Media plugin configuration

You should read about the Media Jukebox and Players to get an idea of the things you'll configure below.

Categories

Just list the categories you want, the associated folder name and icon. The icons are used when searching media by categories:

    <categories>
        <category name="Kids" subdir="Kids" type="Movie" pic="/mutant/pics/cat_kids.png" />
                ...
        <category name="All" type="Movie" pic="/mutant/pics/cat_all.png" />
        <category name="Rest" type="Movie" pic="/mutant/pics/cat_rest.png" />
    </categories>

These categories are nothing more than names of the high-level folders under the media entry points. Simply put a certain video in one of these folder to make it part of the given category.

The "All" and "Rest" categories are hardcoded - they have a specific meaning:

  • All means all categories
  • Rest - means all the folders that are not listed as categories, for instance a "TODO" folder

Storage

For each device in the cloud, list all the folders containing media, including their share name.

    <storage>
        <host name="Razie">
            <media type="Movie" localdir="d:\my videos\other" remote="Videos/Other" />
            <media type="Movie" localdir="c:\video" remote="Video" />
            <media type="Movie" localdir="O:\Media" remote="OMedia" />
            <media type="Photo" localdir="D:\Pictures" remote="Pictures" />
            <media type="Music" localdir="D:\Music" remote="Music" />
            ... <!-- more entry points -->
        </host>
        ... <!-- more hosts -->
    </storage>

These are "media entry points" i.e. places on your file system where you store media.

Players

Players are configured per platform. A platform is per OS but you can override per device.

You can alias players:

<player name="winfile" aliasto="vlc" />

The player we like the most is the multi-platform VLC player. Make sure it's installed in the right place. This is the configuration that points to it:

       <platform os="windowsxp">
        <player name="vlc" class="com.razie.pub.media.players.WinFilePlayer"
            program="C:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe -f --extraintf rc --rc-host localhost:4449 ${asset.path}">

and
       <platform os="ubuntu">
        <player name="vlc" class="com.razie.pub.media.players.WinFilePlayer" shell="/bin/sh -c"
            program="/usr/bin/vlc -f --extraintf='rc' --rc-fake-tty --rc-host=localhost:4449 ${asset.smbpath}">

WinFilePlayer

This plays simple commands. The commands are prepended to the file name and the entire string is then executed with a shell.

What plays what?

This is configured in the plugin_media.xml under asset finders. Why bother and not just use WinFilePlayer all the time? Because if I know what player is started, I can also control it :) If your default player for .mkv files is MButu, there's no easy way for me to know that, is there?

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