writing scripts for Zapper

Update container creator

Eeyore — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 01:45:00 GMT

I updated the container creator for PCzapper to function following some stricter rules.
Added the Type=VideoStream and converted NAME tag to Name tag. Apparently capitals only is no longer valid.
It should be working fine again now.

Easy way of adding media

Eeyore — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 00:37:00 GMT

PC zapper has a new way of adding links. It's all very easy.
You add a new browserURL and add the following
http://www.pczapper.tv/mediamanager_client/player.php?url= plus the URL of your media file.
where the URL is the full adress including http://, for example
http://www.pczapper.tv/mediamanager_client/player.php?url=_
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvFmQSHWZNU

On this page there is a list of supported medialinks.

Or, of course, you can use the feature in Eeyore's very basic container creator to make this into a nice container!

Media Center

Eeyore — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 01:37:00 GMT

Isn't this what it's ment to do?
Mads Villesen created this plugin to control Media Center Edition with your PC Zapper remote.
If you run Media Edition, be sure to try this one out!
It's designed for the 'sleek' remote, but of course it can be adapted to do more with the basic remote (that one has more buttons like a rec button and channel up and down buttons) so get creative and add some lines to the script!

Google video on PC Zapper

Eeyore — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 19:25:00 GMT

I added an [Add Google Video] button to the online container creator , for use with the opera9.psm plugin.
Now you can easily add Google video links to your own containers.

More to come! If you have suggestions on what to add or change to the creator, I'd like to hear of it.

Getting video-content (and google-vid solution)

Eeyore — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 18:37:00 GMT

Most times, it's not hard to find the video you're looking for.
Especially if you are looking for any videolinks, a simple google search will suffice, like funny +filetype:wmv.
Or, in the page containing the videolinks, you rightclick on a link and paste it in the container creator. Sometimes you even have to look in the sourcecode of the webpage, but mostly that's all.
If you can't find it, there's several tools to give it another try.
First, of course, there's URLsnooper.
URLsnooper is a piece of donationware (freeware unless you think it's worth your money) I brought up in the fabchannel article, which captures media-urls that are loaded by webpages. Give it a try, it looks something like this:

If that's too complicated or doesn't work, you can try a firefox plugin called unplug, which basically, once installed, gives a page with medialinks for each website you want:

Now, you surf to a site, press the button, and unplug gives you the links.
Just copy and paste them into your containers.

A bit different are embedded links and the like. Firefox has a plugin to deal with that also: it's called (very catchy) MediaPlayerConnectivity. When installed, it replaces the video's on the pages you visit with a black MPCbutton and some other handy right-click stuff. Basically, with this, it is really easy to copy-and-paste andy video-URL on any website. The trick is (in my humble opinion) to swich off the MPC for all filetypes, and when you want a video and cannot easily get the URL, switch the filetypes on and refresh the page. Once at work, it looks like this:

Still, the problem of getting the vids in containers is persistent. Or is it? I dumped the links in the Zapper in quite some formats, and one actually worked.
In full screen, presented to me with great awe, with only the grey playbar on the bottom to remind me it's a google-vid, there it was: an swf file played on the zapper!!!
Apparently, the trick is to associate swf files in the zapper with MediaPlayer BUT CREATE THE LINKS IN THE CONTAINER (or in the Zapper Media Manager) AS WEB LINKS!!!
The code will be like this in the container:
<Item Type="BROWSERURL"><Name>IT'S NAME</Name><URL>ACTUAL URL (being 12 lines long)</URL></ITEM>

I'm not sure it's ment to be this way, but hey, it apparently works.

The toughest thing would be to get videocontent from within flash-applications, like from the dreaded fabchannel, starting to play full screen.
when you really want the video, I'd go for downloading (ripping) the content instead of trying to find the link, which is way more easy: look here for instance).
While digging into this matter, I stranded in decompilers, ASP hacks, PHP reverse-tools: not worth the effort. In that case, you're better off getting the Opera plugin to work and watching the flash video's on your Zapper through that route.
But until now Fabcahnnel won't play fullscreen.
Grr

PCzapper plugin for Opera 9

Eeyore — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 21:44:00 GMT

Hi all, For everybody that is experimenting with the opera oportunities: here is the slightly edited plugin for opera 9. The one that's also there and is called opera is for opera 7.
Arrows up and down are for link selection, arrows left and right are for scrolling up (left) and down (right), Selecting the links through [play] or [ok].

To install: First install Opera from here. Now download the plugin file. Open the pczapper media manager. On the right side, click plugins, click add, browse for the opera9 plugin file. Click Ok.
Now under associations, search for .htm and .html, click on them and change from web browser to opera and click Change.
Ok again and Opera is the default browser for PCzapper.

Opera - the nice PC Zapper frontend

Eeyore — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 21:04:00 GMT

Last post I used the Opera browser to create clickable pages for use with the PC Zapper. I stated it actually ment using Opera web browser as a front end for the PC zapper (just as I created the script for the GBPVR to use PCZapper as a VCR earlier).
Now let's explore this a little further.

There's quite some sites that use RSS feeds for links to news items or direct video access or whatever. No way to watch them on your tv-screen. Not yet. But with Opera, new possibilities emerge.
On rss2html.com you can easily convert an RSS link into a web-page. (Try, it's realy self-explanatory) And with Opera, you can click your way through the links in these pages. The link that's created is easily imported into (a container for) pc zapper. Now, since you associated the htm and html extentions to opera plugin (see previous post), you easily browse through your rss feeds the way you want it: from your couch, on your TV-set!
You can even take this one step further: in another post I talked about RSS, VCR and torrents. Imagine, on your zapper, you click through an RSS feed from a torrent-tracker, this autodownloads the torrent you clicked and when it's finished downloading, you access it from your couch... Isn't life a wonder?
Happy Zapping!

google video workaround

Eeyore — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 16:25:00 GMT

Well, I found a workaround, but it's not an easy one.
This appears as if we use Opera as a front-end. And actually, we do.
We need to create a web-page that looks good on tv (so BIG LETTERS), in which we cun-n-paste our video links, and then navigate that page with the remote control from the zapper.

My setup at home is that I use the zapper on my TV set, and not on the computer. So I need Opera to appear on the TV only. I use firefox for browsing on my computer, so that's not a big issue for me.
I have an NVideo videocard, which has a function to open applications on the screen you want.
The settings screen looks like this: (in dutch)

Main thing is on the right side: I add an app, I tell Nvidea that it opens on screen 2 (TV)

We need Opera plus it's plugin (you can find it here). Add the plugin to pczapper config in media manager.
Now you manually create the webpage containing the links (find a html-template here).
Add this webpage to your meda manager and open it with the zapper. Hopefully this worked and you have video's.

Now tweak opera to not have any toolbars, searchbars, statbars and stuff, make it fullscreen and maybe more to be as functional as it gets on your TV set.
Quite a workaround for a simple thing the zapper isn't recognising: URL's that send back data to a server!!
Hopefully they get a fix on that soon...

Google video's: experiment failed

Eeyore — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 00:43:00 GMT

Hi all. Haven't been posting for a while, due to holidays, work, family growth and the like...
Guess I won't be posting regular any time soon, but hey, every scrap of good info is still, well, good info.
I've been toying with the google video's and especially how to embed them in the containers.

Since the google vids are basically flash, I first tried to open them with media player 10 on my computer. That works like a charm! So, first thing to do is associate .swf files to media player in the PCZapper Media Manager (the orange thingy next to your computers clock).
Next, rewrite the tag to open the video and start playing it.
It's a very basic tag really:
http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-[your movie id goes here]&autoplay=true

Try it on google video`s. If you hover over the movies, a doc-id is in the url. That's the one we're talking about here.

Now, for making a container in which to implement this. Tried the URL as usual, in the container creator, but the Zapper Manager doesn't want that.
Changed virtually everything, from the cItem tag to include all possible values, to associations for the browser URL to MediaPlayer: Zapper Manager doesnt' want to deal with tags that end with numbers, I guess. Or the http:// part is what it doesn't swallow. I'm not sure.
Gonna try and write a plugin to let zapper think MediaPlayer is a browser. Maybe that'll work. I'll let you know!

Update of Container Creator

Eeyore — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 19:27:00 GMT

I updated the Eeyore's very basic container creator to include a help file.
Hope this helps y'all.