Vista Media Center Controller

[kingtd]

One of the other major components of my home entertainment and automation setup is my Vista Media Center. The interface looks really nice, and I've got it hooked up to a big projector for TV, movies, etc. The downside to VMC is that it is VERY hard to control from anything but the keyboard or remote.

Bradjsm did a phenomenal job of creating a very small service you can install on your VMC box and it basically pumps out status and takes commands through a telnet interface. From there it was a short jump to this eventghost plugin that really gives back control.

The various commands you can send are found at the VMCcontroller web page here: http://www.codeplex.com/vmccontroller

Warning: This thing will pump out a LOT of status messages to eventghost - you'll get at least 1 every second while a song or movie plays.

Edit: New version is here, version 0.5.

~K

[Loli]

i really wanted to use VMC, but still, this support only 32bit version and not 64bit (

[megsum]

Hi,

this is a great plugin. Works a treat via NetRemote to my HTPC. Is it possible to return the status messages from VMC Controller back to NetRemote via EventGhost? I believe that it's possible for Girder to send information back to NetRemote (although I've never tried it), but I'm not sure about EventGhost or this plugin.

Cheers,

Adam

[Peekstra]

I'd also love to use the plugin but I get the following error when I try to use it:

error: uncaptured python exception, closing channel <pluginImport.VMCcontroller.VMCcommander connected at 0x2e92c88> (<class 'socket.error'>:(9, 'Bad file descriptor') [asynchat.pyc|initiate_send|219] [asyncore.pyc|send|331] [socket.pyc|_dummy|141])

running on Vista 32 Ultimate (evenghost runs as administrator).

The service responds when I telnet to 40500, so I guess that the plugin itself is failing?

[joylove]

Hi

Thank you so much for this plugin. I have an error message when trying to use the plugin. It says in the log


"Cannot read __init__.py for plugin "VMCcontroller""

Can anyone help please?

[Pako]

READ THIS before posting anything!

[kingtd]

After putting up with some problems with my original release of the VMC controller plug-in, I'd been wanting to fix some stuff up. When I recently went to the Windows 7 RC on my main media center box, I was inspired by olddog over on the VMC controller forum figuring out what had to go (the EPG code) and putting out patched DLL's. So I've upgraded the plug-in as well.

Fixes and additions:
- It should be much more tolerant of Windows Media Center exiting out and dealing with disconnect scenarios.
- Checkbox added to configuration, allowing failed commands to re-establish a connection to VMC controller and retry.
- "Connect" action that allows you to reconnect to either or both of the VMC Controller ports.
- Should work with extenders. (You'll need 1 instance of the plugin for each extender though)
- "204 Connect" commands should be usable as events.
- Error 9/Bad File Descriptor problems should be gone.
- Works with eventghost 0.3.7.x

Some of the output was tweaked a little so double-check your eventghost configs and make sure you configure the plug-in once if you're upgrading (since a new field was added).

~K

[mojo_lo]

can't seem to get it to work. receive the following error:

VMC.400 BadRequest

[azrael]

Hi there,
i have the same problem using Win7 x64 and the Win7 x64 alpha of vmccontroller from http://vmccontroller.codeplex.com/releases/view/34386.
i get the "VMC.400 BadRequest" message twice for every command i send, actually.

[jitterjames]

I have the same result with w7x64

Code: Select all

6:50:55 AM      Reconnect on Failure:True
6:50:55 AM   VMC.400 BadRequest
6:50:55 AM   VMC.400 BadRequest
6:51:08 AM   VMC Controller: Send: button-back
6:51:08 AM      Reconnect on Failure:True
6:51:08 AM   VMC.400 BadRequest
6:51:08 AM   VMC.400 BadRequest


I am able to control vmc via the http interface however, and you can write some quick and dirt python script without even using a plugin.

Code: Select all

import urllib
serverAddr="http://127.0.0.1"
port="40510" #vmc port for http server

command="button-up"

f = urllib.urlopen(serverAddr+":"+port+"/"+command)
s = f.read()
#print s
f.close()

gotta love EG and python !

note that MediaCenter needs to have focus for this to work. I have no idea why. For testing I use another computer on the lan to send commands to mediaCenter so that focus is not an issue. You just need to replace the 127.0.0.1 with the actual ip address of you mediacenter machine.

[jitterjames]

kingtd:

Are you able to request albums or songs with VMC Controller? I can request artists, but for the life of me, I can't figure out how to do the other stuff or make sense of the "filters"! Please point me in the right direction if you can.

thanks

[jitterjames]

hmph

[kingtd]

My usage is pretty basic - I don't really query the list of songs or artists or any of that stuff, since I'm already getting that information directly from the disk. So I'm not sure what's going on there. The whole VMC controller project is pretty haphazard over there, so I don't rely on the advanced stuff working.

I had huge problems with x64 support as well, so I rolled my media center back to 32-bit.

There are a couple other problems with it as well, but they're all easily blamed on media center and Microsoft. The MSAS interface peridiocally gets stuck and stops sending data for example, and you have to restart the listening socket to get data.

~K

[jitterjames]

fyi I've had pretty good results accessing it via the web interface.

here are some commands that work for me

songs by id
http://xx.xx.xx.xx:40510/music-play%20indexes:10,99

play artist by name
http://xx.xx.xx.xx:40510/music-play%20artist:

list all songs
http://xx.xx.xx.xx:40510/music-list-songs

play album by name
http://xx.xx.xx.xx:40510/music-play%20album:

I think it also gets around the error you mentioned because it doesn't keep a socket open.

I have been able to get ti to work with either WIN7-64 or Vista-32, not the other two.

ya that project is a bit of a mess... too bad.

[kingtd]

For pulling information, the webserver piece is pretty good. Where I struggle is automatic updates of media status. Normally it feeds a constant string of track time updates into eventghost, but sometimes it just stops. In those cases, it's hard to programmatically tell if it's still playing and broken, or just paused. =)

~K