[Livin]

dakpunne & SyphOn,
A few questions...

1) You call this HTPC Manager, though it looks more like a front-end tool (something I'd use as a remote of sorts with my touchscreen) then a "management tool"... is my assumption accurate?

2) How does your goals for your app compare with/to Maraschino?
- also curious why not consolidate efforts with Maraschino devs?

3) Do you plan to make it user extensible? I'm thinking simple integration (no coding necessary) with other apps like EventGhost, etc that can send/receive network events (TCP communications like HTTP). Would be useful for displaying status, and bi-directional commands/controls.

[SyphOn]

1) Yes and no. I agree on the part with it being a front-end tool. But there is more to it than it just being a remote for XBMC. You can add / remove downloads, TV shows, and soon movies. Hence the name Manager. But to be honest the name is something we quickly came up with, so if you have any suggestions: Just let us know

2) Maraschino is only a dashboard. Also it did not suit our needs.

3) No.

[Livin]

1) Yes and no. I agree on the part with it being a front-end tool. But there is more to it than it just being a remote for XBMC. You can add / remove downloads, TV shows, and soon movies. Hence the name Manager. But to be honest the name is something we quickly came up with, so if you have any suggestions: Just let us know

Not sure, guess it depends on if you are working for it to be a one-stop-shop for management and control? Maybe something like HTPC Control Dashboard

2) Maraschino is only a dashboard. Also it did not suit our needs.

Just curious...What is it missing? I have not implemented it yet but if you will be doing things it will not I'll start working with yours.

3) No.

Please Even a basic interface would greatly enhance the usability for people trying to integrate to make a seamless system with your app as the front-end. Ages ago I was a horrible coder (thus why I'm no longer a coder) but if I did it I'm assuming a good coder could whip it up in no time.

It is a pretty basic idea... based on the URL that is passed to the web page, the HTML is created on the fly to display data passed to it as status (text and image), a button (toggle or multi-way), or both. The URL defined all parameters the web page was to display. This provides, real-time, page updates for control of the Home Theater & Home Automation systems... plus has many other applications.

[karandras24]

2) Maraschino is only a dashboard. Also it did not suit our needs.

Please don't thake this the wrong way but i think you need to look at maraschino again.

It is certainly more than just a dashboard.

Your solution looks quite nice and once it's matured a bit i'll give it a try, but tbh the only difference i can see between yours and maraschino is the bit about adding stuff to sickbeard.

[SyphOn]

Because my previous answer was bit short (I didn't mean to offend anyone):

I'm not saying one is better than the other. Just try them both out (if you want to), see which one u like. If you think that adding to SickBeard is the only difference, then just stick with Maraschino.
We are not trying to compete with Maraschino in any way. We just created something that we felt wasn't out there. If something is missing or you would like to see changed just let us know and we'll see what we can do

@Livin: I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean by 'user extensible'. Is there a way you can give me an example of what you mean?

[Livin]

@Livin: I'm not quite sure I understand what you mean by 'user extensible'. Is there a way you can give me an example of what you mean?

Definitely

Most HA/event systems have some method of bi-direction communications, which is perfect for true integration.

... connection type like EventGhost (great back-end automation tool for complex HTPC/HA) has:
TCPEvents : A better Network Event Receiver/Sender plugin
WebSockets

OR

... connection-less ability like simply sending/receiving commands over HTTP using web servers, then parsing the payload for the needed data.


As basis for the example, lets use the screenshot you posted on Post #1, the Dashboard view.
- it is broken into sections. The user would have the ability to add one or more custom sections specific to their needs.
- each section would be defined by a set of XML files or whatever you deem best for your app - this is to define any static text, buttons, notifications, item ordering, etc) and then can be dynamically defined based on notifications/communications from external systems (other apps like: EventGhost, HomeSeer, or whatever.

External systems would send your app the notification via a formatted and/or defined payload (you define and publish) - your app would then parse the payload and turn it into status text, buttons, commands, images, etc based on what was parsed - and place it in the user defined sections on the dashboard.

payload examples for Home Alarm System...

Simple Status Text and Image

button type = status
button background = "C:\images\backgrounds\alarm"
text string = "Armed"
status image = "C:\images\alarm_red.jpg",32x32

... this will simply show the status of the alarm system


Control Button with Text, Status Image, and Command back to Alarm System

button type = toggle
button command = "http://homeserver:8080/device=alarm&command=disarm"
button background = "C:\images\backgrounds\alarm"
text string = "Armed"
status image = "C:\images\alarm_red.jpg",32x32

... this will create a button that shows the Alarm as 'armed' but when the button is pushed will send the command to the alarm system (HA system) to 'disarm'
... then, once the alarm is disarmed, the HA system would send another notification and the button would change to suit the new status, and new command needed to 'arm' it.


Does this help explain - there are tons of possibilities for use cases here.

[SyphOn]

Yes. Thank you for the detailed explanation. I understand the thing you are searching for.

When the time is right to incorporate something like that we'll let you know. For now we just want to focus on optimizing what we have created so far. Mainly because this is the first time we ever programmed something in Python and there is lots to learn for us. Maybe Maraschino has the ability to easily incorporate the things you are looking for?

[ErlendSB]

The Unicode error in the nzbsearch section sees to come when the results contains specials characters. Try searching for "pina".
On fix can be to encode the result to utf-8.
Line 25 in nzbsearch.py:
data = searchFetchDataFromUrl(url)
Changed to:
data = searchFetchDataFromUrl(url).decode("cp1252").encode('utf-8')

I'll set up a git fork soon, so you can receive pull requests, but I though I'd let you know.

[TeKo]

Working now from Source on Win7.
Great work.

CP and Headphones support + TV Show Banner view and its even better

[SyphOn]

Glad to hear that. I added banner support to master a few hours ago

[shlag]

Works fine from source on win7 here, but there is no image/thumbnails

image URL for a movie:

Code:

http://192.168.1.128:8084/json/?which=xbmc&action=thumb&thumb=special%3A%2F%2Fmasterprofile%2FThumbnails%2FVideo%2F8%2F8cd02a09.tbn&w=100&h=150

[SyphOn]

Can you post log your file?

[ErlendSB]

I get the same problem with images, and posted a log on github.
The _imaging C module is not installed

This only happens when running from source

[TeKo]

Yep same here.

[ErlendSB]

Installing 32bit version of python fixed it for me.