New photos …

…Of you know who.

Usual place.

XBox Media Center UPnP Server!

Yes I did it. I finally found the time to integrate Platinum UPnP Server inside XBMC. This was officially released a few days ago. (I am c0diq btw ;-)). I did try to make XBMC show up in XP My Network Places when you have the UPnP UI Component installed. Unfortunately, XP relies heavily on multicast for it to work. I wrote a SSDP Proxy a while back and I changed it to forward broadcast messages to Multicast and vice-versa. When the Proxy is running on another machine than the XP box, it works great. But if it’s running on the same machine as the XP box, XP doesn’t receive the multicast packet. This is the same problem I have experienced with Windows Media Connect. If you try to look for it (using the Intel Tools) on the same machine, it won’t work. That’s because the UPnPHost (UPnP Windows implementation) refuses Multicast packets coming from the same machine. Yack.

So after 2 days of extreme frustration, I decided to switch gear. I am working now on a firefox extension called Fireball that will let you find upnp servers on the network and browse them via javascript. How cool is that!? I am 70% there. Say tuned!
I also just released version 0.3.7 on Sourceforge with lots of improvements and bug fixed. Usual place.

Long time no post

I realized today that I haven’t posted anything in a while. It’s unbelievable how much time a newborn takes, and I am only doing 10% of what my wife does.

I managed to do a few things over the last month:

1. Sold my ’72 chevelle . I wasn’t doing much on it, it was taking too much space in the garage and the engine was pretty much DOA.
2. Took 2 weeks of vacation over xmas. My parents & brother visited. It was fun and relaxing (somehow).
3. Inherited a real pool table and set it up where the chevelle was. Back to no space in the garage.
4. Back to working on XBMC. I have implemented a UPnP Server inside XBMC. It’s currently not in the svn trunk but in a branch called upnpserver. Waiting on some feedback from the #teamxbmc before merging.
5. Went to CES last week. Hotel upgraded me to the biggest suite I have ever been in (I had a grand piano in one corner!). Show was great, food was aswesome & I played lots of poker (and won a bit of money too!).
6. Met a VC at LV airport & talked with him for 2 hrs…hmmm
7. Bought Lost Planet for the 360. It’s freaking awesome.
8. Learning Flex & building a XPCOM wrapper on top of Platinum.
9. Reorganized Madison’s gallery pixes and managed to make rss feeds and video playback work! (still doesn’t do progressive download though)

Platinum binaries

I have been requested to offer a prebuilt version of Platinum. So I have. Find them here. This includes among other things a folder-based MediaServer.

Platinum 0.3.1 released

In response to a comment about the LightSampleTest not working, I fixed it and released Platinum 0.3.1. It actually made me realize that the Renderer Test was probably not working in 0.3.0. So that’s good news, it’s all fixed! I also removed all old source code and project files so as to not confuse people. I’ll try to fix/update the HttpClient and HttpServer Tests when I have more time.

-s

What’s next?

Well now that v0.3.0.0 is out, here’s what is in the pipeline:

– Improve Http server with a threadpool to throttle number of connections that can be handled in parallel. Without it, this is becoming a big problem since I only support HTTP 1.0 right now.

– Fix the crash I am seeing on my home machine which I believe is due to a corrupted version of .NET 2003 (How could this happen!!).

– Add Search support to MediaServer (possibly integrate sqlite and start building a small local database).

– Better support for MediaServer update/eventing.

– Make MediaServer visible/accessible to the XBox 360 (almost there already but I need the Search support otherwise it’s a hack).

If time permits:

– Add transcoding capabilities to MediaCrawler.

– Look into DLNA + UPnP v2 specs.