Solicitation for Development: Desktop / Workstation Agent

[tschak909]

Hello, Everyone.

I had heard quite a few times over the years, the wish for greater integration with Desktop / Workstation computers within the home. Things like:

* Being able to start a piece of media on a workstation, or move a piece of media between a TV and Workstation, on eitheHar an orbiter, or the file manager
* Having a convienient orbiter available on a workstation to do the above, or control other house functions
* Having a way to turn the monitor on/off automatically, in response to changes in house mode (when going Away for example, or waking up, or presence detection)

etc.

I have put together a quick prototype of this, and it is in SVN in a few pieces, for those interested in finishing development of such a component.

Wiki Page is here: http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Workstation_Agent

A demo video is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1pedtpuYzA

No, I am not putting up instructions on the wiki of how to install the components, why? Because I want to foster development within here, and discussion, to force the issue towards making it easily installable, rather than letting setup instructions languish on a wiki that people just muddy through.

Thoughts?
-Thom

[rages]

Hi,

but you have already inserted the source in SVN?

I apologize if I have understood incorrectly in your words ..

Emanuele

[tschak909]

yes, the pieces i used to do this demo.

-Thom

[rages]

Yes, but what's his name?

Emanuele

[tschak909]

there is no one piece.

I built it from the SmartQ Media Player and Plugin, which are in src/

the needed device templates are also in sqlCVS, so you'll need to update... 2177 is what I am using at the moment (Generic Linux Workstation)

But this is not ready for use at all. So please do not ask me how to install it. That's an exercise for the developer.

-Thom

[rages]

Hi,

I wanted to find out if I groped to port to ARM (pandaboard) using as a base ubuntu 10.10, or Meego.


Emanuele

[tschak909]

then port the whole stack.

This is for something completely different.

Do you guys not watch or read?

-Thom

[tschak909]

the meego stuff is here:

http://repo.pub.meego.com/home:/tschak909/meego_current_extras/

and the MeeGo kickstarts are in src/MeeGo

But that is a different topic altogether.

-Thom

[rages]

I'm afraid I did not understand what we're talking about then.

I thought it was a sort of orbiter with the opportunity to interact with the server LMCE and to see a video  or a VDR stream on a desktop PC, which at this point could be even the ARM Ubuntu 10.10.

I apologize if I misunderstood, my English is a bit 'elementary.

Emanuele

[tschak909]

yes, but it's meant for desktop machines that already have existing environments.

The end goal is to have an installable package on Windows, Linux, and mac, that doesn't interfere with the existing stuff, just maps LinuxMCE stuff to file types, and provides a media end point. It is NOT meant to be a full media director package.

-Thom

[dextaslab]

So just to make sure I've got it correct, this will be an extremely lightweight version of say, running an MD on virtual machine platform in a Windows (etc...) environment, except it'll run a lot faster, have more features, be more integrated with a smaller footprint? Sounds awesome! If you'd except a VB.net program I'd like to be involved (I know this isn't the case).

[tschak909]

hmm...

The point of the workstation agent, is simply to allow workstations to be able to participate in the LinuxMCE home. It is NOT meant as a substitute for media directors, in that:

(1) there is no ConfirmDependencies, so no automatic package installation
(2) the feature set is very fixed. This is intentional, many features of LinuxMCE require tight control of the target system, so many things will have to be omitted.

-Thom

[grind]

This is a very very nice idea Tschak! As usal...

Unfortunately i'm a beginner in programming and therefore no big help.
In addition i think i'm learning the wrong language for this project but that brings me to the point: Why don't you use Java?
It would run on all three mentioned platforms without compiling and stuff.

Most probably because you know C much better?!

So long,
Nicolai

[tschak909]

No, because Java is not a systems language, and our DCE libraries are currently in C++, and we need to be able to hook into various aspects of the target system for integration.

Go do some homework.

-Thom

[david_a_dawson]

Hello. posting to old thread for fun and profit.

Did this go anywhere?

I like the idea as I understand it.

It'd be very cool to take that idea and apply it to the mobile devices qorbiter is being ported too as well desktops.

Eg, on an android handset, have a video/ CCTV be able to be accessed/ controlled via the qorbiter interface.