mControl Driver: Vista Media Center Controller

[ceeps]

Originally Posted by gjniewenhuijse

Msgboxrich works great for me. So do you installed the latest vmccontroller?

Do you only use the msgboxrich functionality?? I wrote my own driver for this, thats very easy.

I have the 64 bit version of vmccontroller installed. Most functions work fine, but when I use msgboxrich I get a badrequest error returned. I use some other functions but my main interest is the msgboxrich feature. I have mControl server running on a WHS2011 mahine. I have vmxcontroller installed on my x64 client machine. Maybe I am ussing incorrect syntax. I tried both \\machine\share\picture.jpg and c:\folder\picture.jpg. Have I got this right? I had it working a long time ago, but for whatever reason it hasn't worked for me lately despite my tinkering. Thanks for you response!

[gjniewenhuijse]

Originally Posted by ceeps

I have the 64 bit version of vmccontroller installed. Most functions work fine, but when I use msgboxrich I get a badrequest error returned. I use some other functions but my main interest is the msgboxrich feature. I have mControl server running on a WHS2011 mahine. I have vmxcontroller installed on my x64 client machine. Maybe I am ussing incorrect syntax. I tried both \\machine\share\picture.jpg and c:\folder\picture.jpg. Have I got this right? I had it working a long time ago, but for whatever reason it hasn't worked for me lately despite my tinkering. Thanks for you response!

You can try this path:
c:\\folder\\picture.jpg

[ceeps]

Originally Posted by gjniewenhuijse

You can try this path:
c:\\folder\\picture.jpg

Tried that, no luck. msgbox works fine, just not msgboxrich. Any other ideas?

[ceeps]

I was able to get it working somewhat. It displays the image, but when the image in the path is overwritten it will continue to display the old image that had been overwritten. I seem to remember having this problem before and I remember that I found some solution, but I just can't remember what I did to get it working. Anyone have any idea how I can get msgboxrich to display the image that the path points to rather than some cached image?

[gjniewenhuijse]

Originally Posted by ceeps

I was able to get it working somewhat. It displays the image, but when the image in the path is overwritten it will continue to display the old image that had been overwritten. I seem to remember having this problem before and I remember that I found some solution, but I just can't remember what I did to get it working. Anyone have any idea how I can get msgboxrich to display the image that the path points to rather than some cached image?

Maybe generate an unique imagename before you display it.

I looked into the source of vmccontroller and it looks like its not an vmccontroller "problem", because the image is rendered with an microsoft mce library.

[gjniewenhuijse]

There is also a problem using the latest source from vmccontroller and the latest update from microsoft, then you can't use button-up/down/left/right/back etc.

I updated the source and build a new version, so if anyone like to use this, please send me an message.

[ceeps]

Originally Posted by gjniewenhuijse

Maybe generate an unique imagename before you display it.

I looked into the source of vmccontroller and it looks like its not an vmccontroller "problem", because the image is rendered with an microsoft mce library.

I figured it out, the command photo-clear-cache solves my problem with the old image being displayed instead of the new one. Thanks!

[gjniewenhuijse]

Originally Posted by ceeps

I figured it out, the command photo-clear-cache solves my problem with the old image being displayed instead of the new one. Thanks!

Hello, nice to hear you find a solution. Maybe you can share in detail how you do this, because i have the same problem and i can't solve it with photo-clear-cache.

[ceeps]

Originally Posted by gjniewenhuijse

Hello, nice to hear you find a solution. Maybe you can share in detail how you do this, because i have the same problem and i can't solve it with photo-clear-cache.

It very likely could be a problem with mControl. I found that mControl was working very unreliably for me with the vmccontroller. I have an ISY so I decided to add the networking module to see how that worked. It solved all my problems. Now vmccontroller commands that previously didn't work or only worked sometimes work all the time.
Here's a detailed description of what I am doing:

1. Motion Detected, camera uploads image image.jpg to shared folder with ftp.
2. My ISY waits 5 seconds and then sends msgboxrich to 2 extenders and 1 PC.
3. After all the msgboxrich commands are sent, a photo-clear-cache is sent to all 3 machines.

The ISY netorking module is communicating via tcp on the 4050X ports. If you don't have an ISY maybe you could try sending the commands to vmccontroller from a progam like curl initiated from a .bat or .cmd file. This way you could see if its problems with mControl. I was also having problems like you mentioned with the directional buttons, but when I switched to the ISY networking module those problems went away.

Hope this helps!

[ceeps]

Ok I just noticed that I had the problem again while I was playing music in MCE. So it appeards that the photo-cache-clear does not happen until media playing is stopped. I haven't tested this with media other than music but I assume it happens while any type of media is playing. Maybe that's why I tried the photo-cache-clear command earlier and it didnt work for me and perhaps that why it wasnt working for you either.

Have you figured out how to make msgboxrich point to the path of the most recent image in a directory? Here is an example of one of my image names: yard20120424125933445.jpg
I don't really know how to get it to point to the most recent image if I set my camera to ftp images with the date & time appended to them.