuckless]

Maybe I'll just write a plugin and see if the placeshifter will actually use it. I just don't know if sage will use the plugin if a placeshifter is being used, or if it will always use it's internal player (which won't show a dvd menu at all). Initially I was thinking that I'd support simple dvd playback (ie, just play the largest title on the disc), but later I'd like to try to actually support dvd menus.

I'm not even concerned about transcoding... I've told my placeshifter to NOT transcode, since my desktop is actually a better machine than my sage server.

I was thinking about running xine/vlc in a slave mode, which is how Sage runs mplayer (i think )

[Thraxius]

I personally have looked at that text file for a bit. I can't make head or tails of it. I am not a Java programmer so it is pretty much greek to me. Could someone point me to a example of someone using this plugin spec so I can try to reverse engineer it and learn what I would like from it?

Yes..I am still around programming silently in the background.

[Fuzzy]

How's this or bringing back an old thread. I'm curious if this has had any upgrades over the years. Namely, if support is there for bluray and hd-dvd. I know normally, if checks for a plugin class with the file extension. However, the docs also mention that it will check for media_player_plugin_class/dvd for video_ts imports. Is there an equivalent for bluray/hd-dvd imports? if so, what is it? my guess would be media_player_plugin_class/bluray, or media_player_plugin_class/bdmv, but I'm not sure if either exists (wouldnt' know where to even look for it).

Either way, how about a minor doc update if this IS the case?

Thanks,
Fuzzy

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

How's this or bringing back an old thread. I'm curious if this has had any upgrades over the years. Namely, if support is there for bluray and hd-dvd. I know normally, if checks for a plugin class with the file extension. However, the docs also mention that it will check for media_player_plugin_class/dvd for video_ts imports. Is there an equivalent for bluray/hd-dvd imports? if so, what is it? my guess would be media_player_plugin_class/bluray, or media_player_plugin_class/bdmv, but I'm not sure if either exists (wouldnt' know where to even look for it).

Either way, how about a minor doc update if this IS the case?

Thanks,
Fuzzy

Narflex? Opus? Anyone?? ;-)

[Opus4]

I'm told that it would look for "media_player_plugin_class/bluray".

- Andy