XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

If you need any help with XBMC4XBOX, such as installing or using the software, please post it in here.
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Gasman
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by Gasman »

Dan,

Is there anyway to get the Favourites up in the app display.?

I would like to be able to select one of mine when nowhere near the TV, ie out in the garden.

I have an Arkon Tx and Rx that I use to plug headphones in when out in the garden. With the remote I can listen to all my music files, but cannot see how to access the Favourites unless I am sitting in front of the TV.? Or am I missing something.?

I've bought the premium version via my Galaxy Ace, but as you know would prefer to use it on my Ziio.

Would you be able to make this happen in some way please.?

TIA
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Dan Dar3
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by Dan Dar3 »

@Gasman
Not sure what you mean by accessing favorites. Can you please detail here / PM or email what do you do on XBMC4Xbox and how / what you would like to see through the remote.

See PM for your Creative ZiiO problem.
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by Gasman »

No problem,

In XBMC at the bottom right you have the up arrow icon (white on black) that goes blue when selected and the shutdown button (white on red)

The up arrow button is what I know as favourites, at least when I have added radio stations to Favourites, that is where they appear. It is also where the SVN Repo installer appears.?

So I have my favourite internet radio stations on that list and access them from there.
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by Dan Dar3 »

Ok, thought so (http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/wiki/Favourites), but didn't think you can add Music as a favourites, but apparently you can.

So these radio stations, how did you add them to favourites? where they files or maybe from the Music section somehow?
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by Gasman »

At present I have to create a playlist for the info. I created a huge set of playlist for stations a good while back, and then have to find which ones will work.

Below is the content of one of my favourite stations Radio Paradise in a pls file

[playlist]
numberofentries=1
File1=http://173.192.48.71:8058
Title1=(#1) Radio Paradise 64 Pls
Length1=-1

Now I do have the 173.192.48.71:8058 in the Playlist list of the Music section in the app, but that does not work.

I actually have showing

173.192.48.71:8058
http://
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Dan Dar3
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by Dan Dar3 »

That's perfect, I think I get it now. You have your playlists stored in Q:\userdata\playlists\music so I think I can add a button to Music > Playlist to load (choose) playlists from in there, which is what you probably need. I'll do that next, it's an interesting feature and I see a few people are using the Music section, thanks!
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by Gasman »

Dan Dar3 wrote:That's perfect, I think I get it now. You have your playlists stored in Q:\userdata\playlists\music so I think I can add a button to Music > Playlist to load (choose) playlists from in there, which is what you probably need. I'll do that next, it's an interesting feature and I see a few people are using the Music section, thanks!
Not quite, I currently still have them on my NAS box as they are then available to all my omnfi DMS1 media streamers, but I suppose I could put a link in my music section, that would just be a few clicks extra to do. You already have a Playlist option in Music along with Library & Files.

All I pretty much use the XBOX for is the Music, which is why I went and bought the XBOX, solely to run XBMC. I have watched a few movies on it, but music is my main passion. The XBOX accesses my NAS for everything.
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Dan Dar3
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by Dan Dar3 »

@GasMan
I see, then you might have an easier solution at hand right now. You can probably add a Music source to where you keep your playlists (pls/m3u etc) on the NAS, and then use the "Files" tab to navigate and "play" one of these files - that should populate the "Playlist" tab with the contents and continue the playlist control from in there; I think that might work.
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by Gasman »

That works a treat, thank you.
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by Dan Dar3 »

Great, enjoy :-)
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by cifa »

@Dan Dar3,

I tried it for the 1st time this am - awesome!!
The youtube link is amazing (via my Galaxy S2) & worked flawless (only tried x2 vids). I plan to try out more & put it through its paces - but damn, great work :D
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Kozz
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by Kozz »

Heya Dan,

I had a chance to try your latest remote app, [June 2 | 2013]

Nice work by the way :)
And now for my Critique

1) When I was at work today and not in range of my wifi connection I had a look at my battery usage and thought it was rather high for your app, Much higher than chrome for example that I use very often and does many HTTP requests, tab syncing etc, I'm just wondering if the app is always trying to connect to the xbox even though I'm not on wifi, perhaps something to look into is checking for a match of the SSID that you were connected to upon setting the IP or from when you pressed the search for xbmc4xbox [Network Scan] button, Not a big deal just something that came to mind

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Don't know if this helps you at all but when I looked in my DDMS view ;) The cpu seemed rather high [ for an SGH-i747] it doesn't effect my performance of the device at all, but maybe on an older less powerful [API-7] you would notice some lag or performance loss ?

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2) My only minor gripe is that I cannot seem to add any more than one xbox in this view ;), Many times I go into another room and change the xbmc device in my remote apps, Would be nice to have for xboxes too, cause you know that people like xman have at least 8 xboxes throughout the house at any given time :)

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Other than that I really like what you've done with this app especially how I can go into Commands > Logs and freaking toggle my xbmc4xbox debug log on/off, then view the current log and even upload it to the web to I can post it on this site :) This is going to save so much time debug so many plugins for the repo etc :D

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Dan Dar3
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by Dan Dar3 »

Hi Kozz,

That is great work and thanks for bringing it up!

1) First thing that comes to mind might be the status checker in the Main screen. That makes an HTTP call to check whether XBMC4Xbox is reachable every 3 seconds and draws the little green / gray icon next to it. I wrote the code specifically to stop that timer when navigating away (onStop - onResume), but reading more into documentation it appears that sometimes onStop might be called, so I might need to move the code into onPause / onResume rather.

http://developer.android.com/training/b ... pping.html
http://developer.android.com/reference/ ... ml#onPause()

I will definitely look more into it and will come back with an update - battery consumption and performance are generally things I keep an eye on.

PS: For users noticing the same issue, the options menu in the Main activity offers an Exit option, that should close the application entirely, as opposed to just pressing back or home, as a workaround for now.

2) I gave quite a bit of thought to that when I started - how to make the feature easy to use for a single XBMC4Xbox user and allow for multiple boxes at the same time. The way it works now is provides an empty entry at start, which you can manually change by long-pressing and also it changes it's IP following a network scan, to make it easier for people using dynamic IPs (DHCP). Actually, the network scanner creates more entries if it finds more XBMC4Xbox running at the same time, but if it finds only one it will update the first one. I guess I was trying to avoid to create a lot of stales ones as IPs changed say every day... I might add a new entry in the drop-down to allow to manually add new entries yourself (especially useful for advanced users with multiple Xboxes and using static IPs) or a checkbox in the edit dialog saying it's a dynamic IPs so that the scanner can update those, but leave the fixed IPs ones alone... I don't have my mind made up yet, if you got any ideas, we can discuss them on TeamSpeak when we meet next :)

3) Yes, I used that myself and thought those two might be useful to normal users to enable debugging and pull logs to post here on the forums :)
A few tips, if you pup an email address in the upload dialog will use the local mail client to send you the link to the pastebin (you probably used that, this is more for other users) so you can receive it say on your laptop / desktop and post it on the forums from in there. If you use the refresh button it will always scroll for you at the end so you can see the last error, also allows for scrolling on both dimensions (that was quite a pain in the arse to implement :). What it doesn't allow you is to change the font size, I might add that, I tried to choose a size that would suit for both small and larger screens.

One last bit of maybe useful info for you and maybe others - that feature requires an FTP server on (and thus configuring the right user / password on the XBMC4Xbox entry if changed from defaults) as xbmc.log is still in use and could not pull the file through HTTP API FileDownload method. So if you find the logs are not being pulled, it's either because the FTP server is not enabled, the user/password combination is incorrect or it exceeded the number of connectiosn - but I think I did code for that so it displays the appropriate error back to you (the user).

Again, thanks for doing all this, I will look more into the CPU / battery usage and we can talk about the multiple Xbox scenario on TeamSpeak!
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Dan Dar3
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by Dan Dar3 »

Hi Kozz,

I think I just found the leak - it appears the feeds ticker in the Main activity it was running in the background, even when the activity was suspended. The thing is a bit of a hack, as TextView's are only scrollable (marquee) when they are focused, and the timer (async task) to check for XBMC4XBox was taking focus. You can actually see it right now, go to Main, wait to start scrolling, go to Home or press back and come back to Main and you'll see it moved on - that was keeping the main looper active and consuming CPU.

I made a change to suspend the scrolling when the Main activity is in background, and restore it back on resume - unfortunately, could not find a way to resume the scrolling from where it was, but i guess not a big deal. Can you please try this build and see how it works - I might release it by Friday to the store, if nothing else comes up.
https://xbmc4xbox-addons.googlecode.com ... %20dev.apk

Tip: Maybe some of yous have found out, but the news ticker in the main is clickable, and it takes you to the Feeds page where you can see the news from the blog, tickets opened/closed, forum threads which you can visit on the web from there. I've also added a Help entry in the options menu in Main, and I'll add an entry for this on it's website so more people find out.
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Kozz
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by Kozz »

Not a problem Dan,

They were just minor things I noticed and seen when playing around with some of the Eclipse stuff. I'm just glad that the info was of any use to you :) as you know development on android and java scripting is very very new to me but I will try to give my feedback in the areas I can from an end-user perspective.

Cool I did install the test version you linked a day ago, I'll try to give it a go and keep an eye on my batt in roughly the same circumstances I gathered the first bit of feedback. Very useful info you linked it should come in handy when I take my first steps into android dev. ( I did create a basic skeleon web-app, it uses python to HTTP request a page then match an expression and return a list of links and titles then it outputs them onto an html page) still very basic, more of a proof of concept but maybe you will have a better idea on the method used to parse the information form the originating site. We can speak on this more the next time your on Teamspeak.

For anyone else wanting to chat about xbmc4xbox or just off-topic ramblings with us in a cool un-formal setting be sure to join us on Xphazer's xbmc4xbox teamspeak server channel
Details here: http://www.xbmc4xbox.org.uk/forum/viewt ... ?f=8&t=418
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by sahib12 »

Hey Dan, this remote is really good and really useful. I was just wondering if maybe in future builds you could add support for android 1.6? If it is an easy thing to do then I would appreciate it but if it is too difficult then just forget about it.
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Dan Dar3
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by Dan Dar3 »

@sahib12
I realize a few people still have older Android versions, I'll see what I can do - might be possible for the Android libraries I use (Android Support Library and ActionBarSherlock), I'll need to try it and let you know, although I can't promise anything.

I prefer to push the versions up (in the hope that certain things would work better / faster), but I could also look at creating a separate build for up to and including 2.1 or 2.2 (they seem to be least used versions from looking at the Store console). I'll come back on this soon.
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by sahib12 »

It'd be great if you could make it compatible for older versions, I appreciate you trying to do it but if it doesn't work or you haven't got the time then no sweat buddy :)
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by Xphazer »

sahib12 I think your are due for a device upgrade. ;)
Donut was the prehistoric era of Android.

I don't think it would be possible to make the remote app compatible to Donut. In other hands it should already work on Eclair and FroYo no problem.
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Re: XBMC4Xbox Remote - Android app

Post by sahib12 »

haha yeah maybe, LG Optimus GT540 still does the job for me though lol, I have this phone and so does my mum but I've updated mine to 2.1 and it works great on there but it doesn't install on the 1.6 version - it doesn't really matter though she can just use the dvd remote :)
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