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Living Room / Re: I'm ready to join the HTPC (home theater pc) revolution - what to get?

« Last post by mouser on September 20, 2013, 08:54 PM »

A few more observations after a week of tweaking -- first some more XBMC complaints..

XBMC is an amazing open source project and it's amazing that it runs so well on so many different platforms.

It's also completely fails the test of being a set top replacement for a consumer device like a tivo etc -- for all but the most devoted users.  It is simply packed to the brim with an insane navigational system and large gaping holes in functionality.  It is absolutely and inexplicably painful to navigate around some of these side and context menus and perform certain operations, and it's absolutely braindead about lots of things.  It may be ok for movie and tv browser but it's fairly terrible for online streaming and audio music.

If someone unfamiliar with XBMC came over to your house and you gave them the remote, the chance of them getting stuck in some sidebar context menu, triggering unwanted commands, and becoming frustrated is a near certainty.

Having said all that, i haven't seen anything better.  But using something like this really makes you appreciate the work that goes into polishing a consumer GUI (like the TIVO) to make it intuitive and comfortable.  XBMC gives you 10,000 alternate unsupported abaondoned broken "skins" and it's impossible to navigate.  TIVO does not let you choose the skin but everything else works intuitively.  What would you rather have?

Despite all my complaining, I still haven't found anything better for use as an htpc set top box (mainly for music) and XBMC does have a very high factor of cool if you want to hack around on it, which I have spent the last week doing.  God knows how much will break over time -- it feels fragile.  But there are some fun things to be done, and lots to explore and customize if you are into that kind of thing.

Jriver Media Center is still on my list of tools i'm playing with -- it has much nicer out-of-the-box music support, and much more power-user friendly interface in standard desktop application view.  However, it falls down miserably on the htpc television screen (theatre) view, so that's what's stopping me there.

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N.A.N.Y. 2014 / NANY 2014 Pledge: xbmcsender

« Last post by mouser on September 19, 2013, 10:33 PM »

NANY 2014 Project name: xbmcsender

What is it?

This NANY release consists of a small (open source) python class and commandline utility for sending links to your xbmc for playback.

This script will send urls (audio, video, youtube, images) to your xbmc htpc machine for playback, but it can also be used to send local files, which is does by first ftping the file and then instructing your xbmc to play it from the newly uploaded location.

This script itself is cross-platform; it also comes with a windows-only Find and Run Robot alias addon.

What's the point?

The idea of this tool is to let you quickly send a file or url from your main pc to your xbmc htpc box.

There are actually quite a few addons for different browsers that will help you do this -- i wanted a more neutral non-browser-specific solution that could send not just any url, but also upload local files.  The point is to have a very quick way to take something on your local machine and play it on your xbmc with the fewest hassle.  And perhaps more functionality will be added by me and others?

DOWNLOAD HERE:
https://www.donation.../xbmc/xbmcsender.zip

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N.A.N.Y. 2014 / Re: N.A.N.Y. 2014 - New Apps for the New Year - Welcome Thread

« Last post by mouser on September 19, 2013, 12:47 PM »

Welcome to the site Bhathiya!

There's not really any formal process for joining the NANY event.. Just stay tuned to this section and you'll see us start posting some updates soon.

Usually what people do is start a new thread in this section and announce the name or purpose of the program they will be releasing.  Some post early versions for people to try.

It will all make sense as we get a little closer to the new year.

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Screenshot Captor / Re: LATEST VERSION INFO THREAD - ScreenshotCaptor - v4.7.2 - Sep 13, 2013

« Last post by mouser on September 18, 2013, 03:32 AM »

Hi Dimitri, and greetings to Belgium!

You're not getting old, it's just that the new "Quick Capture Bar" is a new thing and I think I forgot to include a way to start the timer from it.

I will be adding it to the next release.

Until then, you engage the auto timer from the system tray menu, Right-click -> Capture Options -> Engage Auto-timer.

Let me know if that works for you and if you have any other issues with it, and thanks for your patience.

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Developer's Corner / Re: Odd/Fun Ways You've Learned Programming

« Last post by mouser on September 18, 2013, 12:19 AM »

When I was a little kid first learning to program, my initial motivations were to play computer "games".  I put the word "games" in quotes because these weren't the kinds of 100-person production quality games of today.  We're talking about a situation where you typed in the 2-page game program code from a computer magazine for 6 hours in order to play it (text only).

This book was my bible:

Basic Computer Games

That book and my father's encouragement is what started me coding -- for many years after that my focus was on creating games.  I spent a good part of a decade doing little else but creating clones of arcade games.  My grand opus was a clone of q-bert that had my own invented cut-scenes.. I wish I still had a copy of that..

Somewhere around 1986, in my latter years of high school, I finished work on a hybrid text-graphics adventure creation toolkit, and send out some packages in the mail with demo disks to a few computer game companies to see if i could find a company to buy/use it.  Didn't get much interest and just shelved it and went to college.

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Living Room / Re: DonationCoder & Cody themed art compilation thread.

« Last post by mouser on September 17, 2013, 04:27 AM »

The amazing creator of Cody, dc member Nudone, has an avatar where Cody makes a guest appearance:


There are a few more cody-related avatars on the forum as well..

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N.A.N.Y. 2014 / Re: The NANY Retrospective Thread

« Last post by mouser on September 16, 2013, 11:27 PM »

To this day i enjoy reading the comments that people leave on your coincalc.com website.

It goes to show how a nice focused web app can be a lasting source of use.

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N.A.N.Y. 2014 / The NANY Retrospective Thread

« Last post by mouser on September 16, 2013, 11:09 PM »

Hard to believe that there have now been seven (7) previous NANY events.  That's seven years that some of us having been writing new applications to celebrate the new year.  Crazy.  Time goes by so quickly.

I thought maybe we could have a thread where some of us coders who have participated in NANY could look back at our previous entries and comment on them.. Most NANY apps didn't have much of a life beyond the event, but i know a few have had an interesting history..

If you participated in a past year's NANY event, post a reply and talk about your past entries and what you learned, etc..

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Living Room / Re: OK - lets get to know each other... who are you, what do you do, where from?

« Last post by mouser on September 16, 2013, 11:03 PM »

Welcome back scancode.

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Feature Requests For Region Captures - Use Arrow Keys and Solid Region Lines

« Last post by mouser on September 16, 2013, 02:18 PM »

Yes, i will for sure try to get the crosshairs options in the next version.
Arrow keys i will see, but make no promises.

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Poor man's 'gallery view' in Screenshot Capture

« Last post by mouser on September 16, 2013, 12:30 PM »

Is there a keyboard shortcut to toggle the Thumbnail Viewer

Ctrl+H

could you attach the .sctool files now?

Unpack these under your ScreenshotCaptor\Tools directory:

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Developer's Corner / A Field Guide to Procrastinators (humour)

« Last post by mouser on September 16, 2013, 12:21 PM »

DC member Gothi[c] showed this to me:

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Living Room / Re: The Best Job Around the World

« Last post by mouser on September 16, 2013, 04:28 AM »

I voted.

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Developer's Corner / Re: Book: Masterminds of Programming

« Last post by mouser on September 16, 2013, 04:24 AM »

I have but i forgot it all.. I note that i didn't make too many notes while reading it, which is usually a bad sign, but could also mean i wasn't quite ready to absorb it..

Might be time to take another pass at it..

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Living Room / Re: I'm ready to join the HTPC (home theater pc) revolution - what to get?

« Last post by mouser on September 16, 2013, 03:12 AM »

I think superboy might have the right idea.. Which is to not do all this incredible struggling to get these HTPC tv-theatre-view-mode fancy and painful UI systems to work.  That's where all the pain is.  Instead just use a monitor/mouse/keyboard to select what to play.. Problem solved.

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Living Room / Re: I'm ready to join the HTPC (home theater pc) revolution - what to get?

« Last post by mouser on September 16, 2013, 03:06 AM »

I spent half of today playing with 0.0001% of the 3rd party addons and skins and stuff for XBMC.  

I'm probably just getting really grumpy in my old age but it is an impossibly chaotic experience trying to configure these things with a million different half-supported, half-broken, clashing 3rd party addons.

And that's despite the fact that the XBMC folks have created an incredibly helpful system of finding and using these 3rd party addons.

I think there is a real lesson here for coders, of the costs and benefits of designing a system that is structured to let a million people plug and play and every part of it.. The chaos and incoherence and potential for confusion is incredible.

There are quite a few projects like this, that have an incredible ecosystem of independent developers -- it feels like treachory to suggest that this approach results in something that is painful to use, but i just find myself wishing for a system that was coherently designed.

I'd gladly give up 90% of the power and flexibility in exchange for something that was clean and predictable and comprehensible and simpler to configure and use.

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Living Room / Re: I'm ready to join the HTPC (home theater pc) revolution - what to get?

« Last post by mouser on September 15, 2013, 11:03 PM »

If I sound overly negative, I think it's just a matter of getting my expectations in line.

I've spent a decade with a TIVO dedicated tv recording/watching device, and they have the user interface experience quite smooth and streamlined and well designed for a operation from a TV -- though i found it useless for listening to music, which is mostly what i like to do.

The HTPC-route, using standard desktop operating system, is a different experience -- rougher edges and all that.  And I'm of course still getting used to the software.


But make no mistake, it is VERY cool to be able to have so much more control over what's going on and so much more freedom in terms of what you can run and how it works.  Want to run a fish aquarium screensaver on tv -- you can do that.  Want to run skype over your big screen tv, you can do that. The possibilities are endless.

8793

Living Room / Re: I'm ready to join the HTPC (home theater pc) revolution - what to get?

« Last post by mouser on September 15, 2013, 09:17 PM »

So.. I now have an HTPC setup.

The results are.. mixed.

What I bought was a used stereo-form-factor pre-built pc from ebay.
This was a machine that was once top of the line for it's form factor and cost $2500 in 2009 and I was able to pick up for a little more than $300.
https://www.maingear...ters/axess/index.php

5 years later and the specs are still very respectful for it's form factor (it has an i7 chip and 6gb of ram).

I thought having a desktop capable machine would be nice because it's possible I'll end up using it for some always-on fun computer simulations (machine learning, artificial life, etc.).

Dirhael's posts in this thread were right on target:

JRiver really does a nice job of playing and showing audio albums, with scraped background images.. Just looks really elegant while playing.  Thought i may end up going back to XBMC since i normally want to find files to play by navigating folder structure not via fancy powerful tag album artist thing.

But XBMC visualizations are just terrible.

They are both confusing to customize, with JRiver being truly opaque.

Both would be fine for use as my music player -- I have thousands of cds and records that i hope to eventually convert so i can listento it with the htpc computer.  For now i'm using Jriver.


Anyway, overall, the HTPC does work, and sometimes it's pretty cool.


But for the sake of other people considering HTPC life, let me discuss some of the bumps in the road i'm experiencing:

First, my decision to by a powerful pc to use as an htpc has come with a few serious drawbacks.  First, it's LOUD.  I hate that.  I've already gone in and tweaked some underlocking and turned down the fans as much as i can, but there's just not avoiding the fact that this thing gets hot inside and there is no room for good big silent fans.  This is not even mentioning the power consumption.

Second, the small form pc case means its hard to replace components (see fan replacement issue above).

Third, digital audio output sounds great.  Analog output is of very low volume with this motherboard drivers (ive already upgraded, flashed bios, gone hunting for solutions so i know there is nothing much to do about it), and this creates serious humming noise on my audio input line to my reciever.

Fourth, you might ask why i would want to use analog output when the digital works great and sounds great.  The reason is that my receiver decodes the digital fine but will not pass it through to my secondary speakers or my wireless speaker inputs which require analog.  So i have to make a choice of digital audio and no secondary speakers in other rooms, or crappy sounding buzzing analog.  Not happy about this.  And this is a good receiver.  It might be solvable by upgrading to  some new $500 receiver but that's not going to happen.

Fifth, I underestimated how difficult it would be to read text on the tv screen.  Perhaps that's because i still have an "old" style tube television.  But it does mean that actually working within windows on the tv screen is unbearable so requires a secondary screen (or remote login) to do most things involving normal windows applications.


Summarizing, here's what I would advise for others considering making the leap to HTPC:

First, take the issue of noise VERY VERY seriously. Decide whether you want a really small quiet htpc device -- follow Dirhael's route for a passive cooled small and "relatively" low power machine. And consider if one of those dedicated media-playing machines might be the way to go -- ask yourself if you really need the flexibility of having a fully desktop grade pc as your htpc.

Or if you really want a full power machine, think hard about whether you can't use a standard small tower case and place it somewhere out of the way.  That would allow you to build it with normal sized components -- which would cut down on price and give you a lot more flexibility to build a fast quiet powerful machine.

I think if i were to do it all over again I might try to find a way to fit a small tower into my living space.

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Web Link Captor / Re: Latest Web Link Captor Release - v1.10.01 - Apr 19, 2012

« Last post by mouser on September 14, 2013, 06:28 PM »

hahahahaha.
posted a year ago and now discovered your own post recommending to your future self to try it. 

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General Software Discussion / Re: How can I obtain only the titles in google

« Last post by mouser on September 14, 2013, 02:42 PM »

You might want to check out my Web Link Captor tool -- it's designed to do this kind of thing (though not this exactly), and a lot more.

However, it's a tool that has a bit of a learning curve.

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Poor man's 'gallery view' in Screenshot Capture

« Last post by mouser on September 14, 2013, 01:53 PM »

So i've been thinking a little more about a standalone/integrated little image browser tool to be useful with Screenshot Captor.

Key features I had in mind are:

1. Be able to show a single view of images found recursively in folders; perhaps a single view of thumbnails found in an arbitrary list of folders.
2. Quick search/filtering/sorting by name/date/etc.
3. Quick thumbnail size adjustments.

In other words, the focus would be on helping you find images in a large collection.

Now, the main question is still whether it makes sense to write such a tool when there are a bunch of powerful free image browsing/searching tools.

To me it comes down to the benefits of having one that bundles with and is made to integrate perfectly out of the box with SC, and being able to get it to work exactly as we want, vs the the folly of reinventing the wheel and spending time implementing something that already exists..

One thing that would be useful to know is what are the key features people use in such an image browser/finder.. And if there is a small enough essential feature set that this tool could replace some others without too much effort.  Even better would be if we could come up with some unique interesting functionality that would justify this tool's existence.


Having said all that, I just configured the (free for personal use) XnView as a tool in SC to browse the screenshot directory, and it does a very nice job.  Since you can drag+drop files from XnView into SC, it's hard to find a compelling reason to code another tool rather than just tell people to install XnView.  I'll add a default .sctool to the next Screenshot Captor release so that the XnView tool will show up automatically in your Screenshot Captor tool menu if you have XnView installed.  Ditto with IrfanView's thumbnail browser.

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Esc Key

« Last post by mouser on September 14, 2013, 01:39 PM »

Escape works here to cancel it.

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Strange problem with default screenshot directory on network drive

« Last post by mouser on September 14, 2013, 11:54 AM »

This may be fixed in the latest version -- let me know if not.

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Integration with Easy Screencast Recorder

« Last post by mouser on September 14, 2013, 10:13 AM »

Putting in the absolute path to "d:\Program Files\DonationCoder_Portables\EasyScreencastRecorderPortable\EasyScreencastRecorder.exe" , with or without the double quotes around, did not help either

Let me look into that and see if i can see what might have gone wrong there -- that should have worked.

Note that you should not edit the .sctool for ESR that comes with screenshot captor, as it could get erased on next update -- you should create a new .sctool file.

Another note is that if you are adding a custom tool that you don't intend to share, you don't need to make an .sctool file, you can just click on the Tools menu and choose the last item "Configure External Tools" and add it there.

One other suggestion I'd have at this point would be to add the (possibility of adding the) ESR icon to the  Quick Capture Bar and a customizable shortcut option to go with it. Maybe when SCR is past the alpha stage

Yes, this is a good idea.

You actually will see the contents of the Tools menu on the toolbar, under the red toolbox icon -- i just need to add an option for being able to tell SC which tools if any should be shown at the root level of the toolbar..

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Screenshot Captor / Re: Esc Key

« Last post by mouser on September 14, 2013, 10:05 AM »

using the normal selected region capture mode, with the full screen size crosshairs, or using redbox mode?