LinLog

I have a new side project. It wasn't one I was really planning on, but it's the fun kind - the kind that scratches an itch.

You see, I've become a big fan of the Roku set-top box. I have three of them in my house. And in addition to using them for Netflix and Amazon Instant Video, I also use them to stream video and audio from my desktop PC (which has become an ersatz home server). For this I use an application called Roksbox. It allows you to stream videos from any web server. So since I already had IIS running on my PC, all I needed to do was set up a new website, symlink my video directory into the document root, and I was ready to go.

The problem with Roksbox is that it's a bit basic and the configuration is a little clunky. For example, if you want to add thumbnail images and metadata to the video listings, you have two options:
1) Put all the information for every video in a single XML file.
2) Turn on directory listings for your server and use one XML file and thumbnail file per video.
The problem with the first option is that it's ludicrously slow. By which I mean the interface can freeze for upwards of 30 seconds while Roksbox parses the XML file. And the problem with the second method is that you end up littering your filesystem with extra files.

This was particularly the case when I looked at adding thumbnails for a TV series. All I wanted was for each episode to have the season's DVD cover art as a thumbnail image rather than the default image. Unfortunately for me, in order to do that Roksbox wants you to have one image file for each episode. So I either needed a bunch of redundant copies, or a bunch of symlinks, and neither of those options appealed to me.

So I decided to try something - faking the directory listing. That is, I wrote a couple of simple PHP scripts. The first read the contents of a directory and simulated the output of the IIS directory browsing page, but inserting thumbnail entries for each video. So, for example, if there was a video "Episode 1.mp4", the script would add an "Episode 1.jpg" to the listing. The second script worked in conjunction with a rewrite rule for non-existent files. So since the "Episode 1.jpg" didn't exist, the request would be sent to the second script, which would parse the request URL and then redirect to an actual, existing thumbnail image. The result was that I had my images for every episode in the season and I didn't have to create any pointless links or files.

This worked so well that, naturally, I took it to the next level. I started branching out and added more support for customizing listings, such as hiding and re-ordering directories. Then I started getting really crazy and wrote code to generate listings for entirely fictitious directories in order to create video playlists. I even started writing admin pages to provide a GUI for configuring this stuff, built an SQLite database to save the information, and created an ad hoc application framework to help manage it.

I think the reason this little project really caught my interest is that it's something that I actually use on a daily basis. I've been trying for a while now to find a side-project that I can use for picking up new languages or technologies, but nothing ever seems to stick. I'll play with something for a while, but them lose interest pretty quickly when some other obligation comes up. I think that's because those projects are just excuses - I'm doing them because I need a project in order to learn something new, but I have no particular interest in that particular project. But even though I'm not using anything new for this project, it grabs my attention because it's something that I want for myself. That's something I haven't had in a while, and I really like the feeling.

If anyone is curious, the current code is in my public mercurial repository here. I'm planning to put up a proper release of it when it's a bit more together. For now, I'm just having fun making it work.