Actually if you use Firefly as your music server you are required to install Bonjour first.

I havenlt tried this but I have a M500 with a dead display and want to try alternate ways of controlling it. Does this require iTunes, or does it just support iTunes? I use Firefly exclusivley. Sounds pretty neat, thanks for sharing it!

PaulH wrote:

lemketron wrote:

OK, even after installing the Mac version of Yahoo Widgets, there still seems to be something wrong. The Soundbridge widget asked me for the IP address of the Soundbridge, and I entered the IP address but it keeps popping up the dialog asking me for it again. I confirmed the address is correct, by copy/pasting it into a browser which worked just fine.

I've seen this problem reported by some other users. Make sure that you have the latest SoundBridge software, currently version 2.5.171. This was released just a few weeks ago. Of course you'll need to find that Roku remote control to do the update. Software and upgrade info is available at the Roku home page http://www.rokulabs.com/

I upgraded my SoundBridge this morning and am still having the same problem with the widget on my Mac. (I like the new bolder font though!)

It keeps asking me for the IP address even though I know it's correct.

lemketron wrote:

It keeps asking me for the IP address even though I know it's correct.

Lemketron

I'm not sure what mysterious stuff is happening on the Mac, but here are a couple of preliminary things you can try and let me know how it works out.

At the risk of getting overly technical, my widget connects to the SoundBridge via Telnet TCP port 5555, as specified in the Roku control protocol. If you use a firewall on your Mac (always a good idea), the firewall might be blocking access to what it might think is a non-standard port. Check your firewall to see if port 5555 is open for TCP.

One thing you can try for me is to open your browser and point it at your SoundBridge. (No need for my widget to be running.) You should see the standard SoundBridge "Now Playing" page. Click on Status to get to the status page, then click your IP address under Network Information. You should see a console window showing a Telnet connection to your SoundBridge. This particular connection will be to port 4444, but it will establish whether a Telnet connection can be made. At the "SoundBridge>" prompt, enter exit to close the connection.

Paul

PaulH wrote:

lemketron wrote:

It keeps asking me for the IP address even though I know it's correct.

One thing you can try for me is to open your browser and point it at your SoundBridge. (No need for my widget to be running.) You should see the standard SoundBridge "Now Playing" page. Click on Status to get to the status page, then click your IP address under Network Information. You should see a console window showing a Telnet connection to your SoundBridge. This particular connection will be to port 4444, but it will establish whether a Telnet connection can be made. At the "SoundBridge>" prompt, enter exit to close the connection.

Works fine, with the same IP address that is displayed in the widget. I have always been able to access the SoundBridge via browser or telnet.

Do you make any assumptions about the IP address or its format? I assume that the address should be of the form "123.45.67.89", right? It's in the same subnet as the Mac, and as noted, web and telnet work fine.

lemketron wrote:

Works fine, with the same IP address that is displayed in the widget. I have always been able to access the SoundBridge via browser or telnet.

Do you make any assumptions about the IP address or its format? I assume that the address should be of the form "123.45.67.89", right? It's in the same subnet as the Mac, and as noted, web and telnet work fine.

For what it's worth, I use this regular expression to verify the IP address:

\b(?:(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\.){3}(?:25[0-5]|2[0-4][0-9]|[01]?[0-9][0-9]?)\b

That means no other characters or spaces in or around the numbers are permitted, no "http:" or slashes anywhere, and you must have the three periods in the right places. Your example looks perfectly good, however.

I can't think of any significant reason why the connection would fail as long as the browser can connect. I might have a couple of long-shot ideas, but I'll have to spend some time on these. :-(

Paul

Love This Plugin ... I couple of feature requests.

1) I would like to use this to display on a completely black screen with the same information ... in large fonts and adjustable fonts ... so when my Roku is playing, I could sent the information to the screen and just see that info ... let's say I setup a display in another room dedicated to showing the music currently playing.

2) It would also be nice to have the album cover resized to fit a user predetermined size ... so the display of the information is uniform.

3) Using the "getdisplaydata" function on displaying an exact copy of my M2000 on the computer screen.

4) I use Rhapsody to stream music to my M2000 ... the tracks from the albums display just fine and show the album cover ... but when playing radio stations, the tracks once again display fine, but the album cover is missing ... it doesn't even show the "artwork not available" screen. If you need my Rhapsody account info to test with ... I would be happy to provide it.

Thanks for the great work!

bsamp3 wrote:

1) I would like to use this to display on a completely black screen with the same information ... in large fonts and adjustable fonts ... so when my Roku is playing, I could sent the information to the screen and just see that info ... let's say I setup a display in another room dedicated to showing the music currently playing.

I'm not sure I understand what you are asking for here. Do you want to dedicate a monitor to now-playing info, without the remote control user interface?

bsamp3 wrote:

2) It would also be nice to have the album cover resized to fit a user predetermined size ... so the display of the information is uniform.

Good idea. The Amazon.com service I use usually provides "small," "medium" and "large," bitmap image, although there is no guarantee that Amazon will give any image at a defined size. For example, "large" could be 500x500 pixels, or something quite a bit smaller.

bsamp3 wrote:

3) Using the "getdisplaydata" function on displaying an exact copy of my M2000 on the computer screen.

I currently have a working mock-up for Windows that will run as a stand-alone application separate from the widget. It's a simple window that shows the SoundBridge display as a bitmap, but it's not yet running as efficiently as I would like. I don't yet have a Mac version, as I haven't come up with a clean way to get this to be multi-platform within the Yahoo widget engine. Unfortunately, the widget engine isn't geared to creating bitmaps or even dealing with any kind of binary I/O for that matter. I'm at a bit of a standstill as I ponder a new approach.

bsamp3 wrote:

4) I use Rhapsody to stream music to my M2000 ... the tracks from the albums display just fine and show the album cover ... but when playing radio stations, the tracks once again display fine, but the album cover is missing ... it doesn't even show the "artwork not available" screen. If you need my Rhapsody account info to test with ... I would be happy to provide it.

I specifically turn off the album artwork display when playing Internet radio, as the name of the album is either not included with the song information or if it is, it's not in a consistent format from station to station. This might be different when streaming from Rhapsody. I'll look into it.

bsamp3 wrote:

Thanks for the great work!

You're welcome!

Paul

I'm not sure I understand what you are asking for here. Do you want to dedicate a monitor to now-playing info, without the remote control user interface?

Yes I do want to dedicate a display to the music information playing on the Roku. Setting up the Roku M2000 next to my stereo equipment is great and it powers the sound for the entire house. If I go to another room and music is playing off of Rhapsody ... I wonder about the artist, album, etc. So I would like to dedicate a VGA output on my computer ... that I can split into many VGA signals (1 to 4 signal duplication box) ... to run multiple monitors showing the same image. If your program had full screen, with large fonts and an album cover that was always resized to look the same, then I could use cheap $200 LCD flat screens to display this information. Same Idea with duplicating the Soundbridge screen to the monitor ... also preferred to be resized to fit the entire screen horizontally.

I specifically turn off the album artwork display when playing Internet radio, as the name of the album is either not included with the song information or if it is, it's not in a consistent format from station to station. This might be different when streaming from Rhapsody. I'll look into it.

Yes, Rhapsody Radio does an excellent job of providing the Artist, Album, Song information. I tested the program "VisualMR" and it shows the Album Covers just fine when Rhapsody Radio is playing ... so maybe you could have the album cover display as an option when playing radio. Also, having the "artwork not available" screen as an option would be good too. In other words, If the album cover is not available, I would rather see nothing instead of the "artwork not available" screen.

Hello,

fine Widget, really a great piece of Software.

There is only one question. While playing a song i can see everything, The Song and the Album Cover. But there seems to be no vhance to get the Display-Informations while Browsing through the menus of my SB. Did i anything wrong or is this not possible?

Thanks and Cheers

Miwu

miwu wrote:

But there seems to be no vhance to get the Display-Informations while Browsing through the menus of my SB. Did i anything wrong or is this not possible?
Miwu

No, you're not missing anything. And yes, it is possible. While I can retrieve all of the song information directly from the Roku as plain text, accessing what is shown on the screen (menus, etc.) is more complicated. I can query the Roku for this but instead of text, it gives me a stream of data representing the individual pixels on the display. This means that I have to create an ever-changing bitmap and, for now at least, it's a difficult thing to implement in a Yahoo! Widget.

Hopefully some day...
Paul

Hi,

thank you for your reply. I am glad, that everything is right. The software is still great and works fine.

Best regards from Berlin!

Miwu

I just loaded the SoundBridge widget and can control my preset very well. However, I am in the pinch of having loaded iTunes 7.0 and therefore do not have my library available on my Roku. Once this issue is resolved, am correct in understanding that I will be able to see and control my song list, podcasts, etc from the SoundBridge widget?
Thanks - just getting the hang of things...

u204779 wrote:

Once this issue is resolved, am correct in understanding that I will be able to see and control my song list, podcasts, etc from the SoundBridge widget?
Thanks - just getting the hang of things...

Think of my widget as a replacement (or substitute) for the handheld Roku remote control, with a "now playing" display. You can control what you see on the Roku display, but the widget itself doesn't manage playlists. And other than the "now playing" you cannot currently see what is on the Roku display via the widget.

Version 1.3 of my SoundBridge Remote Control Yahoo! Widget is now available from the official Yahoo! Widgets page at

http://www.widgetgallery.com/view.php?widget=39187

New features include:
1) New options for a resizable album artwork window (see ReadMe.htm)
2) Album artwork display works with Rhapsody
3) Some cosmetic changes for use with the Mac
4) Improved SoundBridge connection testing

Enjoy!

Paul

Version 1.4 of my SoundBridge Remote Control Yahoo! Widget is now available from the official Yahoo! Widgets page at

http://www.widgetgallery.com/view.php?widget=39187

The one new feature in this version is access to the "hidden" alarm clock features in the latest SoundBridge firmware. Shift-click R button will take you to the alarm clock settings, as well as pressing the A key. Pressing the Z key will take you to the snooze settings.

Enjoy!

Paul