The MisterHouse Media How-to

version 0.10 David Vitrant and Pete Flaherty

This is a short description of how to get the Media application up and running with your MisterHouse system.

This document was originally written by David Vitrant, who inspired me to write the module in the first place. He was instrumental in the debugging and documentation. For the most part this is his how-to, though I have added some additional commentary about using the module with a remote xine player and store.

What's not covered:

Setting up a remote media repository, on a machine (that is not the MisterHouse server) that will be running your xine media player (this will be covered in a future revision as details become available)

Recommendations:

This is a general guide and your mileage will vary...

PLEASE NOTE THESE ARE BARE MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS

For a local (MisterHouse server) installation, you will need at least a 1GHz processor For a Remote installation you will need a t least a 700MHz processor

For Either installaton

Introduction:

mhmedia_xine is a module for MisterHouse that lets you control Xine from your MisterHouse web page. It will let you play, stop, toggle full screen, load playlists, as well as most of the amenities that come with xine.

mhmedia is the database, and collection tool to help you organize your media, and playlists (as of this writing this module is not completed).

Installing:

First you need to have MisterHouse installed (download from misterhouse.net)

Then download the mhmedia file from: (mhmedia_xine.pl should come with version 2.98 of misterhouse and above)

On linux type “tar xvfz mhmedia.tar.gz” should unpack the file and u should now have a folder.
- look in the folder and you will have two folders common and web.
- the file in common should go in your common directory, mine is in /usr/share/misterhouse/code/common
- move the stuff in the web -> ia5 folder into the entertain directory of your misterhouse (usually under web) mine is in : /usr/share/misterhouse/web/ia5/entertain and images in that image folders
- the media folder should go right in your local web folder mine is in /usr/share/misterhouse/web/media/

Xine Settings:

Xine needs to have a passwd file to allow users to access it from the network. Traditionally this is in /home/you/.xine/ and mine is just called passwd.  This file (passwd) contains only this one line “ALL:ALLOW” which allows all your uses to access it. You also want in your .xine a playlist.tox file.. call it whatever.. and put whatever playlist you want.. from xine. This playlist will be called up when you start xine from your MisterHouse system.

Now start Xine from command line in the network mode.. do this by typing at a prompt “xine -n” ( this may be on your local MH machine or on a remote machine, that will be serving your media )

NOTE: START XINE FROM THE USER THAT WILL BE ACCESSING THE DATA FROM MH.

MH Settings:

Now open a browser and go to your localhost:8080 (or whatever port/url) login as admin and click on MH Home -> MH Setup ->common code activation.

Make sure that mhmedia_xine.pl has a check mark on the left side (is activated) and also click on the EDIT config parms.

The important settings are: