Want to develop "Play to Extender" option

[dlevey]

Hi all,

First let me say that I am a complete nooob in the Studio area.

I have arrived here at the Studio forum at the suggestion of GKusnick in an effort to develop something that would allow for any content to be played to an extender via the client interface.

I would imagine this in the form of an additional menu option item that would appear if enabled to allow the user to choose to play the video/music/playlist/folder/whatever to an extender.

I've glanced through the Studio guide, looked through the tutorials, opened studio and poked around, haven't seen anything terribly obvious.

I would appreciate any suggestions of where to start and a general idea of a roadmap as to how someone would go about making this happen.

Thanks much in advance for any and all help.

[GKusnick]

My first piece of advice would be to actually work through the tutorial exercises instead of just reading about them in the manual, in order to get some hands-on experience with how Studio works and how widget code gets executed.

It would also help us target our advice better if you give us some idea of your level of coding skill (if any).

If you bring up the menu you want to modify in the UI before opening Studio, that will help you zero in on the general area of code you'll be working in. There's also a Find command for locating widgets containing specific text. (My Studio Tools plugin includes some more advanced search options if you want to experiment with that.)

The tutorials should cover the basics of how to add menu items to an existing menu. For actually making things happen on another client, there are a couple of existing class libraries that can do that (including my Tools Library).

The general process of how to create and package UI mod plugins has been spelled out in some previous newbie threads, so you might trying searching for those. You'll want to package your mod as a plugin even if it's only for your own use, so it will be easily portable to future revisions of the stock UI.

That should help you get started. We can deal with more specific questions as they arise.

[tmiranda]

I totally agree with Greg that you should first work your way through the tutorials. They will give you a foundation to work from.

Next, copy your SageTV7.xml to MyExperiments.xml, open the experimental xml and poke around to see how things work. Think about what you want to do, find something in the default STV that is similar to what you want to do, and see how it's done.

Next try changing things to see what happens. (Be aware that some changes you make will not show up in the actual rendered UI until after the STV is reloaded. The easiest way to reload the STV is to shutdown the client and restart it again.)

Other things I'd suggest:

- Install Greg's Studio Tools Plugin. It provides functionality that IMHO is essential.

- Make sure you do not have any other Plugins installed. They will add complexity you don't need at the moment and will mess up your STVi when you are ready for that.

Tom

[Mike]

This is for SageMC, but it might be of some help. There is another utility that can turn an extender off over tcp Ip which could be useful with this type of thing.

edit: it can turn the extender on or off.

[wrems]

Not sure if it's helpful or not, but BMT can play to extender. It might help you until you can get yours up and running.