Posts Tagged ‘plugins’
9 HTPC Plugins that Should Exist
Much of my site is dedicated to home theater computers because it is one of those hobbies that never seems to get old. Even though HTPCs are very niche, I can’t help but love having one and love the freedom it brings to my TV.
Despite the great things they can do, I always find features that are missing no matter what the software. Thanks to plugin support, most HTPC software can easily be extended beyond what features “come out of the box”. Here are a few plugin ideas I have for anyone willing to code them.
- Movie Watcher – I don’t aimlessly watch TV very often, but when I do I usually end up on either A) a movie I have never seen before and don’t care to pay attention to, or B) a movie I own and have seen a million times. The thing is, I have all of my movies ripped onto my HTPC. So why can’t my HTPC software know that I am watching The Rock and offer to switch me to the copy I have in higher quality without commercials? It would be even better if it offered to either start me at the beginning of the movie or try to sync the time so I start watching from my rip in roughly the same place.
- Automatic Login – I know not many people have webcams plugged into their HTPCs. I believe that is only because there is no compelling reason to. But what if when you sat down in front of the TV your experience was customized to you favorite channels and shows? Facial recognition is fairly common on personal laptops so why can’t my HTPC know who I am and customize the TV just for what I like? Only a few HTPC software applications even allow individual logins (XBMC and Boxee come to mind), but I think it is time we start using it to it’s fullest.
- Pandora TV – If the software knows who we are, cause we logged in by sitting down, we should be able to just push a “comedy station” or “drama station” and the software already knows what shows we like and can recommend shows we might like based on our tastes. Of course there would be a way to “thumb-up” or “thumb-down” a show and the software can fine tune its results for us. Sometimes it would just be nice to have my TV pick something for me.
- Universal Video Chat – Yet another reason to have a webcam plugged into our HTPC. I don’t want to buy a Google TV, Cisco Umi, or PS3 just so I can video chat with people that have the same box. Why is there no good video chat client for HTPC software that incorporates Skype, Google chat, and Facetime all in one interface? If software like pidgin can incorporate every chat protocol known to man, I wouldn’t think 3 video chat clients would be so hard.
- Multi-room Simulcast Viewing – Some software can sorta do this with a funky hack. But really, why can’t I just tell the TV to broadcast what I am watching to all TVs (in case of a big game) or why can’t I tell the TV I am going to the garage so continue my show out there in 30 seconds? If all of the systems are communicating, the only limitation would be if your network is fast enough.
- PIPIPIPIP – I don’t really want 5 nested picture in pictures, but I think I should at least have the option of displaying a picture for each tuner I have (or up to 4 recordings at once). Why would you want to do this, sports. Windows Media Center has a pretty neat sports center and things like the NFL Red Zone drive customers to spend money every month. I know you would have to have a pretty beefy computer to display 4 HD videos at once. But I don’t think that has ever stopped people in the past from trying. Sure beats dragging out 4 TVs, especially if you can easily select one to view in full screen mode. Think expose or multiple workspaces but with multiple channels.
- Live Buffers – I have 2 channels and I keep switching between the two. I also have 2 tuners that aren’t doing anything and 2 terabytes of storage. Why is it so hard to keep 2 buffers so that I don’t miss anything while I am watching the other channel? I could understand 3-4 buffers needing some serious disk throughput, but 2 buffers seems absolutely reasonable.
- Search and Browser – These are two ideas taken straight from Google TV but they were the best two ideas Google TV had. All HTPC software should have an easy way to search for shows/music/movies/actors/whatever. I don’t care if it is a button on the remote or just type like webOS, in any case, the remote should be the first thing we go for when trying to look up information while watching TV, not our laptops, tablets, or phones. Oh and the browser can’t suck.
- More appliances – I know this isn’t a plugin per se but I think a lot of HTPC software can’t truly shine because the average person doesn’t know how or want to know how to set it up. Boxee has a great idea with building a box based on their software and focusing on that box for compatibility and features. Sure it isn’t the best seller out there, but it is a good start for them. XBMC, MythTV, MediaPortal, etc. all need to have some sort of all in one TiVo-killer box that is an appliance and not a computer. Just look at the AppleTV and Roku, and their software sucks in comparison to XBMC and MythTV.
A couple cool browser plugins
OK, so I found a few plugins that make browsing the internet a joy, and they also help your index finger not have to click so much.
I want to start with something that has been around for a long long time but I have just recently started using it. Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking website. What does that mean? Think of it as a myspace/facebook/last.fm of bookmarks. What you do is you bookmark things in your browser, just like you normally would, but the bookmark is actually stored with del.icio.us instead of locally on your computer. Once you bookmark something you can see who else has also bookmarked the same thing, and then see what else they are bookmarking. You can also create networks of people and keep up to date on the things they are bookmarking. It makes finding new things a little bit easier. It is also great because you have access to all of your bookmarks where ever you are.
The next thing I found is by a company called Cooliris and it is a plugin called Previews. The first noticeable thing it does is it adds a extra button you can click when you hover over links in your browser. The picture below shows it better than I can say it.
If you click/hover over that question mark blue book thingy it will bring up a window showing where the link goes. But it does it all without leaving your current window.
You can still browse just as you normally would inside the smaller windows and you can also join the window to your current Firefox session by clicking the tab button. You can also skip to the next link on the page or email the link to someone. Not that emailing links to people is new, but doing it without leaving your current browser window is pretty new to me. You do have to sign up with a Cooliris account for email, which is a obvious downside, but that is only if you want to use the email feature.
As if my right click menu wasn’t crowded enough, it also gave me a couple new features to highlight text and do a google, google image, wikipedia, or dictionary search all without leaving my page.
If you are doing a Google image search outside of Previews and want to view all the results as a slide show Previews can do that too. Simply do the search and hover over one of the image results then click on the play button.
But slide shows is where my next plugin comes in. This next one is called PicLens and it is also made by Cooliris. This is the coolest browser plugin I have ever seen. It makes me want to buy a touch screen display just to have this running at my desk at all times. Cooliris has a pretty cool video of the plugin in action and I will try to capture what it does in a couple screenshots.
The first thing that happens is you get this new icon.
Then whenever you click the icon to launch Piclens you get a full screen 3D wall. Each icon represents a story, picture, video, or search result. You can then click on each picture and it will play the video, show a summary of the story, or display the picture.
The categories are on the top left side and the search is top right.
You use the bottom blue bar to scroll through the wall.
When you click on a video it starts playing automatically.
You can also double click to make it go full screen or play a slide show.
I really can’t describe how smooth and great looking this plugin is. I also can’t explain how much memory the thing eats! Seriously, don’t try to fold proteins or play Unreal Tournament 3 in the background while this is running.
One other reason I thought Piclens was so cool is they have a WordPress plugin; yes I installed it. The plugin adds a link to the bottom of each post and you can click on it to view all the pictures in that post without needing to install Piclens. That is pretty cool but it isn’t super useful seeing as there aren’t a whole lot of pictures to look at on my blog. What it is good for is viewing something like a gallery. Thanks to some cleaver people they found a way to do it with Gallery2.
I installed the needed items on my gallery and you can have a look at it here. What you do is just go to the gallery and click the play button that shows up on any image when you mouse over it. Piclens will then load up and show the current image using the 3D wall.
All you need to do to make Piclens work with your Gallery2 installation is upload this xml.php file the file here to the root of your Gallery2 installation and then edit the theme.tpl file for whatever theme you are using. Make sure you rename the xml.php_.txt file to just xml.php. I am using carbon as my theme so I found the file in gallery2/themes/carbon/templates/ folder on my server. To edit the file you need to find the line that has
{if $theme.pageType == ‘album’}
{g->theme include=”album.tpl”}
and add
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”MediaRSS:{$theme.item.title}”
href=”/gallery2/xml.php?g2_itemId={$theme.item.id}” />
on a new line right after the first text.
That was it. It works fine for me on two computers with Firefox 3.0 and Internet Explorer 7 but please let me know if you find that it doesn’t work in other browsers or other operating systems (I am too lazy to turn on my mac).
Please also let me know in the comments if you have found any other browser plugins that I may not know about.