Updated version of DialMee plugin for Meedio posted

shawn@shawnbass.com — Mon, 03 Sep 2007 04:51:32 GMT

So, I'm a huge fan of Vonage VoIP service. I'm also a huge home theater PC (HTPC) freak. So I had an idea that much like peanut butter and chocolate, these two technologies must merge! So a while back I created a plugin for Meedio that allows me to dial telephone numbers in my phone book from the comfort of my couch. Ok, so it is completely the laziest thing in the world, but someone had to do it, eh? Anyway, this update to the DialMee plugin was simply to fix a bug that was causing an error beep on exit of Meedio. I described in my previous post what Meedio is all about, if you missed that.

As far as the technical details of what this plugin does, it relies on phone book entries that were previously imported into a Meedio library. Once you're viewing your contacts on screen you can press buttons on the side of the screen that allow you to dial the person's home, office, mobile, etc. The mechanism used for this is some crazy regular expression matching for attempting to take any inputted US telephone number format and convert it to the 10-digit dialing format that Vonage expects. Next, I make a web request to Vonage's Third Party Call Control to initialize the telephone call. From an end user perspective, it goes like this:

1) Pick up remote control
2) Find contact in phone book.
3) Click button to dial their home/office/mobile, etc. number.
4) Behind the scenes the web request to third party call control happens and your home telephone line (Vonage) rings.
5) Upon answering the cordless phone (you didn't think I'd get off the couch did you?), the Vonage third party call control then dials the destination telephone number and connects the two parties.
6) You talk...on the couch....in your pink fuzzy slippers. Ok, maybe not pink, but definitely fuzzy.

Link to DialMee support thread

Updated version of EvilLyrics plugin for Meedio posted

shawn@shawnbass.com — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 22:29:11 GMT

Ok so I'm way behind on the home theater blog, but I uploaded a new stable release of my Meedio plugin for EvilLyrics integration a few weeks back. The plugin update contains the fixes for the new release build from EvilLyrics as well as a fix that was causing an error beep when the plugin was shutdown. What is this plugin? It's a fulltime plugin for the HTPC frontend called Meedio (which I run on all of my HTPC systems connected to every TV in my house...yes my wife loves me dearly to tolerate this crap). The EvilLyics plugin receives messages from the music player and passes the Artist/Song info to the EvilLyrics COM object, which then performs a web request to retrieve lyrics for the currently playing song. When the lyrics are retrieved a COM event is fired and I retrieve the lyrics and publish a datafeed within Meedio containing the lyrics. The lyrics are then displayed on screen in the HTPC interface. Cool eh, no? Ok, maybe just geeky. Anyway, while Meedio is a dead product as it was acquired by Yahoo over a year ago, there are several developers (myself included) that are continuing to develop plugins for Meedio as well as continuing to work on an open-source Meedio replacement product called MeediOS.

Here's a screenshot of what the end result of the EvilLyrics plugin does inside Meedio:

Yeah, it's probably just plain geeky

shawnbass.com - Home Theater PC blog

Updated version of DialMee plugin for Meedio posted

Updated version of EvilLyrics plugin for Meedio posted