Official 5.3 Beta Discussion Thread

[rtarver]

In order of preference for me, web riva takes priority since I think that's the only way we'll retain iOS connectivity with reasonable ease. Second to that would be the proper DLNA interface. I've had my Oppo for 3+ years now, with no full integration. I have a roku now, but that's my fault it's not integrated.

Only Dean really knows his target demographic from a business perspective. If voice is more important, so be it. I've just been holding out for "one ring to rule them all". I tinkered for a while and actually got rjriver to feed my oppo for awhile. This was via their command line which I fed from CQC. Reliability was terrible.

My vision is that distant family or house sitters can sit down in my media room and pick up one of my excess iPads and that's all they need. Maybe a harmony or similar remote for tactile volume and transport controls. I've been buying 4K for my sci fi when it comes with the blu ray. I won't dive into the new oppo until control is possible. For now, I have a small growing collection of 4K movies I've watched the blu ray version of.

I know Dean has to prioritize in favor of his business needs. I totally get that. Pro installers are probably installing for those that aren't going to take the time to rip all their movies. Aren't going to take the time to manage 3rd party repositories that have to be ported to CQC with any regularity. And definitely aren't going to tolerate anything less than near perfect reliability in whatever they do integrate.

I honestly haven't touched the interface designer in probably a year plus. I have too many 'half way possible', but not quite, things I want to work. For now I've just continued to read the threads trying to keep up with the new stuff. When I see the path to a full media implementation I'll dive back in. Or maybe in a month or so when I have to take a week off or lose it.

I do have other commercial options, but I'm unwilling to a) spend that much, and b) I'd much rather support an independent product and developer. For now, I'll just wait and watch.

[Dean Roddey]

I actually had another idea today as to how we might use the new Amazon lexbot stuff in conjunction with our existing CQC Voice stuff to get really accurate recognition. If we could do that, then absolutely CQC Voice would be the thing to do, because we would have something really powerful, and it wouldn't take a lot of time, and we could then move on to other things.

I need to do one simple test first to see if the fundamental idea behind it is valid. If not, I'll know quickly and I can not waste any more time on that front. If so, then I would have to at least give it a try. The only thing I worry about is that the response time is likely to be a bit slower, since it may require two back to back processes. I don't think I can overlap them any.

[Shaky]

For me I want Spotify integration.  A close second would be a voice solution that's intuitive to use and easy to setup and keep going. For me CQC voice is almost that but the mic. requirements and/or recognition performance are a limiting issue IMO right now.  We need CQC voice with a networked Mic. like Echo/Google has but open source or something. There seem to be talks of that type of thing coming...but I haven't found anything concrete yet. Likely a matter of time.

I'd love to see more in depth media too, but could wait a bit more in favour of the above.  An honourable mention to Plex as well.  I don't know exactly what I'd do with that and CQC at the moment but could be cool at some point I suppose.   My 2 cents...

[znelbok]

I can do a networked Kinect right now.

VirtualHere on a Pi using Wifi with a USB Kinect and the VirtualUSB driver on the server will do the job. Not neat and tidy unfortunately. Cost adds up quickly that you are almost at the point of the other mic's (Kinet $50, Pi $45+, VirtualHere $30)

Although if you can get a couple of connects to the Pi then costs come down

I agree with spotify (Already said Spotify). Its being integrated into everything and would be a (IMO) a great addition to CQC.

[pjgregory]

Ok, so a DLNA solution is too complicated and too difficult for you to implement in any time frame that you would see as commercially viable.  I can get that, but what about a general look at the media stuff.  There seems to be a lot of support for Plex, which will function as a proper streaming solution, both for stuff in the cloud and on a local  NAS.  It would work for audio and video players running on PC's and tablets which is a start.

Wouldn't it be better to go for an integration with Plex which has most if not all of the stuff required already in place, rather that implement a sort of CQC JRivers- Lite which you seem to be suggesting in the opening post? 

PJG

[Dean Roddey]

More Plex integration is obviously an attractive option. The down sides are that the integration protocol isn't so great, and that it's something that might be considered to DIY'ish for pro installers to want to use, though maybe not. The big downside to any external system is lack of tight integration. I.e. the user has to go outside of the automation system to do things, which it would be awfully nice to avoid from a pro install perspective.

Ultimately nothing is really perfect in the media world. It's a complicated thing. On the DLNA front, if we did something I think that the only practical scenario would something like:

1. Have enough smarts to suck over the contents of a DLNA server into a CQC repo
2. That allows it to be browsed within CQC
3. And we should I think then be able to act as the middle man and ask player X to play content Y from server Z
4. Which gets us out of the really big and complicated bits of a server, which is supporting all of the streaming and media codec issues.

That is something that we might could bite off reasonably. How practical that is, I'm not sure. I.e. would #1 basically just bring everything to a screeching halt for 10 minutes because DLNA servers (and UPnP) just aren't designed to handle that sort of 'suck out its brains' operation for a large media database? And, as with all such external systems, we have no way to know what has changed, so if you add one song, we'd have to suck the whole thing over again.

That's the big advantage of our own system. As soon as you add or remove or rename media, those changes are immediately available without any further intervention. From the perspective of the 'it just works' type requirement that an installer will generally have, that's a big deal.

Though, if we did decide that the next release is going to be Media World, and we can do the restricted DLNA scenario above in some reasonable time, maybe we could do both.

[Dean Roddey]

I uploaded some tweaked documentation yesterday evening. I accidentally unzipped into the wrong place and had to clean up. Despite sitting there for a good two minutes to convince myself I was deleting the right stuff, I managed to delete the downloads directory, which means that the installers were not available. It's always best to do that right after announcing a new release, to maximize embarrassment.

I'm rebuilding it now, which will take a while, but the 5.2 installer was the first thing put back. I'm tellin ya, there's a fine line between stupid and not stupid.

[Dean Roddey]

I'm starting to make some forward progress on the Z-Wave driver again. I'd left it sort of in a transitional state, and it took me a while to figure out what that was. I still may have some things to deal with but it seems to be happy again. I continue to flip back and forth a bit about how to best handle this or that complexity. The fact that making changes on that front inevitably breaks it in head scratching ways probably is proof it's not as good as it should be, though it may never be possible to do a lot better given the complexity.

[Dean Roddey]

I banged away more on the Z-Wave driver today. I was getting back to implementing the basic lock class (a generic handler for locks that follow a fairly common pattern.) I'm noticing that the lock is never responding to any secure messages. I'm not sure why. I know I have the right key, since I can talk securely to the master controller during replication. And I'm sure I'm getting the lock awake, since I get non-secure message replies, and it sends me the nonce required to create a secure message to send back to it. But it just doesn't respond.

So I'm not sure what's going on there. I don't know of any requirement that each node exchange any sort of key information. It's all based on the overall network key AFAIK. Oh well, I'll try again tomorrow.

[batwater]

UPB revamp!

PulseWorx has an IP version of their PIM. Not sure if that's the right way to go but is an option...