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.