WDTV Tools » applications

YouTube Services Taken Down

Elmar Weber — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 10:22:12 +0000

The YouTube application hasn’t been working for a longer time now, I’ve finally had the time to take down the related proxy scripts and application images. Since the WDTV Live is out now there is not much sense in the application itself, mainly because it is too much work to integrate something like YouTube (escpecially search) in an consistent and manageable way into the WDTV UI.

The sources, even the proxy scripts, are still in the SVN repository, so anyone who really wants YouTube support for the old WDTV can take his way from there. Or just get a WDTV Live for a hundred bucks and be done with it in an easier way.

YouTube Support – Preview Release

Elmar Weber — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:06:36 +0000

NOTE: YouTube support has been discontinued, see the corresponding article for details.

NOTE: this is a preview release, it might not work everywhere with all configurations because just minimal testing was done

NOTE: don’t use this when you have the media library enabled, your WDTV will scan forever because it searches for every keyword

It took longer than expected, but here is finally a preview release for the YouTube support for the WDTV. It has not all features I wanted for the first release and a few bugs probably remain. Here is the rundown of features:

supports search for videos
supports the Most Viewed and Top Rated videos of today, this week, this month and all time
supports Recently Featured videos
supports top rated videos in categories
plays back the highest available resolution, for most this is 640×480 pixels, but for newer videos this is 720p HDTV
use keyboard screen to enter search characters

Hints for the search: “>” means execute search and “_” is the space character.

Known issues:

some queries might not work because of special characters in the result’s movie titles

Search will be a little slow in the beginning because the cache on the proxy server needs to fill up first and there is also extensive logging going on to track performance issues. Expect do wait about 10 seconds for a directory listing and about 10-15 seconds before the video starts.

The release is available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/wdtvtools/files/wdtube/youtube-r249-wdtv.zip/download. As usual just extract all files to your USB stick.

YouTube Support – Directory Structure

Elmar Weber — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 01:34:27 +0000

After posting the YouTube Support Teaser the hits on this site tripled over night. So there seems to be a lot of interest. To get you included I would like to post the browsing structure of the YouTube browser for discusson. Currently I have something like this in mind:

YouTube
- Search
  - some keyword
- Recently Featured
  - Today / This Week / This Month / All Time
- Top Rated
  - Today / This Week / This Month / All Time
- Most Viewed
  - Today / This Week / This Month / All Time
- Categories
  - Film & Animation
  - Music
  - …
  - Science & Technology
- ?

I’m not sure how to structure the category view because there are endless possibilities, e.g. you could search a category or view the recently featured or top rated videos for this week or just today.

If you miss something or have other suggestions just leave a comment here or over at the YouTube Teaser WDTV Forum thread.

YouTube Support – Teaser

Elmar Weber — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 02:05:06 +0000

As already mentioned on some occasions I’ve been working by the way on YouTube support for the WDTV. After some initial issues with the YouTube API the data retrieval works now without problems and basic streaming works too. There are just some performance problems to be worked out because it takes about 20 seconds until the playback starts. Basic UI integration is also on the way, so you get a nice keyboard to search with instead of a folder view. Support for favorite channels and tags will be added as well before the first release. There are also some kinks when browsing with thumbnails. Below are two screenshots of the search frame and a resulting file listing.

Update On Available Modifications for the WDTV

Elmar Weber — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 19:26:18 +0000

It’s been a month since the last update on new and existing modifications.

The existing ones have been upgraded and improved, take a look at LaurentG’s mod and juliojs’s work (or his blog (spanish)).
Regarding the non OSD mods, ninja76’s torrent downloader has also lift off and makes progress. realtebo’s IRC download client is also there but hasn’t had any updates lately.

Regarding new developments there is a thumbnail cache from BMD_Online that speeds up when you are using the thumbnail view to browse your media.

Probably the most exciting latest development is pibos WDTVExt project. He has actually managed to tap into the WDTV GUI to modify the main menu and enable new plug-ins. There are already some examples like a weather plug-in.

There is also a very good new OSD Mod from lilibabe, very slick design:

There is ton more but most are basic extensions for WDLXTV or very specific applications. A more or less complete list is managed in the forums at http://wdtvforum.com/main/index.php?topic=1217.0.

Some OSD Mods

Elmar Weber — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 02:36:29 +0000

Take a look over at the WDTV Forum, there is some serious development going on. LaurentG and juliojs use event-osd to skin your folders according to your own templates and data. Thanks to LaurentG’s great idea to use the folders as an options menu a new world of possibilities opens up. For example is ninja76 working on an integration of torrents into the UI and realtebo integrates file downloads via the IRC network.

I can’t wait to see more mods that bring the little black one to shine even more.

Tutorial: How to Create Application Images (app.bin) Files

Elmar Weber — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 19:32:14 +0000

The question popped up a few times in the forums, so I created a tutorial on how to do it: http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/wdtvtools/wiki/Tutorials/CreateApplicationImage.

The assemble-app-bin.sh script that is introduced in the end is also available in the SVN repository via
# svn co https://wdtvtools.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/wdtvtools/trunk/appbinutils

event-osd r112 Released

Elmar Weber — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 02:01:21 +0000

The second release of event-osd is out. event-osd is a notification system for the WDTV’s GUI that allows you to modify the OSD on the fly.

This release works with the media library enabled and should now work on all WDTVs with ext3-boot 0.9.2 and WDLXTV >= 0.5.2.

Besides the main bugfix some smaller changes have been made: app.event files are now converted with dos2unix, so if the file has Windows file endings it still works. Furthermore some system calls have been optimized so that there is less overhead when the directory changes.

You can download the new release from http://sourceforge.net/project/downloading.php?group_id=261153&filename=event-osd-r112-wdtv.zip.

As always, the documentation for developers is available at the Wiki at http://apps.sourceforge.net/trac/wdtvtools/wiki/event-osd.

A video showing event-osd in action with appletrailerfs:

Use More Than 6 Applications

Elmar Weber — Tue, 19 May 2009 20:46:12 +0000

The current firmwares only come with a few loop devices, so if you want to use more than 6 applications you need more. disco, author of the webserver app, supplies a how to and fix in his blog at http://discowd.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/extra-loop-devices/trackback/.

The application binary does not work, to use it you must persist the content of the app.bin somewhere in your root filesystem.