Yet another FireFly Client (SilverPlay)

[Anonymous]

Hi Warren

Tx for posting this. This might be very helpful to other users as well.
-> I have added some checks to the next version which should give a better explanation why it cannot connect 🙂

Regarding the last part of your message about silverlight having to be installed that is correct.
Like Flash, Silverlight is a Browser Plugin which has to be installed to use silverlight applications.
But the same is true for FirePlay. In case of FirePlay it is the Flash runtime environment.

You probably had flash already installed from before as it is used on quite many websites.

[Anonymous]

This is awesome. I’m currently using the FirePlay client to serve up a large collection of foreign language songs for educational use. The addition of a lyrics pane in SilverPlay is something I had done in a Rails app (albeit badly) I was working on for the same purpose before finding FirePlay and settling for simple playback. I had looked into lyricwiki.org as a solution too, but it wasn’t quite as mature then as it is now apparently. A good deal of my songs, even some rather obscure ones, show lyrics.

I am, however, getting some jumps in playback like the previous user experienced. These seem to decrease as the song progresses, so maybe the buffer is just getting gummed up a bit somewhere. Not sure, but other than that it’s wonderful.

Is this at a point where custom skins could be written for it?

[Anonymous]

I also just now noticed that (in Mac Firefox at least) the next song in the list won’t play unless the tab that SilverPlay is in is active. When I click the tab SilverPlay is playing in the playback resumes at the next song.

[Anonymous]

Hi spyralout

About the selection of the next song. There was a problem with V 0.1 which should have been fixed with V0.1.1.
Let me know if that is still the case that the next song is not selected correct with this version and I will fix that asap.

About the skins. It is possible to develop your own skin. The player is compatible with the IMS Themes from the silverlight Toolkit on
Silverlight Toolkit Theming
However right now the theme has to be included in the dll itself.
but if you really want to write such a theme let me know and I will implement an implicite loading of themes so you can put the themefile in any folder on the webserver where you host SilverPlay. Or I could add the theme to releas directly 🙂

The MediaElement with silverlight, which is used for playing the music, has some hickups with the buffering.
I tried to program around that with downloading at least 5 sec of the song before playing.
I can try to make this configurable so it could be increased to fit the download speed 🙂
Can I ask what for an outgoing speed you have with your Internet connection?

[Anonymous]

I just tried it in both Safari and Firefox (latest versions) on a Mac and it does still have problems playing the next song if the tab it is in is not active. As soon as I tab back to SilverPlay it starts playing.

My outgoing network speed shouldn’t be a problem. The Firefly server that I’m streaming from is on a high speed university server. I am offsite, with Silverplay installed locally to my machine. I’ll try installing the client on a machine that is on the same network tomorrow and see if it has any effect.

The Silverlight platform is pretty new, so it doesn’t surprise me that there are hiccups, but what I’ve seen I like so far.

[fizze]

I couldn’t find it in this post – but does SilverPlay require Silverlight 1.0 or 2.0?

If it’s just 1.0 chances are it might work with MoonLight as well 😉

[Anonymous]

SilverPlay does require Silverlight 2.0.

So Moonlight is a no go for now sorry. 🙁

[periferral]

i installed mono (moonlight) latest from source and it compiled and installed successfully. I was able to use SilverPlay on my debian etch system with no worries.

i quite like the interface, and the look and feel overall. My comments/suggestions

1. as others pointed out, it was slow to buffer song immediately leading to skips during playing. Maybe you can take some time to buffer the songs before starting out the play if that is possible at all

2. i see you are working on and possible completely implemented smart-playlist support. This is really cool. When I create a smart playlist, is this added to firefly media server?

3. It would be cool if I could right click a track and add to playlist. Currently right-click give silverlight settings. Don’t know if that can be avoided.

4. i might be totally overlooking this but I don’t see a shuffle/loop mode. also there is a reload like button to the right to the play time indicator. I don’t quite know what that does.

5. The top right usually is designed for search. Maybe you can move search up there and move the skins dropdown to somewhere less ‘obstructive’ and also reduce its size since it seems a little overwhelming. Maybe just a name dropdown without the preview since the preview is really not useful.

6. in firefox, I cannot open a new tab. I think ctrl-tab shortcuts are suppressed by silverlight. Not sure if this is something you can work around.

I can help you design a logo. I do some basic graphic design so let me know if you have any ideas and I can create a few templates for you to review. hit me up on IM. I’m periferral@yahoo/gmail/hotmail

[Anonymous]

Hi Perferral

Thanks a lot for you detailed feedback.
I’m currently on a busines travel until next sunday and have no time to work on SilverPlay during that period. I will however continue early February on V0.2 and hope to have a static playlist editor available until somewhen mid february.

Specific to your input:
>1. as others pointed out, it was slow to buffer song immediately leading to skips during playing. >Maybe you can take some time to buffer the songs before starting out the play if that is possible at all
Yes that’s something I will try to do. May be a longer buffer time will help. Will make the buffer time configurable so it will be easier to get feedback on what values are giving best results.

>2. i see you are working on and possible completely implemented smart-playlist support. This is >really cool. When I create a smart playlist, is this added to firefly media server?
The smarplaylist and the comming up static playlists are saved in firefly directly. Nothing is saved locally.

>3. It would be cool if I could right click a track and add to playlist. Currently right-click give >silverlight settings. Don’t know if that can be avoided.
That’s unfortunately something which is not doable.
That is something the silverlight community really wants and I hope MS will listen to that and add support in the comming versions.
I tried several hacks and one of them works in most browsers but not in Firefox. It is not possible, or at least I haven’t found a way yet, in Firefox to supress a right mouse click from javascript right mouse click is always forwarded to the Silverlight plugin which then shows the configuration part.
Will investigate more once I have the main functionaly in.

>4. i might be totally overlooking this but I don’t see a shuffle/loop mode. also there is a reload like > button to the right to the play time indicator. I don’t quite know what that does.
The button to the right should actually be a repeat button. Meaning that when you have selected songs and you reach the end it will start over again.
Shuffle is one thing on my priority list. Also a Extended Shuffle where you are able to shuffle songs from your whole selected playlaylist/library and not only the selected album.

>5. The top right usually is designed for search. Maybe you can move search up there and move the >skins dropdown to somewhere less ‘obstructive’ and also reduce its size since it seems a little >overwhelming. Maybe just a name dropdown without the preview since the preview is really not >useful.
Good point. That’s certainly doable. Maybe I should put the theme selection to the status bar.

>6. in firefox, I cannot open a new tab. I think ctrl-tab shortcuts are suppressed by silverlight. Not >sure if this is something you can work around.
Might be doable with some javascipt hack. Will also put that to my TODO items.

[goana]

hi manred,

I have copied all the silverplay files into the folder “/opt/share/mt-daapd/admin-root/Silverplay/”. But I can only see a blank page when I use firefox 3.0.1 (windows machine). I have also changed the localhost to “myserverdyndns.org” in the file SilverPlay.html. I have copy the clientaccesspolicy.xml to “/opt/share/mt-daapd/admin-root/”, all with no success.

Any ideas?

goana

[Author]

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