5th Pre-Release Ready

[stevenhanna6]

5th Pre-Release Ready

http://www.xlobby.com/xlobby_2.0.7177.12.exe
Expires August 7th 2007

playlistfinal.jpg

playing.jpg

Let me go through the major changes/additions.

1) MP3 playback has been changed to a bit. I have noticed a few issues with some mp3s, the major one being that some just wouldn't play...this should fix that.

2) There is now a new playlist screen for creating and editing music playlists.

3) Help screens, there are some initial help screens Wes created now available in the system. Hit F1 to jump to the help menu.

4) A category with multiple columns can now assign an event and/or image to the column, this was used in the new playlist section if you want to see how it works.

5) Select an "Output Device" aka sound card to do multiple internal audio zones. I have to add a note of caution here, I just got this working the other day so I have not tested it much....also note if you want to do multi zone audio you will have to start the "xnet" server which is buggy since I have not had time to fix it's code. But if you still want to give it a try, be my guest. Also note your computer will basically have to see multiple soundcards for your outputs....meaning usually windows will not assign each output on a 5.1 sound card to 3 stereo outputs. But there may be a driver that will allow you do this. Now that brings me to something else, software synching....yes it's very hard to do....it might and it might not work (still using old code). On the flip side there are 2 ideas we have for the synching issue, one is software based the other is hardware....I know for a fact the hardware one would work but the software one needs more investigation at this time.

Minor Things

1) Movie Direct spider should be working more accurately
2) Music Direct spider has been added, but its accuracy isn't that great right now
4) Various screens have been cleaned up some more
5) "F2->Info Set", allows one to set static information that is stored in the xlobby.xml file, this information can be used in the skin, for example %variable>static>telephone%


Comming soon

1)Internet radio, I'm in the process of getting this up and running.
2)CDEX plugin will be updated to allow people to more easily rip cds into the system
3)A new communications/interface layer for xlobby, this is something being built from scratch it will allow for any number of hardware/software components to communicate with xlobby

Also note .NET 3.0 will become required for xlobby in future releases. Just warning you guys now, there are some things I need to do in .NET 3.0 that I can't do right now.

Yes I'm still working on the forum, it's not staying in it's current form. I do have to make more changes.

PS As you can see I have 16days worth of music in my playlist using the "all tracks" button located on "controls", I point this out because 16 days is not really a lot. We have tested the system with one anonymous users content that gave a result of about 180 days worth of music in the playlist. It would have been christmas by the time the playlist finished

[blopa26]

Steve,

The previous version (4th release) was so unstable with the Web Server. I've been having problems since I installed that version. Web Server was working better in the 3rd release, with just a few hang-ups.

Did you do something in this 5th version to improve the Web Server stability?.

Remember I wrote a post about it when the first version of your new XL was released.


Thanks in Advance, Pablo.

[Jay]

The docs will be invaluable to newbies. (and me)

[capecodscot]

Hi,

I installed this version yesterday, however none of the volume controls work now. There is also no sound output using the built in media player. I have checked against an older version and all works fine.

Any ideas?

[capecodscot]

Please ignore the previous post - it was a stupid local issue.

[blopa26]

Steve,

I've been testing this 5th release since yesterday at night... Web Server unstability is not fixed yet... Please let us know when you're planning to do it... As far as I remember, you said that you were fixing this after add some improvements around the Music and Video Player...

Thanks in Advance, Pablo.

[jlr2000]

Steve -

Is there an option somewhere in this release to disable firefly support? I have more than one remote and Xlobby accepts input on all channels by default I think. Also, I'm trying to use the internal media player but I can't find any options to adjust or tweak it. My main concern is that it plays subtitles by default. I have the VOB files on the hard drive and I'm not quite sure how to disable subtitles, normally I use Zoom Player and just click the "disable subtitle" feature.

Thanks for your help.

[wesblack]

The current release does not have this yet. We are working on the Menu that will control remote inpute devices. I will discuss this with Steven this week and will provide some more details soon.







Wes Black \ Calrad

[cooldog]

Only 5 days to expiration ....

[cooldog]

Steve,

I've found an interesting and exceedingly minor bug. I've given up on using DVD-Profiler, and I switched over to Ant with the Xant2 plug-in a few weeks ago, and that has been working beautifully for me.

I particularly like the ability to have "collections" of movies (done with the collectionname|moviename syntax in Ant).

This morning, I started on the project of getting my home video into Ant and Xlobby.

I was REALLY happy when it seemed that Ant, XAnt2 and Xlobby were allowing me to build an even deeper structure in the Videos database; collection|subcollection|videoname.

The minor issue is that if you have a subcollection that has a non-empty "Parameter", backing up to the collection level gets you an Unhandled Exception. If I hit continue, Xlobby does the right thing without problems. It's easy to avoid the bug, and it makes no sense to have anything in that Parameter field in this case anyway, but I thought you still would want to kill it.

Paul
P.S. Please don't break the Xant2 plug-in with your new code ... I now absolutely depend on it!!!