Clemens Vasters

October 22, 2005

@ 11:47 PM

This project is serious fun. Nothing is better than something that helps a geek figuring out technology and has an immediate tangible personal benefit. My “ClemensTV” (quite a humble choice of a code name!) project is one of these. The screenshot below shows what my Indigo service does to a completely innocent and unsuspecting Windows Media Player without any additional client code install/footprint. Worked on first try on my girlfriend Sabine’s notebook (that’s the benchmark; she doesn’t even have .NET 1.x on her machine) as well as on a few of my friends’ machines who I gave nothing but a username/password and an URL.

XHTML with inline AJAX scripts, ASX stream envelopes, ASX play lists, RSS, OPML, and even raw binary GIFs all served from Indigo endpoints (one per TV channel and one for the overall channel lineup). With [ServiceContract] and [OperationContract] and all that jazz (plus, admittedly, some somewhat significant code, config and attribute “magic”).

The only thing in the Windows Media Player content pane that isn’t served up through an Indigo channel is the live video stream itself – and if it were necessary…

Tech details to come… Gotta watch TV ;-)

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Sunday, October 23, 2005 7:56:33 PM UTC

What really amazes me, Clemens, is that you can still find time to watch TV with all what you are doing...

David Brabant

Monday, October 24, 2005 9:12:03 PM UTC

is this legal in Germany? In the US sharing your TV with friends in this way is against the law without re-broadcast permission from the network. For personal use this is perfectly fine, but you describe above you're sharing with others... which must be the intent if you're using RSS etc...

Anonymous

Monday, October 24, 2005 9:18:08 PM UTC

I am sharing the videos with members of my household only, I am paying the public televion fee (that covers my household and any TV reception devices I own), and I pay for my pay TV, which gives me permission to fetch and record a single stream at a time from the digital offer, and I have a valid client license for the backend video server. That's all perfectly legal.

I addition to this, I there is a technical time offset of about 5 seconds from the live signal, so all of this falls under "private copy" of a recording, which is also legal as per German copyright law.

The RSS and OPML is for architectural consistency with something else I am building in addition to this.

Clemens Vasters

Tuesday, October 25, 2005 3:41:59 AM UTC

That's freakn awesome:)

Scott Schecter

Tuesday, October 25, 2005 3:02:15 PM UTC

That is cool, can you provide us a public preview URL for 10-20 minutes to get the experience?

Dariusz Parys

Wednesday, October 26, 2005 10:56:05 PM UTC

Hey Clemens, this looks cool but I don't understand what exactly you're doing. Can you clarify?

From reading your blog I've pieced together that you're
a) writing a smart client in Avalon(not shown).
b) going to wrap BeyondTV web services in some way to deliver OPML and RSS content which in turn will link to streams and podcasts from your PVR?

Why do you need Indigo and what does it buy you? Isn't all this just HTTP? What am I missing? (don't get me wrong, it's very cool).