Premise "Nothing playing" when media device selected in a media zone

[franky]

In a media zone, if I click "Select media" and select one of the media devices in the zone (e.g. a CD player) then SYS correctly switches my preamp to select that input and the zone's Play Mode switches to Normal Play as I would expect. But the browser still displays "Nothing playing" which, to me, is misleading to the end user. See attached pictures. This is an issue for devices like regular CD players where the end user is manually changing the media, or perhaps a DirecTV receiver where I just want the end user to change channels with the DirecTV remote and I don't care about SYS being aware of what channel is tuned.

Is this by design or am I perhaps misconfiguring or misusing something in SYS? If this is by design, is there any improvement to this that anyone has come up with?




Frank

 

[123]

Tricky. It now says "Nothing playing" which is occasionally true (i.e. when there is no CD in the player). Given that SYS does not know what media, if any, is present in the CD player, what should it indicate for "Now Playing"?

 

[franky]

Given that SYS does not know what media, if any, is present in the CD player, what should it indicate for "Now Playing"?

Perhaps it should say nothing at all, since it already indicates the MyCDPlayer is selected. Or, something like "Local disc". Or, in the case of a tuner that is manually controlled, something like "Manually tuned channel". These are just some thoughts.

If the CD player (not a CD changer) had great two-way control, and SYS could be aware of the transport state, etc., would the experience be different?

Bottom line for me is I'm looking for the best way to integrate a typical IR controlled CD and DVD player into a Media Zone reusing as much of SYS and it's browser UI as possible. But the "nothing playing" text is really misleading to the user (in my opinion). Maybe others have done this differently?

Thanks for any thoughts and ideas.

 

[123]

"GetTrack" is responsible for indicating "Nothing playing". Basically, it checks two properties in "Media Content", "NowPlaying" and "PlayMode", and if either of them is empty, it'll say "Nothing playing".

Modules > AutomationBrowser > MediaZonePanel > Classes > MediaZoneEx > GetTrack

Output = ""

if not this.NowPlaying is nothing and not this.PlayMode is nothing then
	strNowPlaying = this.NowPlaying.DisplayName
	if Len(strNowPlaying) > 50 then
		strNowPlaying = Left(strNowPlaying, 50)
		strNowPlaying = strNowPlaying & "..."
	end if
	Output = Output & "Playing: " & strNowPlaying
else
	Output = Output & "Nothing playing"
end if

method.Output = Output

You can replace "Nothing playing" with an empty string or try to make GetTrack smarter by having it test other properties. You'll have to find some properties that become populated when the CD player is selected (maybe something in "Resource Status" like "Availability" or "Resource"?) so that you can have GetTrack display a more meaningful message. Worst case, you can test the "Content" property for "MyCD Player" (or whatever device) and go from there ... it'll be hard-coded for your environment and not a portable solution.

 

[chucklyons]

Curious...what kind of cdplayer with two way control do you have? If you have two-way control, not sure if you could tweak Damon's DVDPlayer module to pull cd info from freedb.org...but you would really need some way to extract the CD's unique ID...

 

[franky]

Thanks 123 for pointing out the code that produces that text. I'll ponder some improvements based on this.

chucklyons, sorry for not being clear. I don't have a player that has two way control. I was just trying to find out what experience SYS (as last shipped) had hoped to provide for CD players. I thought perhaps that experience could only be acheived if richer a richer control interface existed for the player.