Enter Webz beta release - web browser for the TiVo!

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Today I'm announcing "Enter Webz" - the world's first web browser for the TiVo DVR.
This is just a Beta release.

This release is available for download from http://David.Blackledge.com/tivo/enterwebz.
More information is in the documentation.

Just download, unzip, and run the .bat file, then look in "Music, Photos, and More" or "Showcases and Apps" or equivalent, depending on your TiVo model.
You'll get Enter Webz, and a couple of shortcuts to Google and Archive.org (where you can listen to public domain music, or watch public domain videos and movies on your TV).

This is free for your personal home use. I plan to set up a fixed-ip server in the future.

It's ugly and buggy still, but today's the last day of my vacation, so I may not get a chance to work on this for a while.

Why a web browser for the TiVo DVR?

Quick lookups

Google, Definr.com, IMDB, Wikipedia
One-off pages for other Apps

Google Authentication for Google APIs (the main inspiration for creating Enter Webz... I used Enter Webz to register Pandora’s activation code on my new TiVo Premiere!)
Display a related URL for dynamic app content (e.g. from an RSS feed)
Application help pages
Instant HME Apps for some websites

like:
weather.gov and wunderground.com
Gmail mobile or Gmail basic html
Google Voice mobile (mp3 download blocked)
Google Calendar mobile...hopefully soon
Facebook mobile
tivocommunity.com forums!
Archive.org’s public domain content:
mp3s ( playlists of live concerts; audio books), texts, videos (classic TV; movies)
Feedburner XSLT-formatted rss feeds
xkcd.com
Launch other HME Apps

Special URLs launch apps from domain names (vs. static IPs of “Manually add a server”)
Can be configured to present any URL like it is a stand-alone app.

 

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You're very welcome, and thank you for the compliments.

I doubt it needs to be higher than 1.5, I'll change my compile configuration.

most of the speed is thanks to the computer you're running it on ;] ... plus JSoup. I also did a few things to make it more responsive.

YouTube and Video Player: Thanks to moyekj for just recently figuring out how to launch those.
If it sees one of the YouTube "watch" URL formats, it launches the built-in YouTube app with that video ID. I need to make it launch the new better quality app on Premieres.
To deal with large files, if it sees a video/mpeg content type (usually larger files) it launches the Video Player with that URI.
Note, in the future it will launch ALL video files over 1.1G with Video Player, but short videos will use my in-browser player (in-browser helps because you don't lose browsing history and it supports ASPECT/ZOOM to correct the video display). I need a modification to JSoup to do the size check efficiently, though.

This is why I released it as a beta! The more I hear, the better it can be! ;]

PIP is off by default because of this. If PIP stops working...just turn it off and leave it off (maybe try again the next day if you like) - although it works some of the time, it's flakey. When it's working, turning it off then on (SLOW button) gets a blank PIP until you do it again. When it stops working (not scaled) consider everything destabilized until PIP is off - I've had it crash the TiVo for a simple error while the PIP was displaying in a bad state. There is work to do to find out how to cleanly make PIP work consistently like the Premiere does. (although that's through flash so it may not be completely possible in HME).

Out of Memory: Expect that. That's actually the TiVo running out of memory, not Enter Webz. If you're doing a lot of browsing or just have a crazy big page, we'll likely run out of TiVo memory/views/whatever.
However, getting "stuck" out of memory I'm going to blame on the broken PIP destabilizing the HME environment... haven't seen this happen myself.

Good news is, Enter Webz remembers "last visited" so a crash doesn't lose your place.
Also, I wanted to start pyTiVo archiving with Enter Webz, but accesses to the TiVo web service while running HME is a great way to cause a system crash (perhaps pyTivo could have a mode where it only uses cached information as soon as you start accessing the web interface?)

You'll also notice inline image failures: since the TiVo is directly loading them, websites that block remote-loading also block them from the TiVo. I'm certain there is a way to give pass-through header info to the TiVo in a createStream request via the TeDict, but my best experiments so far only caused TiVo crashes (which means it tried to interpret something!).
Google Voice mp3 playing seems to have the same problem.
Any research in this area would be really helpful! Or just bang on TiVo's door for that one secret.

Seems I could allow Premiere users to try to launch arbitrary flash files when I find them on a page once I learn a little bit more about that.

I'm tempted to launch YouTube (and flash) "inline" on the page by using scaling and application-as-Stream, but I don't think that's useful...just cute. (you'd have to "exit" the application to get control back to Enter Webz)

FYI, when I eventually put it on a server, it will use the Premiere's new "Genre" field so a link-as-app will show up in the "photos" and "music" area or the "other" area (there is a "video" genre, but it doesn't show up anywhere - probably some additional requirements on the TiVo side - more research to do)

 

;]
Notice how the Premiere puts Live365 and Pandora and Photos in one menu, and other apps under Showcases & Apps... that's cause the TiVoConnect response (when DoGenres=1) includes the genres tag with one or more genre tags that contains "photos" "music" "video" or "other"

Code:

<Item>
<Details>
<ContentType>application/x-hme</ContentType>
<SourceFormat>x-container/folder</SourceFormat>
<Title>Photos &amp; Slideshows</Title>
<Uuid>BBC7824A-40C6-8B61-4D87-6A3D799F365B</Uuid>
<X-TiVo-TopLevelDisplayOrderHint>50</X-TiVo-TopLevelDisplayOrderHint>
</Details>
   <Genres>
      <Genre>photos</Genre>
   </Genres>
<Links>
<Content>
<ContentType>application/x-hme</ContentType>
<Url>https://204.176.49.65:7287/hdphotos-ml_2010.09.13-1339-20100913_134517/1284410719/1355864959-1671224959/clientip_75.161.43.57/</Url>
</Content>
<CustomIcon>
<Url>http://204.176.49.116:7288/hdphotos-ml_2010.09.13-1339-20100913_134517/1284410719/1355864959-1671224959/icon.png</Url>
</CustomIcon>
</Links>
</Item>

(For some reason it also includes ContentType again under the Content tag)

Anything with "photos" or "music" ends up under that group, "other" under Showcases & Apps, and "video" (if that's the only genre) disappears... Genre "video" is how Netflix, YouTube, Hulu, etc. end up in the two video locations, obviously. To get it to show up, maybe all I have to do is call the app "<Hidden />" or maybe they have a pre-authorized list of UUIDs, or maybe it has to be https.

 

Yeah...I'm really rusty on batch files... maybe I'll find a good sample on the Internet somewhere ;]

SD fonts are usually good, and on HD I scale the fonts up slightly since they seemed too small to me, too (on 1080), but that combined with a smaller TV is likely too small, yeah.

The webpages can be even worse if the specified fonts are very small.
Change the font scaling by pressing 1-9... 0 goes back to default (which is 5).
The THUMBtacks screen font doesn't scale...maybe I should use a larger font for HD.

I plan to add HD/SD screen resolution selection to the menu eventually
(ASPECT/ZOOM to get the ugly menu page).

Thanks for trying it out!

 

Let's see... I sort of proxied a connection using my "hme:" protocol setup. I take the two key headers the TiVo sent me and used them in a TiVoConnect request to 204.176.49.116 which gave me the content that I showed in the sample earlier.

Code:

/**
 * HTTP Header sent in resource requests by the TiVo with the tsn (context
 * connection attribute "tsn") as value
 */
public static final String HTTP_HEADER_TIVO_ID = "TiVo_TCD_ID";
/**
 * HTTP Header sent in resource requests by the TiVo with the TiVo Software
 * Version (Device Info event's "version") as value
 */
public static final String HTTP_HEADER_TIVO_VERSION = "TiVo_SW_VER";

I had an IP-only problem, too, and eventually figured out I had invalid XML I was generating... it had un-escaped ampersands.
While trying to fix it, I also added the ?xml at beginning of the file, and Content-Type: text/xml, and that additional <ContentType in the <Content section ...not sure if they're required, though.
oh yeah, and you HAVE to have a Uuid specified. Current experiments show a random one or a non-standard one works fine, but it won't show up at all without it.

 

Yeah...that's a feature ;] The default list of links isn't permanent until you save one of your own. At that time, it saves all the normal links permanently, but it doesn't save the "demo" links which includes those hidden apps. If you delete all your links, it will bring back all the defaults, including the "demo" links.
The "suggested links" page is meant to hold all these defaults (and additional suggestions), but the wiki site only shows the special app-launching links in "iframes" which Enter Webz doesn't currently support. I'll add another place for the special app-launching links soon.
I may have it permanently save the "demo" links, too, since it's easy for you to delete them if you don't want them.

While I'm not 100% sure what you mean, most of the missing content falls under 3 categories: JavaScript, Flash, or Frames.

• JavaScript will never be supported.
• Flash MAY be supported on Premieres... though it will be hit-or-miss at best, and most likely won't work almost at all.
• Frames will eventually be supported.

Other features like Silverlight and Java Applets will never be supported for sure.

As far as Zoom...that's currently to open the menu... but I might change that to "info" and use Zoom similar to what you're talking about...it might be a better fit.

 

I know it caches the list... doesn't refresh nearly as often as the older models... this is nice for speed, but hard for developers ;] Things I try that seem to help force a refresh: go to standby then come back, or go to a detailed menu like system settings or something, then come back.

 

Interesting. The URL isn't a problem for being local, so I'd guess it was the page, but the 0xffff is a surprise. The attached html seemed to load fine on my computer, but I don't have any of the images or stylesheet files it references, so it's probably one of them causing the problem. If there is any output from on your computer when the error happens, I'd be interested in it... probably a bug in my code not handling some weird problem with the stylesheet files.

The "good news" is... looking at the website, the URL won't do you much good because it is designed to play the videos through a Flash app that won't work on Enter Webz.
It might be "easy" to create a Serviio-specific app using their API, though ;]

 

First, sorry again about the Java 1.7 - next release will be 1.5.

I think I know what it is... I have an old version of TyPo in one of the jars, and a newer version in EnterWebz.jar. Your generated classpath probably puts the old one first in the path.
Try it with a manual classpath that matches the .bat file instead of a generated classpath.
Next release will also self-define its classpath in the main jar file, so you won't even need the loop.