Alternative online media server and more options

[hello2000]

In this post, you’ll find what pretends to be an alternative to the official online media server by the WiiMC team. It’s very simple to configure WiiMC to use it, just replace the default onlinemedia.xml in DEVICE:/apps/wiimc by the one provided in this post.

What are the advantages?

• You will be able to access more web services from WiiMC. These are the added ones:
  – Jamendo (with track search, as well as standard feeds)
  – Google Weather
• For the already available by default services, you will have more features.
  For YouTube, you’ll be able to access playlists, and get a specific user’s uploads.
  For Shoutcast, you’ll be able to navigate it by genre. The default Search function is available for both services.
• Enjoy quicker (or not 🙂 ) navigation/search on all services (except Navi-X). This is because you’re using a less-crowded server (it’s my personal VPS), or because it is nearer you (the server is UK based)
• If my server is not available, you can always use the default server by using the links on the “WIIMC.org links” folder on WiiMC, or by replacing the custom onlinemedia.xml with the default one.
  All the processing outside the “WiiMC.org links” folder and outside Navi-X is done by my server.

Jamendo details:
While track search and feed retrieval seem to work, their results aren’t accurate when compared to the ones on Jamendo website. As far as I know, this is a problem with the Jamendo API and not my scripts.
Because of this, sometimes when you wanted to play a specific album or track, you couldn’t… As I have developed two new scripts and added two new options to the onlinemedia.xml file, now you can play a specific album by entering the ID of the album you see on its URL at the Jamendo website:
http://www.jamendo.com/en/album/92299 – 92299 is the AlbumID you need to enter to play the album “Leaving Liverpool”
And you can also play a specific user-created playlist by entering its PlaylistID:
http://www.jamendo.com/en/playlist/200471 – 200471 is the PlaylistID you need to enter to access the playlist “2011” by Jamendo user “nad451”.
These two new options, added at 12th June 2011 (please update your online media file if it is older and you want to use these features) allow you to access the entire Jamendo library, no matter if their “get2” API works well or not (by the way, these two new functions use the old API “get”, which is best than get2 for certain things).

To avoid service outage due to DNS problems on my domain (free domains suck), the XML file and scripts are designed to work with the IP of the server directly rather than with the domain.

How do I start using it?
Download (right click and save as) http://213.229.73.233/wiimc/onlinemedia.xml and either overwrite the old file on the SD/USB where WiiMC is, or rename it to something else so you can easily return to what it was before. Now put the SD/USB back on your Wii, start WiiMC and select the Online Media tab. You should see a handful of new options, organized in folders.

Note
Note that this does not improve the speed of media buffering, as that is not done through my server (if it was, it’d be a bandwidth hole and I wouldn’t be posting this here My server, like WiiMC official and default one, only gives WiiMC the links to the media (YouTube, Shoutcast, or whatever). Also, Navi-X browsing and search is still done through the official server, and there are no plans to change this.

This has been made possible thanks to the scripts by jhb50 and boondoklife, which I adapted and installed on my server, then from which I coded the access to some more web services.

This has been tested with WiiMC 1.1.8. No enhancement pack required, but you’ll get a better experience with it (I myself don’t have the enhancement pack and I don’t find it necessary).

Please tell me your opinion and suggestions for improvements. Also, give me ideas for services you’d like to see integrated. Ideally, these services should have a public API which is easy to work with in PHP.

[cadbusca]

Well you should get a slightly faster response when using your own server since you did not have to access the internet and contend with all the other traffic. It is unlikely though that others will experience any benefit from using your servers for acccessing the normal WIIMC scripts since their server is provided by the ISP and most likely has a capacity far in excess of your normal user server.

Also I believe only one of the scripts in my alternate pack that was provided by another user requires ZEND. All the others are normal php scripts and only require a php install.

In developing those alternate scripts, I realized that it is possible to extend the YouTube scripts so that you can actually browse thru the youtube library by following the uploads, playlists and channels of various users. Those extensions will be released shortlyonce testing is completeand while they could be used under WIIMC, they really need additional enhancements provided in WIIMC+ to function smoothly. If you implement those scripts on your server for others to use that would make YouTube Browsing available to everyone.

[hello2000]

I’m not sure you understood, as I can’t understand very well what you say in the first paragraph, but the scripts are not hosted at a server at my home, but in a VPS from Hostrail.
Better yet, the scripts WERE hosted at that VPS, becuase it seems they just rolled back my VPS to a previous backup and I lost all the data that was on /var/www, including the scripts. (It is a free VPS anyways so these things are to expect). I’m now going to reupload the scripts to another VPS that it’s not from Hostrail and that has been working for six months without problems.

The only thing that worries me is that I made modifications to the scripts that are now lost as I didn’t backup. Anyways…

I’ll update the post with a new onlinemedia.xml when I’m done.

EDIT: I already updated the post with a new onlinemedia.xml. The download location for this file is now different.
The scripts are now hosted at my other VPS, which is not from Hostrail and has been proved very reliable in the last months. (uptime of 65 days, and it had been running for longer before, but I rebooted it)

Also, jhb50, could you please explain me better why my server might be quicker for me, but other might not feel any difference? Obviously I know that if the server is “nearer” (in terms of internet connections) me, it will be faster, but apart from that, is there anything?

EDIT2: nic.cz.cc free domains service pointed my domain gbl08ma.cz.cc to searchportal or any other domain parking site (again, it already happened to me before). I already changed the zone records back, but it’s not working yet…
To avoid WiiMC from being dependent on the domain being working or not, I posted again new onlinemedia.xml which instead of the domain name contains the IP address of the server.
This new onlinemedia.xml also adds basic support for Jamendo. Unfortunately track search does not seem to be very accurate, and I’m yet to find a way to get a m3u playlist of a album/artist search through the Jamendo API.

Other thing nice to have is Grooveshark support, but it’s by far more difficult than Jamendo as their (Grooveshark) API doesn’t return M3U playlists.

I’ll post the source for my scripts soon.

[hello2000]

I posted a new Online Media XML at the same location of the first post, this one organizes better the services in folders and adds support for Google Weather API (an unofficial API hosted at Google’s servers, but works anyways). You enter the name of the city you want to obtain the forecast for, and there you have!

Let me know what you think, and ideas of services to be added. Preferably the services should have an API that is workable with PHP.

I know, I know, I didn’t post the source for the scripts yet, but I’ll do it once I have some more code to share (more services support).
I’m now going to edit the first post to be more readable (delete the story blah blah and organize in topics).

[cadbusca]

My comments:

Weather – Seems to be one day out… Today is Friday but it shows Today(presumeably Thursday), then Friday, Sat, etc

Jamendo.. Would be nice to also display artist name. Also seems to be out of wack with the jamendo lists. Your most pop tracks this week list The journey Home, The Signal, sad robot etc, but the jamendo top 100 this week shows Push On, OLTRENATURA ( a journey around the world) and Tortuga as the top tracks.

[hello2000]

About the weather, I already noticed it is sometimes one day out, I think it’s because of time zones or something. It is already out on the Google API return. One thing I’d like to add is to show a image of the weather for the selected item on the right of the WiiMC screen (like if it were the albumart), similar to what happens on Navi-X, but it doesn’t seem to be possible with M3U playlists which is the format the web scripts echo the data.

About Jamendo, their API’s very complete, but lacks certain things I find essential: for example, I can’t get all tracks of a specific artist in M3U format and with URL streams; I can’t perform a search by artist then get all the artists that match, them select an artist and get all the albums of that artist, and finally, get all the tracks of that album with their streaming URLs in M3U format.
It would be possible if we had SQL-like access to the Jamendo DB, but they don’t provide that. 🙁

About the discrepancy of the results, I think that in the case you talked about it is because you’re comparing the “100 most listened” tracks on the Jamendo website with the “Most Popular tracks this week” feature on WiiMC. The most pop tracks is a top that AFAIK is only available through the API (through the API you can get lots of sorts, much more than on the website), but not on the website.

Wait! Now that I look more carefully, it seems the Jamendo’s top-100 has the same tracks as the one shown on WiiMC, but not on the same order. Well, what I’m requesting to the jamendo api on the “most popular this week” is:
http://api.jamendo.com/get2/stream/track/plain/track_album+album_artist/?n=50&order=ratingweek_desc

(In fact what I’m requesting is in m3u format, just change “plain” to “m3u” on the above URL and you’ll get a m3u playlist for download). As you can see, the tracks are unordered… “The Signal” from “BertycoX” is on 10th place, but on the API return it appears in 2nd.

The Jamendo API sucks a bit and I think that’s why this doesn’t work very well. For example, when I do a track search for “BertycoX”, only two tracks appear, but BertycoX published many more. This is what is requested when you search for “BertycoX” using the API:
http://api.jamendo.com/get2/stream/track/plain/?order=searchweight_desc&n=40&searchquery=bertycox
(again, “plain” instead of “m3u” to allow you to see in browser instead of downloading)

This is what appears when you search for BertycoX on Jamendo website:
http://www.jamendo.com/en/search/all/bertycox (it doesn’t allow to search for track, only for album and artist).

Well, as you see, there are lots of discrepancies. I wish the results on Jamendo website and on the API matched better to avoid these problems.

[hello2000]

I updated my onlinemedia.xml alternatives with two new options for Jamendo that will let you play anything from the Jamendo library as long as you know the IDs. Read the first post for more information (section “Jamendo Details”, in smaller text).

Enjoy! And comment! 😀

[cadbusca]

I’ll give those a try.

Are you going to make your .php scripts available? I have just posted my “YouTube Enhancement Pack” with replacement scripts for those posted earlier plus significant extensions. http://www.wiimc.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1406

You indicate in your earlier post that others should replace their existing onlinemedia.xml file with yours. This is not necessary, since the individual entries from yours can be copied into any users existing onlinemedia.xml file to only add the links that they want to have available, just as I have suggested for my Pack.

[hello2000]

I haven’t tried your scripts yet, but they look very promising. If you give permission, I might replace the YouTube and Shoutcast scripts I have on my server by yours and yours seem to have much more features. This would increase a lot the online media universe of WiiMC (Advanced YouTube, Advanced ShoutCast, Jamendo, the usual Navi-X and even Google Weather – this last one still not working very well).
Obviously I’d give you credit like I’m doing actually.

The source code for my scripts (and the jhb50’s and boondoklife’s ones too) is available for download at:
http://213.229.73.233/wiimc/wiimc-scripts-by-gbl08ma.zip

As obvious, no warranty is provided for this scripts and they are all configured for my server, you need to edit this to run them on your server. The scripts are all licensed under GNU GPL v2 – I hope jhb50 and boonondok life don’t mind. If you detect any licensing issues, please inform me as the ZIP file was packaged and everything was prepared when I was in a hurry.

Now, I can add: with this alternative to the default server, not only more services are added, as you’re also using a more open source alternative… not that it matters much, at least, that’s what some say 😉

[cadbusca]

My scripts are available for use under the same terms as WIIMC, however as I have noted it will be difficult to exploit their capability without the integrated enhancements for YouTube Exploring in WIIMC+ V9.

[Author]

Posts