Extra extra

Puppetmaster

Eeyore — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 15:37:00 GMT

I found this nice tool to remote-control my MP3 collection and even, if I want , my PC Zapper with my cellphone. The good thing of puppetmaster is that it bluetooth-remote-controls WinAmp (and mediaplayer and zoomplayer and outlook and lots of others) and gives you info on what track is playing on your cellphone screen.
I own a nokia 6230i which is java-enabled and has bluetooth. So is my PC.
When installed, Puppetmaster is a nice solution for my audio-needs. I added some extra scripts (more on that next post) to add functionality and off it went. Really easy, actually
The lousy thing of any media center solution, including PCzapper, is that, when you want to listen to your music, you have to watch a large (in my case very large) blue screen which sums up some titles and the music coming from my TV speakers.
So I decided to solve an annoyance that bothered me for quite a while:
I was to make a direct connection to my stereo-set from the scart plug that comes with PCzapper. An audio-breakout, so to say.
Why isn't this built in in the scart plug out-of-the-box? It gives quite some additional value...
I flipped open the PCzapper scart connector (you don't need brute force and you can actually click it back together when you're finished) and welded a short piece of two-paired cable on the audio-pins (pins 2,4 and 6 are needed; pin 2 is left signal, 6 is right signal and 4 is ground for both sides), drilled a small hole in the scart casing through where the new cable goes and clicked everything back together.
I connected 2 female cinch plugs on the other side of the cable (I used a short piece of cable, so I could extend from there to whereever I need the signal) and plugged it in the amplifier of my stereoset. Lovely! Works like a charm! Bonus is that the movies I watch on the zapper also have stereo sound over the hifi set.
If everything went this easy, I'd stop writing about it....

Update: puppetmaster is a goner. You can no longer buy this software. Too bad...

PCZapper changes (and XS4ALL news)

Eeyore — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 03:36:00 GMT

As of a couple of days ago, my internet provider XS4ALL appears to give away PCZapper Pro to all it's users. A little bit too late for me, but what the hack...
On PCZapper, quite some things have changed also. It doesn't display on pczapper.tv yet, but changes are eminent, if you look at pczapper.nl, you see a new range of products is added, and the old hardware parts are left behind. A new grey control box, new remotes (no 'sleek design remotes', regretably) and a full range of products. Look on pczapper.nl for the product-changes.
It seems as if the zappers have been working their secret mission since taking over the bankrupt HomeLinc inventory to come to a newly defined product. The new line goes well with the free, payed pc and full versions. Hopefully, we get more insights into tweaking now the coprporate strategy is rolled out. Let's hope PCZapper remains heading towards an open platform, giving out manuals and insights as PalmButler used to do and better, where everybody can change looks and content in a breeze.

Let's now head to quality tweaking tools, WiFi connection for the tv, and stuff like a PPC and a Phone version, preferably with a content management system that stores your favorites centrally, so you can enjoy what you want in any place, anytime. Am I going too fast? Just say so... I only hope I'm not going fast enough.

update: pczapper is no longer given away by XS4ALL.

PalmButler

Eeyore — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 13:06:00 GMT

Quite some people are asking about the PalmButler software from HomeLinc and how to reactivate it.
They are satisfied with what the PalmButler software does and don't want to buy the upgrade PCZapper offers to change the software to PC Zapper software.
On this page a Palmbutler user offers a way to activate the old software (version 3.3.1) again.
You can still create your own containers for it the way you could when homelinc was still in business, the only thing you cannot do is upgrade.

RSS and PC Zapper

Eeyore — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 22:23:00 GMT

Just a post to point out a really good intitiative on the web:

Here is a container creator that converts RSS video-feeds into containers you can import in your zapper.
It's cut-and-paste, so really easy to do.
The guy has a nice example of it online, which converts the yahoo movietrailer-RSS's (what's the plural of RSS?) into this container.

Give it a try! It's a bit slow, but that's because the pages are created on the fly.

Zapper in a resizable screen

Eeyore — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 04:11:00 GMT

I do a lot of trial and error on the zapper. In itself ,that's not bad. What IS bad, though, is that my tv set is in the living room and my PC is in my study. So if I want to troubleshoot a plugin or a container, I have to go two flights up and down from TV to PC and vice versa.
So I searched for a solution to view a mirror of the TVscreen output on my computer PC. Together with the virtual remote I could then troubleshoot without all the walking.
Well, guess what? I found one. It's called UltraMon.
On my screen, it looks like this:

The bonus of this is that I now can use the zapper on my PC without going through the screen settings of the zapper everytime I want to use it in my study (with the hazard of not putting them back when I'm done and ending up running 2 stairs up and down to reset the settings after all).
Nothing short of amazing. Just so you'd know.

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

WebSite

Eeyore — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 22:49:00 GMT

I launched a website with basically the same content as here. This will stay the work in progress, while the destilled content will also end up there.
You're welcome to go there:
PCZapper on Steroids

UPDATE: XMLTV works again

Eeyore — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 16:09:00 GMT

Been trying anything: reinstalling XMLTV (not much to install really, but recreating listings, trying out new binaries, even tried to install perl on apache to make a clean start). Nothing worked. Until yesterday.
It just started again. Hurrah!
But what the heck was the problem in the first place? New code-formatting at tvgids.nl and returning to old code formatting? Anyway, I'm just happy it all works again as it should. Let the recordings begin again, and long live GBPVR!

Free and Light versions

Eeyore — Wed, 15 Mar 2006 16:18:00 GMT

Haven't found the time myself, but PCzapper introduced free versions of the Zapper software, to be used on the pc (or laptop). So, now we all can enjoy a free media portal with frequently updated content! Cool!
And maybe it's possible to extend it if you like it by buying the hardware to connect to your tv seperately. On the pczapper.tv (not on the pczapper.nl though) webshop you can buy extention cables, remotes and IR recievers.
Then you could start out with the fancy RF-like remote instead of the very basic (and not-so-eyecatching) basic remote!

Revenge of the oldies

Eeyore — Fri, 13 Jan 2006 18:45:00 GMT

Digging in the box that contains my digital past, I not only nostalgically cuddled my old C64 (with cassette tapes, ancient shit),

but also my not-so-ancient jornada720.

I bought the thing 2 years ago as a calendar and a bookreader. With its built in keyboard it was a great joy in anonymous hotel rooms back in the times that wifi wasn't that common. Last year I bought a wifi card for it, but not long after that I bought a Ipaq rx3715 because it can do all of the above, but also runs TomTom, you know, the mans dream come true: a friendly woman telling you the right way to get to your destination. So, the 720 was stashed away deep in the nostalgia box. Until today.

It was realy easy to connect the thing to the stereo system and, through the built-in explorer, put some shortcuts to webcasts on it. But that's all too easy. I want to play my own mp3's on my stereo without firing up the TV (it's a big tv and I seem to not like the interface PCZapper invented for it). So I installed Shoutcast on my home system and installed BrowseAmp on top, so I could see what's playing and manipulate the tracklist from my Jornada. It's a dream!

Not the best dream I had, because the touchscreen is rather sloppy and the wifi connection barely good enough for listening to webcasts, especially if some torrents are storming towards my computer, but especially the shoutcast/browseamp part is ver satisfying.

And what to do with the C64? This maybe?