I found this great addition to the now palaying screen in Meedio posted by “shoko” on the forum:
Just replace the NowPlaying.screen file in the theme you are using. The button that toggles visualization will be expanded with “Information” and “Lyrics”.
You can read the original post here:
Enhanced Now Playing screen
Update, january 27. 2005:
The extremely kind PERL-guru Kenneth Raknes has helped me with some updates on the script. It is now uploaded and the link in this post points to the new version. See the file itself for a description of the bug fixes.
Original post:
I found an excellent script made by Yoz and Ben Milleare. This script makes a special blog for mobile posts, a moblog. What I wanted was simply the possibility to post to my regular blog by mail or MMS from my mobile phone and any E-mail client. I also wanted the possibility to post more than pictures. If I send a video file or a sound clip from my mobile phone, it is saved on the server and a link to the file is made in the post.
I also wanted it to support the special characters that we use in Norway.
So, I started editing the script, made some progress, but because of my lack of PERL-skills I soon needed some help. After some serious help from Trond Isaksen and Kenneth Raknes we got the script working the way I want. It is still messy, but it should not be too difficult to set up.
You can find the edited script here:
Link to edited mt-moblog script
You need to edit the following lines:
30 – insert the correct path to your MT-installation
45, 46, 47 – Insert the correct blog-id, author-id and category-id
81 – Insert the POP-server you will use
86 – Insert the POP user and password
You might want to edit these lines:
157, 158 – Width and height of thumbnail picture
206, 207 – HTML-code for the post itself
This is an example of a post that is made by mail:
Link to post done by mail
You need a folder to store the attached files, for my setup that is a folder called “images” in the same folder that the blog is kept. The script makes a new time stamped folder for each mail that comes in. All MIME-objects is saved in these folders.
This is the corresponding folder for the post mentioned above:
Folder with picture, thumbnail, text-file and HTML
Because I used Outlook to post this entry there is a HTML-file in the folder. The script always use the text-version of the mail.
Please feel free to use the script and contact me if you have problems.
Here is Ben’s original post about his version of the script:
MT-Moblog HOW-TO
And here is more information on posting to MT by email:
Problem: PostByEmail
Some friends of mine have helped me to modify Ben Milleare’s mt-moblog script. This is an example of a post that is done through mail. The subject of the mail is the heading of the post and the text in the mail is the main text of the post. The attached picture is resized, and a link to the original picture is made.
Sent from: Eirik Solheim
If you install a little program called mpegable DS decoder you can play video and audio clips from your mobile phone on your PC without using QuickTime. It works very well, and lets me even open my 3GP-files in Sony Vegas Video for editing and reencoding.
You can find it here:
mpegable DS decoder
Install the Meedio Helper Plugin
Activate it under “Full Time Plugins”
Thanks to Jelle Hissink for the Meedio Helper Plugin!
Find the screen-file for the RSS detailed screen, most likely found here:
C:Program FilesMeedioMeedio EssentialspluginsimportRss
…and named “RSS.screen”
Open it in notepad and exchange the following code:
standard=”execute” program=”iexplore.exe” params=”-k {file}” window=”maximized”
With this code:
message=”meedio-helper.command.open-url” url=”{file}”
Thanks to Sannie for the code!
…and off you go. The full story opens in the Meedio Browser Plugin.
I have now installed Slimserver on my HTPC. The result is that I can stream my record collection to wherever I am (as long as I have an internet connection). Slimserver is a very powerful system that is easy to install.
This is the webpage that slimserver gives you to control your music stream.
My experience is that an analog tuner inside the HTPC is the worst option. An RF-modulated video-signal is a very complicated signal that needs quite advanced electronics to be “decoded”. This is because all the components of the signal is blended into one modulated signal. It needs to be separated in the tuner. This requires very accurate electronics and some quite high frequencies. The tuners built into PCI-cards in a PC are very often of a low quality and in addition to this they get interferrence from the other components inside the computer.
Actually, one could get better quality by using the analog tuner in a VCR and use composite video out of the VCR and do external tuning on the VCR through an IR Blaster like RedRat3.
A much better option is to use digital cable, digital satellite or digital terrestial. When using that kind of option you have three ways to get the picture from the Set Top Box into your computer:
The two most common:
1. Composite Video. In this signal all the colours are still blended into one signal and needs to be demodulated into sepparate colours. This demodulation always adds some noise. Unfortunately this noise is very bad for all the compression codecs that we use to store the video file.
2. S-Video. In this signal the colour and the black and white signal is transferred sepparately. This is a huge step upwards in quality. I experienced a quality that is close to twice as good as composite from the same set top box. I could meassure this by looking at the CPU-load and the estimated avaliable space on my disk when switching from composite to S-Video. With the same quality-setting in my PICVIDEO-codec I got half the CPU-load and twice the efficiency of the codec (= more video pr. megabyte on the disk).
Still not so common option:
3. RGB. Video input cards with RGB-capture are still limited to professional cards, but consumer-models are appearing right now. You can read about one of them here: SweetSpot
The best option (shortcut the Set Top Box entirely):
4. A digital decoder in your PC recording the broadcasted digital signal directly (like ShowShifter for DVB). This is still in an early stage but is the best option because you do not need to convert to analog and back to digital.
For those of you running ShowShifter on a big progressive screen or projector I think the SweetSpot-product mentioned earlier could give you a very good quality. I do not know how this product will work together with BeyondTV, Sage or MeedioTV.
For 16:9-recordings it is best to record the signal compressed horisontally into 4:3 and stretch it when displaying. This lets you use all the available lines in the signal (as opposed to recording a letterboxed signal).
And, by the way. My digital cable set top box does not deliver S-Video. My capture card accepts Composite and S-Video only. To get the best possible quality without investing in a professional level RGB-capture card I am using an RGB-to-S-Video converter from JS Technologies
During my recent reinstall I have upgraded some software:
Of course, I am now running Meedio as my media management software. This is an obvious upgrade from myHTPC. Meedio is one extremely powerful piece of software and gives perfect functionallity for a serious HTPC.
The Meedio team has not released a complete version of their PVR-module, Meedio TV. So, I am still running BeyondTV 3.5 for my PVR functionallity. Meedio TV sounds promising. It will be interesting to test it when it is released in a full version.
I have also changed my remote control. I am now using a Snapstream FireFly. Works very well together with Girder.
I am still running J River Media Center to control my music and have installed a plugin for Meedio that plays all my music through JRMC.
Suddenly I realised that my blogs started to look quite empty if I did not post anything for the 7 days that Movable Type was configured to show. To correct this I have changed a line in the main index template of my blogs:
Change this line:
MTEntries
to:
MTEntries lastn=”15″
Set up the following view in Media Library – Music – Views:
#,Group by,Function,Mode,Sort by,Sort type,Sort Ascending
1 Artist, index, index, , ,true
2 Artist, , , , ,true
3 Album, ,images, , ,true
4 , ,album-tracks,Track,int,true
How it looks like in the configuration tool
As you can see here, the index automatically selects the letters that is necessary for your collection. This screen shot is from my laptop, where I have a very limited collection…
eirikso 