Rainmeter "SageTV" Skin

[darcilicious]

I said I might and so I did I spent part of last weekend and most of this weekend so far diving back into Rainmeter (I had toyed with it once before about two years ago).

I have a proof of concept of sorts working within the JSMeterV theme by parsing the RSS feed of the Recording Schedule (via the web plugin) using regexp (ugh).

I can continue on this route but it will most likely limit the ability of others from having more than five recordings displayed (easily unless you speak fluent regexp ) (Why five? Because that's how many recordings I like to view in advance )

So. I'm wondering if there's anyone out there familiar with Lua and if so if there's any interest in scripting a more robust parser. I'm totally willing to do the "front end" but having a more robust parser means that not only will it be easier for other folks to modify the "skin" but will also mean that there could be some nicer "display" options (movies vs. tv shows would be dealt with more nicely for example, as could the date/time/channel info). There's a pretty good RSS parser in the JSMeterV theme that I could send along that will probably make the task a lot less daunting as well (I think).

In the meantime, what I have working so far:

• Click on "SageTV" to open web browser on user defined web page (e.g. http://sagetvwebserver/sage/RecordingSchedule)
• Click on "Recording Schedule" to refresh skin (thereby refreshing all the data retrieved from the web server)
• Display five upcoming recordings
• Hover over title to get show/movie description in a tool tip
• Click on title to open up web page for recording details

Left to implement:

• Display recording status (nearly done)
• Display system messages (in progress)
• Display/hide free disk space status
• User-defined refresh interval
• Check for "null" conditions (e.g. less than five upcoming recordings exist)

Considering:

• Dynamically adjust number of recordings displayed
• Display/hide Now Playing

And if you're interested in this skin (current version), let me know and I can send it along later today or tomorrow. Will have something fairly solid (with or without a Lua parser) by the end of the weekend I imagine.

[JerryB]

Congratulations. It looks great.

I don't know anything about rainmaker programming so I took a slightly different approach and have been working on a small desktop application, sort of like a pseudo-gadget, without the need for the windows gadget library so that it'll run under windows 8, but the appearance of your program is certainly better than what I've been able to come up with so far.

[darcilicious]

Thanks!

Rainmeter actually makes the appearance part pretty nice and easy since a "skin" (which is the gadget) runs under a "theme" and that's where most of the heavy lifting is done. A theme can define the font style, colors, background images, etc. A skin can override those or use them. In this case, I didn't have to lift a finger to make the skin fit in with the theme which came with that nice transparent sidebar, etc.

The "hard" part of a skin is using the x-y coordinate system to get the placement of every little thing right and using whatever core functions are available for getting a hold of the data. And in my case, learning enough regexp to shoot myself in the foot

As far as Rainmeter programming -- it's a pretty primitive scripting "language" where everything is either a Measure (e.g. the data) or a Meter (e.g. the display). I'm not finding it quite as awkward as I did a few years ago... but you could spend waaaaay too many hours customizing your desktop with this thing (I actually spent most of my time before today trying to get a "now playing" skin for Spotify working to my satisfaction; it's not quite there yet but I'm waiting to hear back from the guy who scripted a "marquee" solution for scrolling text...)

The only other gadget I'm looking to replace is the WHS "shortcut" gadget; the shortcuts will be a snap but I really like the animations that the original has and I'm not even sure if that can be replicated in Rainmeter or not.

[Dargason]

Looks great!

I'd love to tinker with the lua... I've never really done any programming with it, although I've read a bit about it. The only way I'll really learn it though would be to get my hands dirty.

No promises, however, as I haven't got a lot of free time these days.

[darcilicious]

Sounds good There's no rush; pretty committed to regexp for this initial iteration but yeah, some additional flexibility that would come from using lua (I think) would be nice.

I'll send along what I have, with a write-up to go with it and some pointers to Rainmeter's lua stuff later today or tomorrow latest...

[Dargason]

Sounds perfect.

[Dargason]

I downloaded the "Evereader" lua-based RSS reader skin and installed it. Tweaked the url addresses and pretty quickly got the thing pulling in upcoming recordings, recent recordings, upcoming movies, scheduling conflicts, and intelligent suggestions. There's a lot you can do with it, pretty easily.

I haven't touched the meters at all because I figure you've already done a lot of that work. If you send me what you've got I can start integrating it and maybe adding some features.

I also read the lua code and sample skin pretty thoroughly while I was at work today. While I was doing that, I kept thinking of other skins that might be nice to have and fun to do:

Remote control for an extender
An EPG skin that lets you see what's on and schedule recordings
A skin for resolving recording conflicts
A 'dashboard' skin that lets you see the status of your server (memory use, heap use, warnings, etc) as well as some buttons to restart the server, launch BMT, etc.
A media player skin that would let you browse your media library and play the media... maybe even with playlists and such.

I'm still very much a noob and some of these might be impossible, but I think most of the major pieces are there.

[darcilicious]

Rockin! I sent you a PM earlier today -- PM me your email and I've got the draft email ready to go!

[Dargason]

Ok, I think we're ready for a release of some sort... I haven't got all the installation instructions finished but I thought I'd post a few screenshots and see if anyone is interested in trying it out.

Features
- It's a rainmeter skin, so the look is very customizable. The skin itself simplifies this by bringing out many commonly tweaked variables into a central include file. The skin has been designed and tested with the JSMeterV suite of skins, but can be used with any theme you choose.
- The skin monitors your SageTV webserver, and indicates the alert status, recording status, and unresolved conflicts. Clicking the icon takes you to the appropriate webpage on the server to handle the situation.
- Displays the amount of used and available video recording disk space.
- Shows 3 configurable lists of airings. The most common one is of course the 'upcoming recordings.' Items being currently recorded are highlighted in red. There are 2 other lists that you can access through the arrows. All 3 lists can be configured to show whatever SageTV RSS feed you want, such as 'upcoming movies' or 'intelligent suggestions.'
- Mouseover an airing brings up the detailed information on the recording.
- Click on the airing to bring up the Detail Information page on the SageTV webserver, where you can set/cancel recordings, set watched flag, etc.
- Click on the SageTV title to launch the home page for your webserver. (or anywhere you want really...)
- The skin can be configured to display recording/alert/conflicts information in the system tray.

[Dargason]

Anyone still using this? Got any feedback for me?

[darcilicious]

I am Daily, love it as I have switched out everything to Rainmeter (for a few months now). Don't have any suggestions at this point... Thanks again for running with it!

[wbarber69]

how to do this. me want

[jusjoken]

Where do we get a copy of the SageTV skin for Rainmeter?

I have just started playing around with Rainmeter and would like to see what some of the possibilities are.... it seems like a great desktop enhancement.... especially with the Windows Gadgets all but gone Funny I never realized how often I used the analog clock I had in my top right corner of the screen before upgrading to Windows 8 and having it gone until I installed Rainmeter and found a few clocks to try out.

k

[Dargason]

I didn't have a place to host it, so it's in my dropbox:

https://dl.dropbox.com/u/5155376/Sag...tor_1.0.rmskin

Make sure you have Rainmeter (at least version 2.4) installed, then double-click the package to install it. Navigate to /skins/SageTV and read the ReadMe.txt file for configuration instructions.

Let me know if you have any problems with it.

[darcilicious]

Here's what Mike/Dargason sent me most recently.

I think you should be able to unzip and if you already have Rainmeter installed (pretty much a requirement), you should be able to double-click on the .rmskin file and it will load up in Rainmeter. You can then right-click on the Rainmeter system tray icon, then navigate to Skins>>SageTV>>StageTV.ini

The skin will be mostly blank since it doesn't know to talk to your SageTV web server yet. Go to My Documents\Rainmeter\Skins\SageTV and edit the UserConfig.inc file to reflect your webserver settings:

; PERSONALIZATION VARIABLES
; change username:password to fit your webserver name and password
Authentication=http://username:password@	
; change the IP address and port to point at your webserver				
Server=#Authentication#IP_ADDRESS:PORTNO

There are more settings in there that you can play with to control which feeds/bits of info show up (there are three to cycle through currently) and how many entries show up (e.g. I have five showing, the default is 9 I believe):

; Change URL1, UR2, or URL3 to point at whatever airings lists you find interesting
; To get a new one, navigate your brower to the page you like, and right-click on the blue RSS image at the top of the page,
; select 'copy link address' and paste the result here.  Then replace the address part with #server#.  Then change the title
; to something appropriate.
;  No, you can't just create a 4th URL... yet.
URL1Title=Upcoming Recordings
URL1=#Server#/sage/public/Rss/RecordingSchedule
URL2Title=Upcoming Movies
URL2=#Server#/sage/public/Rss/Search?TimeRange=48&Categories=film&Categories=movie&Categories=Movie&SearchString=
URL3Title=Intelligent Suggestions
URL3=#Server#/sage/public/Rss/IRSuggestions

; Change the ItemsToShow variable to select how many airings to show in each list.
; Valid range is 1 through 9.
ItemsToShow=5

Save the file, the right-click on the skin and select "refresh skin".

I think that's it -- post if you have issues and I'll help out as I can!

[Dargason]

Thanks Darci!

[darcilicious]

No, thank YOU! Great little skin, has enabled me to drop all Windows widgets (well, that, and a little launcher skin I cobbled to gether to replace a 3rd party WHS Windows gadget as well )



(Docks in the second image are from ObjectDock 2 Plus)

[jusjoken]

Excellent.... something more to play with

Thanks
k

[wbarber69]

so cool. I wonder what it would take to add don't like buttons next to upcoming recordings so I can manually tell sage not to record crap I don't want

[KryptoNyte]

Having trouble getting the skin to connect to my SageTV server. A couple quick questions;

I know the IP address of the server, which SageTV Port# does this skin use?
Answer - whatever port you are using for the SageTV Webserver.

In the username and password@, does the "@" need to remain?
Answer - yes

EDIT: Once I finally realized this is using the SageTV Webserver Plugin, things came around.