[LiquidIce629]

thor, can i use spyce to do a search then send the results back to my ajax script in &key=value format?

that could be the solution to searching from ajax instead of trying to get code modified in the c code.

[thor918]

the formating of returned data can be formed as you wanted.(and one could make the same formatting as httpapi to the spy file..   ajaxapi.spy?command=playnext)

sorry python api is also a little limited.
we have no access to music library.(i submittet a feature request on it now...)
but i can see now that it would be a good feature.

[thor918]

any updates?

by the way, unshuffle is in the cvs :
shuffle.spy
unshuffle.spy

[bnb]

any idea why the playlist isn't showing up? it is working fine, but i can't see the song list. i'm using the latest firefox.

thanks

[KingJames]

a few things...

first off, you guys are in the wrong thread. this is about my ajax music browser. please take your fight elsewhere.

now lets get a few things straightened out. ajax and synced playback have absolutely nothing to do with each other. the only slight connection is that ajax might be the technology to use to have control over all of the players in a nice web based gui.

the actual synced playback is much more involved than ajax. i've talked with other devs and users about this and decided to try it myself to see if it would work. basically i was trying to send the play command to all units at the same time to see if they would sync up. they all play staggered with about a .5 second delay.

since some info about my new project has already leaked, i thought i'd throw this out there to give you an idea on what's in the works. this little app will allow you to monitor all xbmc players on your network, see what they are playing, or launch into the web based music browser of a particular player. eventually i hope to include every http api command to be made available from this program for absolute control over any number of xbmc players on a network.



it can scan the network for players, and when it finds them it adds them to the list.
then it will allow you to check the boxes next to players you want to control and send an httpapi command to all of them at the same time.

to answer the initial questions:
yes, this is real and most of what you see above already works
no, you can't have it yet
no, when i check off all xbmc devices and press start playing they do not all play the same audio at the same time.
yes, i will release it to the community when it's ready to be released.

that's all you get for now! hifty: check back often for updates on xbmc distributed.

---

now...

the only place i have seen synced playback work well is in slim devices' slimserver gear. they have a special buffer chip which allows them to buffer a certain amount of audio then have the server send them all a cue on when to start playback.

here is a snippet from their api docs:


now this assumes you have an actual server streaming to all of the clients. in their case the slimserver is feeding all of the 'dumb' clients with the audio data and they just play when they are told. in our case it would be more like having an smb share with your media and having all of the xbmc units intelligently communicate with each other to tell which songs to sync, buffer a song and all at the same time press 'play'.

so my idea to get this working ... is that code needs to be written into xbmc which allows one xbox to communicate to the httpapi or a socket server of another xbox. then some new commands would need to be added to tell the xbox to queue up a song into a buffer but keep it paused. and another countdown type command where one xbox starts the countdown via a socket connection to another xbox?? and they all countdown togther to 0 and start playing.

there are probably better ways to do this and i'd like to see some discussion on how this can be achieved in the appropriate threads.

What happen? is this program still in production?

[kraqh3d]

LiquidIce...
Random should be accessible via the httpapi since its a "builtin" playercontrol function and all builtin functions are available. Search-while-you-type wont work very well, given that function you mentioned. The time its gonna take to search the database will make it unusably slow. Also, it returns results in each categeory (genre, artist, album, and song). Let me know what you'd like here. I can extend the database search function into the httpapi however you'd like.

[Gamester17]

@Liquidice (and all other AJAX developers/scripters), have you guys checked out ZK Ajax Java Web framework (it's a open source AJAX web apps UI framewaork/base that doesn't use any JavaScript), could it be of any use?

[drakethegreat]

My problem is that I use a php library that generates the javascript for me when I do Ajax and so I can't help out a whole lot on this endeavor. I just hope liquidice someday comes back.

[LiquidIce629]

I'm back.

I do have a web interface that is running under 2.0 final, but nothing I would release yet. Since I last released the AJAX I have experimented with several other music systems.. Sonos (with the iSonos / Sonos Web Plugins), and more recently, Jinzora a PHP/mysql based music browsing system. Of course these are just for playing music, but that was mostly why I use all of this stuff. Still nothing seems to be able to beat XBMC in terms of compatibility and functionality.

Anyways, I checked out that zk ajax java framework, but it looks like you need java on the server (in this case the xbox) so I don't think that will help.
the prototype.js library is great for handling the ajax calls, I use it everywhere now.


I am still interested in doing a little music search interface. Now that we're out of the feature freeze i was hoping someone could help me get some search functionality through the httpapi. kraqh3d? I agree the search as you type stuff might be way too slow especially on very large music libraries, but i guess the first step would be to get a file name search working, and go from there.

XBMC distributed was something i threw together one day. I doubt it will ever see the light of day because it is not possible to sync music across multiple XBMC's reliably. Use a Sonos, SlimServer, or Apple Airport Express for that.

I can't make any promises when I will release an updated version as real work has to come first, but i'll do my best to get out a release that will work with 2.0 final. As always thanks for the continued support!

[Gamester17]

XBMC distributed was something i threw together one day. I doubt it will ever see the light of day because it is not possible to sync music across multiple XBMC's reliably

Not yet at least, (and it is nothing that is currently planned by any developers on Team-XBMC), but it would not be impossible to code and implement, ...this however is a seperate (or several) discussion(s), I think?:
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=6207
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=21977

[warius]

The XBMC Ajax interface looks very promising, looking forward to trying it after work

[nad]

LiquidIce: This weekend I'll be uploading an addition to httpapi that should provide the search mechanism you are after. You will be able to issue SQL commands directly against the music database.

[kraqh3d]

being able to send an arbitrary sql query directly to the database sounds like trouble.

[nad]

Why? A well crafted 'select' should be useful to client developers.

[kraqh3d]

exactly... the problem is ensuring that it's "well crafted"... plus, due to memory constraints, we have certain work arounds that allow some of the really large queries to work such as "get all songs"