The Shoes of the Fisherman's Wife Are Some Jive-Ass Slippers

Sat, 28 May 2005

Kitchen accident

Sun, 15 May 2005

Browsing Working

I have some really simple browsing working now with my Python media server. Selecting any of the video, music, picture and online-media buttons on the Z400 remote brings up a couple of dummy folders. Since my SOAP Browse() implementation always returns the same two folder names, you can go on browsing to an infinite depth, although it appears that the Z400 is limited to 16 levels. I have been working away on some Python classes to represent the Digital Item Declaration Language XML blobs that are returned. It's slowly starting to come together.

I've found a couple more funky bugs:

• The screensaver (bouncing Zensonic logo) isn't enabled when there is an error browsing folders or opening media files.
• The Z400 resets when it receives DIDL declarations that it doesn't like or are inconsistent. Since I'm creating my XML blobs by hand, it's pretty easy to get it wrong. I didn't try and track down exactly what the problem was but it's a sign of only testing your server with your own client.
• If you don't specify a port number for a resource in a browse list the unit attempts to connect to port 0 instead of port 80. Weird but easy to work around.

The next step is to try and get the browse functionality working on a directory of real files and then attempt to get video streaming happening. The code isn't quite ready for a release, although a couple of people have expressed interest in it. I might think about what features would be present for a 0.1 release on sourceforge or something. I would like a little bit of each meda type (video, audio, pictures) to be working for an initial public version.

Fri, 13 May 2005

Python Media Server Resurrected!

I found some time to get my Python Media Server going again. Hopefully there will be some more opportunities over the weekend to get some more hacking done on it. I had to finish off a mini-rewrite of the SSDP server code after a multi-month delay which was a bit tricky since I had reformatted my hard disk in between now and then.

I bought another tuner and popped it in my PC. I think there is a problem with the driver though. I can't seem to get the second card to stream at the same time as the first one which kind of defeats the whole purpose of having two tuners.