XBMC Commander - Yet another unofficial third-party XBMC remote for iPad

Simple answer:
The update you loaded is from before the announcement.
The update featuring music video support is unfortunately still stuck in apple "waiting for revision" queue.
Looks like they're getting overrun with retina updates, normally they're faster.
But after more than a week it shouldn't take long now.

Got it, this is great!!!

One thought - any appetite to extend this app or create a new app that only acts as a remote for XBMC, but also allows to access sabnzbd, SB, CP and HP?

There is already one, it's called safari
Seriously, while it sounds easy at first glance, it would be a hell of a job, since as far as i know non of these tools have an official API. Would be like programming the whole thing 4 times over.

(2012-03-25 15:57)grywnn Wrote:  Seriously, while it sounds easy at first glance, it would be a hell of a job, since as far as i know non of these tools have an official API. Would be like programming the whole thing 4 times over.

They have APIs (sabnzbd and SB for sure; not certain about CP). There is Android Media Dog and plenty of other apps around who do that. Given how many sabnzbd IOS apps are out, I may say that it may be easier than you anticipate.

Your next question will be why I don't use any of the dozens of others out. Well, your remote is also a class-on-its-own compared to the dozens of others out there.

any chance you will make a trail/free version of the app so i/we could try it before we are buying it ?

Hey grywnn,

(2012-03-25 10:10)grywnn Wrote:  Hi fatal,

The issue you mention could very well be the screensaver. I guess the screensaver creates some kind of picture playlist, which are strange beasts in XBMC.
I'll investigate, but i don't know if i can do much against it...

Turning off the fanart screen saver solved the issue for me, the playlist does not get loaded with tons of tbn files anymore.

(2012-03-25 10:10)grywnn Wrote:  Now to the empty sources in the files tab:
This usually happens when you're using password protected network shares as sources. The problem here is, that the username / password aren't transfered to the remote (for security reasons), and when the remote tries to dive into the source it get rejected because of missing auth credentials (kinda scizophrenic...)
The good news is that theres a workaroud for this. You'll have to move the auth details from your sources.xml to another file.
If added a short howto to XBMC Commanders webpage:
http://xbmc-commander.com/page2/page9/page9.html
...near the bottom.

Viewing pictures isn't perfect though.
The app will only download & show pictures < 3MB, because anything bigger quickly causes memory trouble.

Thanks for the information, your were right about the cause of the issue and setting up a passwords.xml file solved the issue for me.

Just one note on your site, you might wanna change the references from password.xml to passwords.xml (unless both naming schemes work), as all references I found online were for a file named passwords.xml.

Now, although I can see all the pictures folders and even the picture filename (and even loads the picture thumbnails), when clicking on a picture I see the loading screen but then only get a black screen. I checked the picture size and they are under 3MB in size. Also, are these pictures cached on the iPad or gotten each time I want to view them, as I only have a 16gb iPad, space would run out quick if it were to cache all my pictures heh.

Thanks again.

Take Care

@steve:
First of all, thanks for the compliment :-)
Point is, atm i'd rather improve existing features and maybe add a new layout than starting a completely new area.
But you got me started thinking about it. And you're right, at least sb & sabnzbd got apis.

@orillion:
You too got me thinking, and maybe i'll start the ad-based-upgrade-by-in-app-purchase variant. Never bothered with this ad stuff, but can't be too hard to implement.

@fatal:
Thanks for the info, i've adjusted the support page accordingly. Although i got the strong impression that XBMC simply parses every .xml file in your userdata directory, in which case the name wouldn't really matter :-)
As for the black pictures: Yes, i'm downloading the files to a temp dir on the iPad. But only one directory at a time, not everything. And the temp dir is purged when you leave it.
So black images could indicate
- a full iPad "drive"
- an image format that's not supported by the iPad.
The upcoming v12 of XBMC will feature on the fly image resizing, which will make things a lot easier for my. For now i've postponed fleshing out the image stuff until this is available.

(2012-03-26 17:03)grywnn Wrote:  As for the black pictures: Yes, i'm downloading the files to a temp dir on the iPad. But only one directory at a time, not everything. And the temp dir is purged when you leave it.
So black images could indicate
- a full iPad "drive"
- an image format that's not supported by the iPad.
The upcoming v12 of XBMC will feature on the fly image resizing, which will make things a lot easier for my. For now i've postponed fleshing out the image stuff until this is available.

Hey grywnn,

The iPad is new so it is not full and the image format is .jpg (the thumbnails load fine for the images).

Not really a big issue as it's more for WAF, she'd love to be able to view pics on the iPad. Let me know if there a way for me to create any log files for you etc if you wish to debug, otherwise I'll just wait for a later version.

Here is what is in the xbmc.log


Some are URL encoded some are not...I don't know what the error message means exactly as the pictures are accessible through XBMC and the files do show up on xbmc commander on my iPad along w/ thumbnails.

Also, if I view pictures in xbmc using the remote to navigate, and then go to the Playlist section on XBMC Commander, it doesn't let me click on anything (or clicking on the items does nothing)...and if I try to then go back to the remote it crashes the app back to the ipad home screen.

(2012-03-25 10:10)grywnn Wrote:  Hi fatal,

The issue you mention could very well be the screensaver. I guess the screensaver creates some kind of picture playlist, which are strange beasts in XBMC.
I'll investigate, but i don't know if i can do much against it...

As for your requests:
4) XBMC currently offers no way to query smart playlists. So you won't get this in any remote for a while - until the XBMC devs sort out the whole playlist handling, which is on their roadmap for the next release (v12, not Eden)

Thanks for the info, if playlists aren't possible in the current version of xbmc, what about sources? I have 4 sources defined (each source pointing to various directories), which would also allow a type of "Smart Fitlering" based on sources and allow to only view, for example, "Kids Movies". Although I don't know if the json-rpc (or xbmc) reports to you what type a particular source is set to (movie, tv, etc).

Thanks again for your help.

Take Care

Hi grywnn

Couple of bugs in he latest version.

Bug 1. Seems to be a problem with the download all cache with the movies as it keeps locking up, but the tv download all cache works perfectly. A strange one.

Bug 2 when you scroll the tv shows its nice and smooth but when you go to the movies it's a little jerky and then it seems to correct itself after you stop scrolling and then scroll again. But if you ten go to the tv shows and then back to the movies and scroll its jerky again and then corrects itself when you stop scrolling.

Cheers

@meridius
I'm currently working on Bug 1. Will be fixed in the update after the one thats currently waiting to be released by apple.
Bug 2 is related to the app loading cached images from the ipads disc. File system access appears to be done on the same thread as graphical updates, so while accessing files everything goes jerky. Since i have to get a lot of thumbs while scrolling, this is jerky. Once they are in memory, everythings fine. Unfortunately memory get drained pretty soon, and things start getting jerky again...
Haven't found a way around this yet.

@fatal
smb://192.168.10.10/disk4/Pictures/06.13.07/folder.jpg
Looks like the auth problem all over again. Could be that the passwords.xml is ignored when downloading files through XBMCs virtual file system. (these images are downloaded differently than thumbnails)
I'll check and submit a bug report to xbmcs trac if necessary.
As for the sources, you're right: Sources aren't returned in the json objects, so no filtering posible atm.