Where is EventGhost going?

[stottle]

It sounds like you've got a really cool setup there. And thanks for joining this thread.

Let me tell where I see EG being useful, and why I think you could get a lot of MCE users to become EG users. Hopefully that makes what I'm working on make more sense.

My interest is not home automation, but front-ends. I came from Meedio, which is pretty amazing software, but it died when it was sold to Yahoo. I know a lot of people use XBMC on this forum, for which I think my experience applies as well.

From my Meedio experience, I drew two conclusions:
1) There will never be a front-end to rule them all.
2) There will always be processes to be run when the playback software isn't running.

In terms of the 1st conclusion, Blu-ray and Hulu are good examples. I would almost say Netflix supports my case as well, since it took MS a while to integrate it into MCE. I think there will always be capability people want that MS is too slow or not interested in integrating into MCE. When will MCE download images of local weather maps? Maybe a plugin to check traffic cameras for my route to work? And if you agree about using different programs to experience different media, then a program like EG, which lets you use a remote to control each program, becomes essential.

By far the best example of #2 is watching folders for new media. Adding tag data for music to your database, analyzing the music for replay-gain or generating a fingerprint for MusicIP. Maybe downloading movie/music cover-art. Or downloading TV shows from RSS feeds and updating the DB when they are finished. I will contend that you don't want to add all of this functionality to the player software, as then you end up with a process running 24x7. JRMC is watching folders for music, something else is watching for movies, and a third process generates music fingerprints, since JRMC doesn't have that capability. Another example is TMT, which on Vista and Win7, takes a long time to open my networked storage to allow my to pick a movie (about 10-15 seconds). I'd like to have the movies cached already, so that the program doesn't need to search all the directories every time it starts.

If EG is easy to use for those two purposes, I think you will bring over a lot of MCE users.

There's no way around the fact that you can't automatically customize a unique configuration like home automation. You will always have to manually match events to actions in this case. But you can make a lot of the "common" stuff (the stuff new users are most likely to want) a lot easier. And if you allow the user community to easily add new features, instead of just microsoft, I think you have something a lot of people want. And if people already use it for their remote and watching folders, if they start getting into home automation, they will use it for that too.

BTW, I've got USB-UIRT as well. Great hardware, and a Harmony set up to mimic an MCE remote as well. But I don't see too many people nowadays buying a USB-UIRT when the MCE remote is more readily available. So I went out and bought an MCE remote to test with.

Brett

[jsonnabend]

What is the receiver for the MCE remote, and will it run outside of Win MCE?

- Jeff

[stottle]

What is the receiver for the MCE remote, and will it run outside of Win MCE?

The receiver is just whatever came with the remote. It just says Model HA-IR01SV on the back. It works outside of MCE once the registry has been changed, (you need to run as admin and with UAC off in Win7) otherwise the OS converts the IR commands to keystrokes. Once the registry is changed, the MCE plugin will pass the IR codes to EG.

Here's a link if you are curious.

Brett

[jsonnabend]

Thanks for the link. To use the MCE remote outside of MCE, you have to run as admin, or only to set the remote up?

[stottle]

I haven't done a ton of testing. I'm on Win7, and I needed to turn off UAC to receive the commands. I think I ended running as admin w/out UAC and it worked, I don't think I tried w/out UAC on a non-admin account. You certainly need admin privileges to change the registry (which the plugin has the option to do for you).

Brett

[kricker]

Interesting thread.....you got another XBMC/Sage user and long time EG evangelist looking over your shoulders .

[stottle]

Are you the same kricker from the Meedio forums?

All - I making some good progress, but it is slow learning wxPython, and I've been out of town the last few days. I'm hoping to get something out this weekend for you to test.

Brett

[kricker]

Are you the same kricker from the Meedio forums?
Brett

yup...and from the Sage forums and the XBMC forums.

[stottle]

For anyone interested, I've started a new thread for anyone that wants to beta test my version.

See here.

Thanks,
Brett