[jtemple]

Okay, let me just get this out of the way. This is NOT an XBMC plugin/script. But it is related to one! If any of the forum moderators want to move this then it's fine by me.

I've been running Eden for a couple of weeks now and love it! I was especially excited to find the Netflix plugin as Netflix is what we tend to watch a majority of the time. Up until now we've been streaming through our Wii which is fine, but I can't stand using a remote to search for movies. I would much rather have a keyboard. So I got a dual monitor video card and hooked up our desktop to the TV. But I ran into some issues dealing with dual monitor/dual sound output devices and came up with a kludgy but workable solution.

Here's the link to download the .zip file:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/64641839/XBMCFlicksLauncher.zip

And here's the text from the readme.txt file located in the zip:

I created the XBMCFlicksLauncher to solve a VERY specific problem on my HTPC setup. Here's
my scenario:

* I'm on Windows XP SP3
* My HTPC also serves as a regular desktop PC when not being used by XBMC
* I have a a regular set of PC speakers for playing music, watching videos, playing games, etc.
apart from XBMC
* I have a dual video card in my machine
* XBMC outputs to the High Def TV attached to the HDMI port, a regular monitor is attached
to the VGA port.
* The TV is an extension of my desktop, not a clone
* When I run XBMCFlicks, I want the web browser to open on the TV, not the desktop monitor
* I don't want to have to have my family figure out how to drag the web browser from the TV to the desktop monitor
when the TV is off. By default, IE opens on the last displayed monitor.
* When I run XBMCFlicks, I want the sound from the web browser player to come from the HDMI audio, not the desktop speakers
* I don't want to have to switch the default sound device back and forth manually

So here's what I did:
* Since Firefox was not installed on this PC, I downloaded/installed then removed the Start menu and desktop shortcut for Firefox (it's
still installed, just can't be accessed easily). Make sure you don't check the option to have Firefox be your default browser!
* I installed the "Full Fullscreen" add-on in Firefox (opens Firefox in full screen mode every time)
* I checked the options to stop those annoying "do you want to close/open this or that" messages in Firefox
* I moved Firefox over to the TV then closed. Restarted just to make sure FF opens on the TV next time
* I found a program called QuickSoundSwitch (http://www.quicksoundswitch.toflo.de/) that allows you to quickly change the default sound output device
NOTE: this program claims to not work on Windows Vista/7, have not verified this.
* I wrote a program that would be called instead of a web browser from XBMCFlicks. This program will:
1) Change the default sound card to the HDMI audio device
2) Launch the browser of your choice (in my case Firefox) passing the URL of the netflix movie to play from XBMCFlicks
3) Wait for the browser window to close
4) Set the default sound card back

And now I'm sharing. So here's what you need to do if you want to use this:
1) Make sure you have the .Net 2.0 runtime or higher installed on your machine
2) Create a directory on your PC for the XBMCFlicks launcher and extract the contents of the zip file to that directory.
To make it easier on myself I put it at the root of my C drive (C:\XBMCFlicksLauncher)
3) Edit the XBMCFlicksLauncher.xml and set the following:
* SoundSwitcher - if you want to use the included QuickSoundSwitch.exe then don't change this. If you find another similar sound
switching program that accepts command line parameters for sound switching, you can change this. The sound switcher MUST
be in the same directory as XBMCFlicksLauncher.exe
* AltSoundCard - here you put the sound card you want your browser of choice to use when playing the Netflix movie. For
QuickSoundSwitch.exe, this needs to be in the form of "D=Your alternate sound device". You can either use the actual name
of the sound device or the number. I prefer the name, as the number is a little tricky to get. You can get the name
of your sound card by opening audio properties in Windows. Make sure you type the sound card name EXACTLY as it's displayed
in the audio properties window.
* DftSoundCard - same as AltSoundCard but the device you want QuickSoundSwitch.exe to switch back to when the browser window
closes.
* BrowserPath - the fully qualified path to the browser you want to open when playing Netflix. Since I was using Firefox on a
XP machine, this was "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"
* BrowserLoadWait - not really used, but there for possible timing tweaking
* AddlBrowserParms - here's where you can add any additional parms before the URL passed to the browser. For example, if you
use IE, you can put "-k" here to make IE go into kiosk mode.
4) Modify the playercorefactory.xml located in the XBMC userdata folder on your PC:
* Change the <filename> section to point to XBMCFlicksLauncher. For example, C:\XBMCFlicksLauncher\XBMCFlicksLauncher.exe
* Leave everything else as-is
5) Launch a movie from XBMCFlicks. Soundcard should be switched and the browser should launch.
6) When the browser window is closed the soundcard should switch back to the default.

Some things to note:
1) Using this approach means that I use IE as my default web browser. Firefox is only used to play Netflix movies.
1) I have only tested this with Firefox. Should work with IE and others, if not feel free to post on the forum and I'll look into it.
2) When you are watching XBMCFlicks using this method ALL PC sounds will come from the sound device you coded in AltSoundCard. For me
this wasn't an issue.
3) If you have any problems feel free to post on the forum. Also include the contents of the log.txt that is in the XBMCFlicksLauncher folder.