Media Player Project Update

Back in April I made a post about creating some kind of a 'TV Emulator'. Well, I've not been idle on this. I've been busily figuring out how VLC's http interface works and all the various VLC command line arguments (there are a lot of them!). It's gotten to the point where it's a reliable little app. It weighs in at just over 1200 lines of code, you have to love Python for it's concision. The program offers the following features to date.

As a refresher the core goal of the project idea was: pick a random TV series from those available and play the first (from a chronological perspective) unwatched episode and persist this watched/unwatched information

• Add directories to scan on refreshes
• Directories are assumed to be have the following structure:
• drive:\path\to\dir\<show name>\<any or no season organization -- this is optional>\*S##E##*.<valid video extension>
• Or for your *nix people: /path/to/dir/<show name>/<any or no season organization -- this is optional>*S##E##*.<valid video extension>
• Where S##E## is the season number and episode number -- all my ripped box sets have been ripped and named to this format precisely so I can make easy assumptions like this
• You can accomplish the above pretty easily using something like the renamer
• For you *nix people I stumbled across this: https://github.com/dbr/tvnamer
• If you're brave you could just update the threadedIndex function to use assumptions that are valid for your organization system, but obviously I cannot promise that won't break anything else (but hey, it's Python, it shouldn't be too hard, right?).
• Look for new content on your added drives on demand
• Track what episodes have been watched
• Mass unwatch / watch episodes in a series
• Blacklist series (so they won't show up on subsequent refreshes)
• Create 'channels'
• To start with you have an irremovable channel called 'Default' (very imaginative, I know) which contains all your shows, you can add new channels by using the bottom channel bar and hitting 'Add'
• You can give your added channel a custom name and add your desired series to it
• A series can belong to multiple channels
• If you watch an episode in one channel it will be reflected as watched in all channels
• Save your current episode and position in the episode per channel
• If you change channels your episode / position in the first channel is saved
• If you later go back to that first channel (assuming you didn't watch the episode you were on already) it will resume the episode from where you left off -- basically every channel persists its state
• Skip to the next show without marking the current episode as watched, want to watch this episode just not right now? The next button is for you :)
• Mark an episode as watched and skip to the next (the big eye button does this) if you just watched this episode the other day (say on actual television) you can just skip it and mark it as watched, no harm no foul
• Automatically start VLC with the proper http interface enabled
• This app requires an http interface be active since this is what it uses to communicate with VLC, so if it finds that VLC is not running, or at least no instance with http active, it will try to find VLC and then run it with --extraintf oldhttp (and it will tell vlc to never repair avi indexes -- since this can cause a bad workflow loop)
• Automatically mark an episode as watched once you get through 90+% of it

And that's pretty much the extent of what the app does. It's filled with a few assumptions about the way I have things organized to make things simpler -- but I can do that since my girlfriend and I are the primary users. Below is a screen shot of the culmination of my efforts. It's nothing too terribly advanced but right now it does exactly what I set out to do and I'm pretty happy with it. I haven't released it anywhere yet -- I'm not even certain if anyone would be interested in it, but if anyone is I'd be happy to share.

TV Emu 0.4 for VLC
Please note, I own the Reno 911 box set s and ripped them to digital format for my own htpc use . (Read: Don't sue me.) 

Media Player Project

I've got a project I've got in beta right now that I might eventually release. Here's the lowdown.

Concept: Broadcast network emulation.

What does this mean? Basically, a random distribution of tv series you have ripped from dvd to your htpc. Before you say you can just shuffle a playlist, read on. If you shuffle a playlist, you do get a random distribution of shows, this is true, but the chronological order of those shows is not preserved. (i.e. you get Season 5 Episode 2 of show X and then a few positions down the playlist you're suddenly watching Season 1). For some shows this doesn't matter, especially if there's no overarching story lines, but for others it can lead to a very disjointed viewing experience.

The ideal solution for me here is to have a player that:

1. Chooses a random television series
2. Finds the lowest unwatched episode for that series
3. Plays the episode
4. Marks the episode as watched in a persistent store once finished

I also want this to be light weight, so I've decided to forgo writing something like this for XBMC.

Instead I've wrapped this around VLC, more specifically, VLC's http interface. (I may switch to using VLC's python bindings for an internal controller later for a more all-in-one experience -- it depends on the momentum for the project.)

The project as it stands will do the steps outlined above and a little more. It makes web calls to an open VLC player (with the http interface enabled) in the background and will constantly play new episodes while the player is active and record each episode's status as it goes.

It's very basic right now, you can add shows, remove them, and play. You can't 'unwatch' shows, etc yet. But I plan to build this out. I may even add media scrapers and turn this into a slick interface for VLC in general. Time will tell. I'm not sure if anyone else has this same desire, I could be alone. And if so, I'll happily keep this to myself. :)