comm page 16 - Dave's Blog

Windows Media Center and Zune Integration Hack

2007 Nov 28, 1:23One of the new Zune features that had me the most excited was the claimed improved Windows Media Center integration which unfortunately turned out to simply mean support for the Win MCE video format (with an exception for HD). I wanted to be able to pick shows recorded by my Win MCE and have the Zune automatically sync up the latest episodes. However, with the improved podcast support in the Zune software one can easily create a ridiculous hack to accomplish this.

The new Zune software has podcast support which does everything I'd want to do with a Win MCE recorded TV series so the goal is to shoehorn a TV series into a Zune podcast. An overview of the steps: Create an XSLT that converts Win MCE data to a podcast, run the XSLT as a scheduled task every few hours per TV series, setup a Web server pointed at the resulting podcasts and the Win MCE Recorded TV directory, and subscribe to the resulting podcasts in the Zune software.

1. Reading through the Win MCE data stored as an XML file in "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\Recording\Recordings.xml" and the spec for podcasts I created an XSLT to convert a series from Win MCE data to a podcast.
2. I added a new task to the Scheduled Tasks to run my XSLT using my xsltproc.js script. The task runs a handful of commands that look something like the following:

   C:\windows\system32\wscript.exe C:\users\dave\bin\xsltproc.js C:\Users\Dave\Documents\trunk\development\mce-zune\mce-to-podcast.xslt C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\eHome\Recording\Recordings.xml --param title "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" --param max 4 --param baseURI "http://groucho/" --param thisRelURI "tds.xml" -o "D:\recorded tv\tds.xml"

   For each TV series I run a command like the above and that outputs a podcast for that series into my "D:\Recorded TV\" directory.
3. Zune only allows http URIs for its podcasts so I installed a web server on my Win MCE server. I'm running Vista Ultimate so it was quick and easy for me to install IIS7 but any Web server will do. Then I pointed it at "D:\Recorded TV\".
4. Once all the above was done I just subscribed to the resulting podcasts via my Web server and viola! Since I'm forced to use a Web server I can even run the Zune software on a machine other than my Win MCE server. You can see a screen-shot above of my Zune software showing my Colbert Report podcast.

technical xml mce hack windows media center zune windows xslt podcast

Brief Miscellany

2007 Oct 29, 7:07Two brief updates to previous posts:

1. I noted that I had a new entry on the IE blog. Some comments on the IE blog have recently been rude in their request for information on future versions of IE. For example see the first two comments responding to my post. Feeling bad about that I looked at my posts entry on delicious and saw the following:

   "This is the first blog from the IE team that I have found rigorous and informative. I skipped to the bottom to find it was written by one of the TA's from my first class at Cal Poly."

   That made me feel a bit better and I was able to catch up with someone from college. Thanks Kris!
   
   
2. I previously had my GPS set with an Australian accent. When it encountered 'WA', as in the abbreviation for Washington in freeway exits, it pronounced it 'Western Australia'. Now I've got it with a British accent and WA is just 'W.A.' but when I tell it to drive to 'MS', the name of my saved location for work, it pronounces it 'Manuscript'.

microsoft blog gps personal nontechnical

XSL Transforms in JavaScript

2007 Oct 7, 4:12In a previous post I mentioned an xsltproc like js file I made. As noted in that post, on Windows you can write console script files in JavaScript, name them foo.js, and execute them from the command prompt. I later found that MSDN has an XSLT javascript sample which looks similar to mine, but I like mine better for the XSLT parameter support and having a non-ridiculous way of interpreting filenames. The code for my xsltproc.js follows. The script is very simple and demonstrates the ease with which you can manipulate these system objects and all it takes is opening up notepad.

var createNewXMLObj = function() {
   var result = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.FreeThreadedDOMDocument");
   result.validateOnParse = false;
   result.async = false;
   return result;
}

var args = WScript.arguments;
var ofs = WScript.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject");

var xslParams = [];
var xmlStyle = null;
var xmlInput = null;
var inputFile = null;
var outputFile = null;
var error = false;

for (var idx = 0; idx < args.length && !error; ++idx)
   if (args.item(idx) == "-o") {
      if (idx + 1 < args.length) {
         outputFile = ofs.GetAbsolutePathName(args.item(idx + 1));
         ++idx;
      }
      else
         error = true;
   }
   else if (args.item(idx) == "--param" || args.item(idx) == "-param") {
      if (idx + 2 < args.length) {
         xslParams[args.item(idx + 1)] = args.item(idx + 2);
         idx += 2;
      }
      else
         error = true;
   }
   else if (xmlStyle == null) {
      xmlStyle = createNewXMLObj();
      xmlStyle.load(ofs.GetAbsolutePathName(args.item(idx)));
   }
   else if (xmlInput == null) {
      inputFile = ofs.GetAbsolutePathName(args.item(idx));
      xmlInput = createNewXMLObj();
      xmlInput.load(inputFile);
   }

if (xmlStyle == null || xmlInput == null || error) {
   WScript.Echo('Usage:\n\t"xsltproc" xsl-stylesheet input-file\n\t\t["-o" output-file] *["--param" name value]');
}
else {
   var xslt = new ActiveXObject("MSXML2.XSLTemplate.3.0");
   xslt.stylesheet = xmlStyle;
   var xslProc = xslt.createProcessor();
   xslProc.input = xmlInput;

   for (var keyVar in xslParams)
      xslProc.addParameter(keyVar, xslParams[keyVar]);

   xslProc.transform();

   if (outputFile == null)
      WScript.Echo(xslProc.output);
   else {
      var xmlOutput = createNewXMLObj();
      xmlOutput.loadXML(xslProc.output);
      xmlOutput.save(outputFile);
   }
}

js xml jscript windows xslt technical xsltproc wscript xsl javascript

Date Time Formats

2007 Sep 27, 2:17Starting on a new simple project I wanted to get the history of my Delicious links. Delicious has an export tool available via the settings section so I thought I'd try that. However, the links aren't exported in XML not even in XHTML but rather in HTML. Shocking. An example:

"Don't Tase Me, Bro!" (UF Student Tasered Remix)

Remix of the 'Don't tase me, bro!' guy getting tasered.At this point I'm already not going to use this file because its in HTML but I'm even more disgusted by those date time values. Raymond Chen of the Old New Thing posted about recognizing timestamps and timestamp sentinel values. From the first blog post and with the use of a calculator for base conversion one can tell that those are UNIX style timestamps counting the number of seconds since 1970.

It reminds me of my hatred for the MIME date time format I developed working on my webpage's server side parsing of atom and RSS. Atom is of course my favorite as Atom uses the Internet date time format described in the following documents. Here's an example of one 2007-09-27T020:50:00.000-08:00

• W3C Recommended Date and Time Format
• IETF: Date and Time on the Internet: Timestamps
• XML Schema dateTime

On the other hand the evil and villainous RSS uses the MIME date time format now described in the more recent IETF MIME standard. Here's an example Thu, 27 Sep 2007 20:50:00 -0800
The Internet date time format has the advantage of being so easy to sort. An alphabetic sort with normal C-style collation rules of strings containing Internet date times will also sort them chronologically. This is not the case for the MIME date time due to the preceding day of the week and the spelled out month name. This also means that when producing these you have to figure out the day of the week and when parsing them you have to match month names rather than just parsing out numbers. Anyway now days if I see mention of a date time in a new proposed standard or spec I be sure to point out the numerous advantages of the Internet date time format.

date xml html feed time technical date-time code atom rss