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

(2012-04-23 21:07)allen00se Wrote:  

(2012-04-13 17:14)grywnn Wrote:  @allen00se:
I got the little brother: VSX-921
I do everything with the pioneer app though.
If i'd have to add a button to XBMC Commander, i'd try to write some PHP scripts that run one one of my web servers (a NAS would be perfect for example) and do the telnet stuff. You could then add a http button triggering the PHP script which in turn interacts with the receiver.

@fatal:
I'll give 2a. a try

Sounds like a plan, I am not familiar with how to tackle this, any links you can send my way to help me figure it out would be appreciated. Im pretty confident I can handle the Php talking to the receiver, however not sure where to begin to get commander talking to the php script.
Thanks,
Krys

Well I spent a while working on it, but finally got a simple solution that works. Just like you said, xbmc commander sends http command to a php script on my web server which fires a bash script that will turn on my AV receiver and switch to the right input via its telnet port. Thanks for the point in the right direction.

What's happened to the latest release the movies are no longer in order using commander in my library. I have the old version on my iPhone and that's ok but ths new version is not keeping the movies in the right order and I am using by name.

Eg

The superman movies now have the first movie at the end as its called superman the movie

Same for other movies pirates lots of others there just all mixed up or not together

Cheers

Yeah i change the sorting logic from letting xbmc do the sorting to doing it myself.
Reason for this was that movie sets didn't get mixed with "normal" movies, and i couldn't inject them into the movie list since i didn't know wether xbmc skipped some article.
Well i did the ignore article thingy myself now, but i forgot that xbmc also has a sorttitle which it uses especially for cases like these.
I should be able to request the sorttitle from xbmc though, i'll try to adjust my code so this will work like before.

Btw since sorttitle never worked really good for my i tend to sort the movies in sets by year, which usually gives the same result.

Sort by year will break Star Wars

And any movies with prequels as I like to put them at the front.

I use sort title to put some movies in order like

The title

Superman the movie
Superman ii

But use sortitle like this

Superman I
Superman ii

So That keeps them in order.

Cheers

Amazing app. It single handily made me want to transition to XBMC. There are a couple of features that I would love though. One simple one would be the option to add home menu options. I separate my movies into categories like comedy, kids, horror, etc (I prefer to do it this way because I don't like the wide array of genre descriptions). It would be cool to be able to add these categories on the Commander menus.

Another feature that would make Commander even more amazing would be the ability to play the media files on the iPad itself. A marriage between the AirVideo app and Commander would be so cool. Air Video is great, but being able to browse my library the way Commander allows, and streaming to the iPad would be the perfect combination.

(2012-04-27 23:08)james_stewart Wrote:  Another feature that would make Commander even more amazing would be the ability to play the media files on the iPad itself. A marriage between the AirVideo app and Commander would be so cool. Air Video is great, but being able to browse my library the way Commander allows, and streaming to the iPad would be the perfect combination.

This question comes up a lot. The short answer is, it involves a whole lot more than XBMC and this app. For one, unless all your media files are already in an ipad-compatible format and you're on a local network with plenty of bandwidth, you'll need some sort of transcoding solution, which XBMC does not provide. The app itself can't do this for you - that is, transcode (on the fly) your media in to a format that both works with the built in quicktime player in iOS and manages differing bandwidth speeds. That is a lot of work/processing power.

As it happens, Plex, which forked off XBMC 4 years ago, has already done this work - it's a major feature of the Plex Media Server. Plex has their own iOS and Android apps as well. Since the Plex Media Server and the Plex Media Client are two completely separate programs there's nothing stopping you from installing the Media Server in stand-alone mode and using it just to power mobile/remote streaming. Yes, it's not integrated in to the Constellation app - it's a separate app (that is also $5). And yes, it means you'll need to install Plex Media server on to a PC and scan your library in to it, since it won't use XBMC's library and vice versa.

To which I say, so what? While I am not a fan of the Plex client, their media server is actually quite slick, and very easy to add/scrape media to it - it has a very nice web interface, can grab stuff automatically, etc etc. And it does exactly what you want it to - streams media from your master PC to your iOS or Android devices, in or outside your house. You're only limited by the power of the PC running the server (for 1080p transcoding you'll want a 2ghz dual-core cpu at a minimum) and your upstream bandwidth out of your house if you choose to stream outside it. It actually works very, very well and a lot of us use it for this express purpose. Plex even has a MyPlex service that allows you to share (and revoke) access to some or all of your media library to friends and family.

How well does it work? My brother in law is on business overseas; he downloaded the iOS Plex app, I shared my server with his email, he logged in, and he can watch my media collection 3,000 miles away in 720p on his iPad. I have it running on a fairly decent server, and have a 5mb upload, so your mileage may vary.

Yes, yes, it would be great if this was all built in to the XBMC Constellation app, but it isn't, and isn't likely to be any time soon, because as outlined above there's a lot more to it then the app. Trust me, once you use it you will cease to care

(2012-04-28 01:46)ixian Wrote:  

(2012-04-27 23:08)james_stewart Wrote:  Another feature that would make Commander even more amazing would be the ability to play the media files on the iPad itself. A marriage between the AirVideo app and Commander would be so cool. Air Video is great, but being able to browse my library the way Commander allows, and streaming to the iPad would be the perfect combination.

This question comes up a lot. The short answer is, it involves a whole lot more than XBMC and this app. For one, unless all your media files are already in an ipad-compatible format and you're on a local network with plenty of bandwidth, you'll need some sort of transcoding solution, which XBMC does not provide. The app itself can't do this for you - that is, transcode (on the fly) your media in to a format that both works with the built in quicktime player in iOS and manages differing bandwidth speeds. That is a lot of work/processing power.

As it happens, Plex, which forked off XBMC 4 years ago, has already done this work - it's a major feature of the Plex Media Server. Plex has their own iOS and Android apps as well. Since the Plex Media Server and the Plex Media Client are two completely separate programs there's nothing stopping you from installing the Media Server in stand-alone mode and using it just to power mobile/remote streaming. Yes, it's not integrated in to the Constellation app - it's a separate app (that is also $5). And yes, it means you'll need to install Plex Media server on to a PC and scan your library in to it, since it won't use XBMC's library and vice versa.

To which I say, so what? While I am not a fan of the Plex client, their media server is actually quite slick, and very easy to add/scrape media to it - it has a very nice web interface, can grab stuff automatically, etc etc. And it does exactly what you want it to - streams media from your master PC to your iOS or Android devices, in or outside your house. You're only limited by the power of the PC running the server (for 1080p transcoding you'll want a 2ghz dual-core cpu at a minimum) and your upstream bandwidth out of your house if you choose to stream outside it. It actually works very, very well and a lot of us use it for this express purpose. Plex even has a MyPlex service that allows you to share (and revoke) access to some or all of your media library to friends and family.

How well does it work? My brother in law is on business overseas; he downloaded the iOS Plex app, I shared my server with his email, he logged in, and he can watch my media collection 3,000 miles away in 720p on his iPad. I have it running on a fairly decent server, and have a 5mb upload, so your mileage may vary.

Yes, yes, it would be great if this was all built in to the XBMC Constellation app, but it isn't, and isn't likely to be any time soon, because as outlined above there's a lot more to it then the app. Trust me, once you use it you will cease to care

Cool post, thanks. I understand that there has to be an encoding component to be able to stream media. Which is why I mentioned the Air Video application. Perhaps a plugin that integrates this app to XBMC would be able to bring these features together. I will certainly look into Plex per your recommendation.

(2011-12-08 00:43)dutchflea Wrote:  Apart from my other remarks about the general navigation and the "now playing" features, I really hope that in the next iPhone/iPod version the "Party" button in the Playlist window will be back. In version 1.3.5 it was still there.

Hi! I wrote this some months ago. I use this great app a lot but still miss the party button. Is there any chance it will be back somehow, some day?

(2012-04-29 11:09)dutchflea Wrote:  

(2011-12-08 00:43)dutchflea Wrote:  Apart from my other remarks about the general navigation and the "now playing" features, I really hope that in the next iPhone/iPod version the "Party" button in the Playlist window will be back. In version 1.3.5 it was still there.

Hi! I wrote this some months ago. I use this great app a lot but still miss the party button. Is there any chance it will be back somehow, some day?

What did this button do? Would it fix the problem where someone can click "play" and erase an entire playlist by mistake? Unfortunately because of this issue it makes it impossible to let others add to a playlist at a party, someone always ends up erasing everything!