audiomuze;496521 Wrote: > On a different, but related note, I have a (likely very naive) > question... How difficult/ feasible would it be to create a front-end > entirely independent of SBS, but leveraging CLI or something else to > have SBS handle playback. This way, one could conceivably develop an > entirely independent database app with an API and include many of the > features we're not seeing now in the base build. In other words, take > control of the user experience whilst just piggybacking off SBS to > handle playback. The API would allow plugins to be added and apps like > iPeng to hook into the underlying database, thus enabling users to get > the same benefits via their remotes etc. Clearly this wouldn't work > with the Controller and like hardware, but frankly, who cares? >
It's definitely possible if you are talking about creating a user interface and use SBS as backend, this is what iPeng and Moose does already today. iPeng uses a bit more of the server than Moose does, the advantage is that iPeng is able to make all third party plugins in SBS available as long as they support the Controller. The last version of Moose I used had a scanning/synchronization mechanism to synchronize its database with SBS and just sends the play, stop commands to SBS while most other things are handled locally in Moose. However, if you are talking about just using SBS for playback and not as a backend for library management and browsing/searching it gets more complicated. The main problem as I see it is that there isn't any way to integrate your logic in the SBS scanning process. Hooks in the scanning process would make it a lot easier to enhance the SBS database with more information and also make it possible to integrate directly with the database from third party code to enhance the server with new features. It's possible on OSX and Linux where you don't have to compile perl executables, but on Windows it gets harder because you need to build a *.exe file and cannot just modify the perl code. Replacing the browsing menus is also pretty hard as SBS isn't built for this type of customization. As long as you only want to support your own third party interface everything is find, but if you want it to work on old players (Classic, Boom, Transport) or you like it to work on a Controller part (in Duet, Radio, Touch) or iPeng it gets more complex. As long as Logitech can't/won't prioritize discussions regarding this kind of integrations it requires a very dedicated developer to do something, you are basically on your own if you like to do something like this. I've had some thoughts regarding implementing my own server and just use SBS for playback, but I'm not sure if the communication towards the Squeezebox players allow one server to handle the control and one to handle the streaming. Also things like synchronization and fade in/out might get hard if you don't handle the current playlist in SBS. Anyway, it is possible and there are several ways to do it, but all requires fairly amount of work. -- erland Erland Isaksson 'My homepage' (http://erland.isaksson.info) (Install my plugins through Extension Downloader) (Developer of 'TrackStat, SQLPlayList, DynamicPlayList, Custom Browse, Custom Scan, Custom Skip, Multi Library, Title Switcher and Database Query plugins' (http://wiki.erland.isaksson.info/index.php/Category:SlimServer)) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=72512 _______________________________________________ beta mailing list beta@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/beta
