Xmydia, again?

Hi Folks, as the winter draws near it looks like time to a revise Xmydia. After working on the Interface, and picking up some new toys its time to draw it all together.

first off, the ps3 continues to evolve but we're still stuck with the Opera browser. New netflix, photo app, etc, etc.. but, still the same crappy browser. I was hoping sony would fix this by now. One of the main problems to over come is the ram limitation as well as the craptastic browser.

If you did get xmydia running, you would eventially encounter the out of memory error.  nothing to do but a refresh. now im not going to stop development on the user interface portion, I still like the idea of the thumbs, however the animation is probably pushing it. I have to admit thought Xmydia ver 1 was very buggy, but hey what do you expect for free.

Whats changed at my end, well i picked up a Iphone and Ipad, pretty good devices in their own right, but I think they can do more...

So in closing, heres the skinny, Im looking to tighten the code even further, the scrapping at least, and streamline the interface to reduce memory usage. Also I like my Ipad/iphone, so I want to throw that into the mix. below is a video experement of ipad to ps3 interface. basic idea is to have the Ipad act like the menu and the ps3 serve the main course. Enjoy..... oh and sorry about the side ways video, stupid iphone.

****p.s. one more thing, the links for download arent working, I would recommend holding off anyways untill the new build is complete, as im planning a revamp inside out.....stay tuned...

new update for you vista/win7 users

Hi Folks,
Heres an update for you guys using ie8, I'm not one to update my machine until i have to and the old version of xmydia was designed to run under winxp ie7 also my version of vista was woefully under updated. When i updated to vista ie 8 and brought my vista up to speed I discovered some issues with the update function.

If you are currently having issues with the update function not working and are running vista/win7 with IE8, this patch should help.....

just download the patch and overwrite the guts folder with this new one.
http://rapidshare.com/files/380170377/xmydia-vista-ie8patch.zip
If your version of xmydia is working good, dont update with this patch.

 I had anticipated doing a much over due update to the program this month, but all i can say is damn you icelandick volcano damn you. In either case, an update of xmydia is in the works.

PAL Version... I think

Hi folks,
Simple update for our friends across the sea.... try this PAL version, I think the aspect ratio should be good, just copy it into your wwroot folder and access it. haven't tested it, hope it works for you.

http://rapidshare.com/files/372847822/XMydia-PAL.zip

windows 7 and Vista install update

Hi folks,
heres an update for you guys running the new OSes the site is writen in classic asp, so if you made it past installing iis on your vista or your win7 machines heres a link to get you over the last hurdle.

http://blog.krisvandermast.com/SettingUpClassicASPOnWindowsVistaAndIIS7.aspx

Don't forget you need to add an exception within your windows firewall so you can access it from your ps3

just got done a vista install and it went, well lets just say it went. but xmydia is running.
ooopss I thought I had it happening, heres one more change... you need to enable parent paths, I used a lot of includes and mappaths...

release day!!

Here you go folks, this is as far as im taking it. remember you need to have personal webserver installed on winxp, if you have win7 or vista installed, i never tried it on either but it should work. if you do manage to install it drop me a line. keep in mind this is not a standalone application, it basically is a website that you run locally on the machine you have ps3 media server running on.
http://rapidshare.com/files/371949789/xmydia.zip

remember get iis happening first then dump this into the root folder of it. theres some more instructions in the zip.

good luck, oh and one more thing, if you manage to blow up your computer, dont blame me

updated screens

Hi folks time for an update. I have some more screens available... so lets jump in
first off I've updated the thumbs display.

the update function has been adapted to grab the rating, and that rating now appears as the number of stars under the name, and the name now has the green glow effect to it. Everything flies from left to right and right to left. you'll see in the youtube video.

There is a new icon now, these turning gears icon appears if you have added new movies to your movie directory. Thats right, all you do is dump the movie into your directory on your computer and thats it.
when it appears you click on the icon and the following update actions
occur.

when you click on that icon a list appears with the title you added to your movie folder. They appear because they dont have thumbnails or information contained in your xml library. you need to update them.





this is what updating looks like. Once the update is complete this menu disappears as well as the gears icon. The movie should now appear in you titles complete with thumbnail, genre, description and rating.


one of the last updates is the change genre section. lets change the genre of bolt,  to update click on the genre itself while looking at the DVD cover as seen below.

You should now see a drop list of the genres appear next to the genre. This genre list is dynamically generated by all of the distinct genres in your movie directory. You then scroll down and select the genre the system will update the genre and then prompt you below that the Item Updated.

so folks release time is almost upon us. The only bug I have left is the stars need to appear in the dvd cover section as well.



Some things to note. I found that when I loaded all the titles I had the system did act a bit jumpy but if I just used genres and the A to Z listing things went smooth as silk. Heres a rough video of the whole thing in action...enjoy


opps video is a bit too small on the blog, you might want to view it full screen or view it on youtube.

XMydia lives...sorta

    We now have a name and a release is very close. I have two kinks to work out and then its time to put this project to bed. Kink one, auto updating, kink two,  star listings in the review. But I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.



Word of warning here, this release wont be a simple double click install like other progs, as this is in essence a website running from your computer. your gonna have to learn something....
 Here's what you will need..

1. A pc running winxp (sorry mac guys maby when i learn php) or if you want to try with vista or win7 go ahead,  all I know is it works on winxp pro as thats what I have.. actually you could run it on a mac but you'd have to create the xml's by hand..

2. IIs installed, heres a link to get you on your way.
http://www.webwizguide.com/kb/asp_tutorials/installing_iis_winXP_pro.asp
 within IIs your going to need to create a virtual directory called "video" and map it to the movie directory listed below...

3. a movie directory structure like so..
Folder name "VIDEO" movies/avi's within that folder.
Two additional folders within "VIDEO" named "thumbnails" and "jacket".
 (sorry folks it doesn't support advanced directory structures, but a future release could accommodate tv folders with episodes dropped inside. Right now I'm just concerned with my dvd collection)

4. a place to get dvd cover art and jackets, although the program will generate thumbnails and drop a default jacket in there for you, I like going here for the jackets www.cdcovers.cc then I usually resize them and replace the default.

5. You should already be running PS3 Media Server, if not get that fired up, but not the beta version.

6. popcorn....
 
I had planned to release this weekend, but the bug list was bigger then I thought. gonna try upload a video of the latest this week, but most of the work was on the backend...

New Update

Hi folks,

After some review of the current program I decided to do some updates to the interface, as well as refinements....

A lot of the time spent was trying to figure out how to get flash to communicate with the PS3 media server, this component is almost there and as a result there is now a new icon on the main

screen, this icon will flash until access to the media server is established.

I've also update the thumbnails display. I decided to go with larger thumbs, but with only 15 displayed at a time. After some more consideration I turned the transparency back on, originally I shut it off to speed up the animation, but I found that the performance was not greatly effected if I slowed the animation down.

heres the new screen shot below...

The buttons have been updated with a transparency effect and I've changed the color scheme to greens and blues. I removed the top title bar and removed the genres list. In order to change genres you just click on the Genres icon or use the up down buttons of the controller. The menu item itself now disappears when you move the cursor out of the top left of the screen. I went for a more is less kind of idea.

When you click on the movie thumbnail a new screen appears on top, its displayed below...

This display lists the movie description and the two play buttons give you the option of trying to play it directly from your movie directory or having it stream through the PS3 media server. I'm still going to update the play buttons, they don't fit within the program.

One last refinement I made was finishing the control of the program, I was able to program in some limited controller function, below is the breakdown...

The last piece of the puzzle though is the ability to edit the movies xml from within flash, lets say you want to update the genre or the description, or even add a new movie without having to regenerate the entire movie directory, it sure would be nice to do that from the ps3. Once that's completed, I'll post the finished software with installation instructions. In the mean time I may post a video on youtube of what I have so far in action, just to gauge the response.

Hi all, just created a quick flash movie of the media system in action, here's the download link... playerinaction

its a flash video, I didnt want to make it too huge...
enjoy.
ok now im on youtube check it out

something interesting

Hi folks, when I started the project, my main purpose was to get a better interface happening for the ps3, the interface is now built and I'm currently touching up elements with the graphics. After doing some more testing I discovered that there were some files in my collection that would not play on the playstation3, I was getting the famous o file not supported. So I began to think, perhaps I do need the use of a media streamer/transcoder... After further study and testing I am now pleased to announce that the interface I'm currently building now supports the ps3 media streamer. So where am I at? well, these are the things I plan to wrap up...

1. full flash adding/updating of media files (right now everything is running through a assortment of java and asp scripts that dynamically build the xml catalogs)

2. finalize the user interface(graphics wise)

3. The genres drop lists needs to be automatically generated from the xml, right now its hardcoded into the Flash files(you'd be stuck with the genres I code in)

4. Thumbnails... I'm debating this one, and i think the final version will still depend on you folks getting those from the internet yourselves.

5. finally I would like to run everything from a portable server and get away from using iis for winxp. Ideally this whole package should run from a thumb drive that you can move from computer to computer.

so far so good

Hi all,
if you been reading the blog so far I've figured out the steaming part to some extent, and I'm working out the presentation part. I went back to the drawing board and did some surfing on the ps3 just to see what type of content it can handle. I'm running the latest firmware and thankfully sony decided to include flash 9 support. From there I began to focus my search on flash websites. The bulk of the content was slow and laggy but I did catch a break on some pages. As long as content was presented without too much animation or scrolling, the ps3 was able to keep up. I then began looking for free flash templates and came across flashmo.com there was a nice template there that did kind of what I wanted. This is the one I grabbed..



Yippie, now its time to learn flash, luckily I have access to such things and began to get to work... After getting a handle of the basic structure/layout and programing structure I was able to break down the components and how they function. In a nut shell, the template was pulling content from a XML document mapping where the photos are stored and contained for each image (root). There was a seperate folder for the actual displayed images. If you go check out the free flash site and look at the template you will know what I'm talking about. After several days of work where am I at? heres the new screen capture....
The covers I searched around the internet for, if you look you will find them. Now what I have after revising the code (genre sorting/directory listing) and updating some images/effects from the template we now have something more respectable. I may still revise some of the interface, I like buttons that fly around. As a side note, I had to write a program to build the xml doc, I can do the leg work to get covers but I needed a way to populate the xml with my directory listing/genre/description its now working like a champ. Now I am almost finished, when I do get this done, since its built from a free template, you will get this free as well. oh and by the way this works great on the ps3 and since its web based it works on any pc/mac connected to your network.
stay tuned, a release is pretty close.
if you want to comment please do, accidentally had it disabled.

quick update....

So far what Ive done is setup iis on my home pc, its a hp p4 2.66 running winxp. Its got a pretty low grade everything in it, but ive only really used it for skype, some word processing and web browsing. Anyways, I've determined the only way into the ps3 besides media server, is through the web browser. After doing the configuring for iis on the pc I was able to do a directory listing of all my movies. Kind of like the picture below.
What I discovered was that my movies would buffer and play to the playstation when clicked on. I'm not an expert at streaming, in fact dont know much about it, so I'm only assuming that this was just a straight file transfer from the pc to ps3 where the playstation would play the file as it downloaded. I was able to watch several movies and I noticed no jitters or re-buffers like internet content. At this point I'm pretty excited, because this now means I can build a simple web page with hyperlinks to my content..Remember I want large thumbnails and descriptions. a simple directory listing wouldn't do. My first attempt was like the image below. You would roll over the links and a larger thumbnail would appear on the top right of the screen.
Its not pretty, but now I'm getting somewhere. After scrolling up and down this list I found it hard to read the titles, the cover art overload the page and I soon had the ps3 out of memory error, crappy browser. Undaunted, I looked at other options. As I still need this thing to display in style.

Advancement slow going but I'm optomistic

Good evening all,
After googling around to find if there was software or anything that could give me a thumbnail and proper display for my titles on the ps3, nothing turned up. My requirements are simple: display my movies in a thumbnail format larger than what is available on the current xmb and list a large legible proper title. I came across ps3 Media Server and gave it a shot. This was good stuff however it seemed to be streaming software and worked with the current media server component. Currently my videos are all in AVI or MP4 format, I don't have to re-encoding is not a issue. I then came across Tversity and tried the free version, it installed, and actually for a frontend and server component they put a lot of work into it, but once again it did not meet my needs. This software seemed to have an emphasis on feeds and youtube content. There was a option for the inclusion of your own local content but it still didn't fit the bill. Finally there was a solution of installing Linux onto the ps3. I didn't look too deep into it, as installing a full blown os wasn't on my list.

After all of this research I now know I cannot access the content on the usb drive from my ps3 without going through the playstation menu (generic film icon, improper title) so that means the content is going to have to move to a remote computer if I want thumbnails. That's fine; the computers wired to the router and the ps3 are the same. But does this mean I have to use the media server component? Nope...after looking at all these options, I now have a game plan.

I'm still thinking something similar to this for the PS3...

First post

Hi all,
If you're reading this several things may have brought you here, a google search on the Playstation 3 xmb for displaying video thumbnails or even streaming content. Why am I blogging this? Well in my situation I like the ps3 but want to use it for more then a game machine. The video playback of an avi/mp4 file on this machine is incredible, but we are all stuck with the lack of development for this purpose.

let me begin with a little background on what Ive come to find out.....

1. The Playstion 3 has no support for displaying video thumbnails from a usb drive.
2. It doesn't do video previews unless you copy the video to the hard drive.
3. The list that does get displayed is only listed as a generic video icon with
the file name underneath.
4. There is a media server component that does support thumbnails and proper name
listing but is still tied to the up down scrolling of the Playstation xmb

These are some of the issues I've come across, I find it a shame that such a powerful console is seriously lacking when it comes to displaying content, Sony if you ever read
this PLEASE UPDATE the display of video content to at least rival or match appletv/xbox360 or any other capable media player.


So dear reader, if I were a simple man I would leave well enough alone and enjoy the great graphics of call of duty and just be content with the clicking list of video files scrolling up and down. But I cannot.

few notes to add here before you get too far, if your looking to simply stream video to your ps3 there are free options available, google it as I did. what I wanted was a way to visually display and present my videos in a proper manner. If you want to watch youtube or other content from the internet on your ps3 then this blog is not for you...

This blog is about dealing with my local content and getting it to display and play on my ps3 in a visually pleasing and effective manner nothing more nothing less.

stay tunned there is more to come........