cliremote - text-based remote with feedback

[mad_ady]

cliremote v0.1 by mad_ady
==============================

Requires WDLXTV firmware version 0.5.0.0 or higher (either
Live or Live Plus versions).

This command-line application allows you to navigate the OSD
from a telnet/ssh session, by pressing keys on your keyboard.
To get feedback of your position on the OSD, /tmp/dmaosd.log
is parsed and cues about your current position are printed
onscreen (even if you navigate with an external remote).

To use it, you would run the command "cliremote.pl" in a shell.

Use the following keys to navigate:

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Enter key -> ENTER                                                             
< -> PREVIOUS                                                                   
> -> NEXT                                                                       
? -> Display help                                                               
Arrow key -> UP                                                                 
Arrow key -> DOWN                                                               
Arrow key -> RIGHT                                                             
Arrow key -> LEFT                                                               
S -> SEARCH                                                                     
b -> BACK                                                                       
e -> EJECT                                                                     
f -> FORWARD                                                                   
h -> HOME                                                                       
o -> OPTION                                                                     
p -> PLAY/PAUSE                                                                 
r -> REWIND                                                                     
s -> STOP                                                                       
x -> Exit application                                                           


Dependencies:
* needs DMAOSD_DEBUG='1' to get current position

Changelog:
0.1 Initial release

Screenshots:

[DerFlob]

Hi, I really like it! I've wanted a way to navigate the WDLXTV without turning on my TV for a long time. Great for listening to music.
Unfortunately PLAY/PAUSE doesn't work. The command for irinject is 'pplay' not 'PLAY/PAUSE'.

[mad_ady]

Thanks for the feedback - never tested play/pause. I'll fix it and upload an updated version.

Edit: Fixed in v0.2.

[mad_ady]

A bit of an update - I managed to fix a buffering issue with dmaosd.log in 1.05-based firmwares which made this app useless (you would not get immediate feedback after navigation). Now (or more specifically when the new firmware is released (and by new I mean >= 0.5.2.1)) cliremote should work fine with 1.05 as well..

[KAD]

how do you resolve the buffering issue, if you found a way to force dmaosd to clear the buffers continually, or ....

I'd certainly be interested

[mad_ady]

It's a funny story, actually

TL;DR version: http://svn.wdlxtv.com/diff.php?repname=1.05.04-wdlxtv&path=%2Flive%2Ftrunk%2Fbin%2Fdmaosd.sh&rev=740&peg=740

All this time I was certain that DMAOSD has an internal buffer and only releases output in chunks. So, two days ago I decompiled dmaosd and started to search for functions that have certain strings as parameters, in order to identify some of the logging functions.

I found something that looked like a logging function, but was calling a lot of nested functions and I couldn't understand any of them (lots of ifs, also some cases where it would call a function address loaded from some offset in memory that you couldn't know what it was)... I searched for more strings and was puzzled to find out that some of them were being passed to puts() or printf() or fprintf(). So, this means there is no built-in buffering - something might happen with the standard libc functions...

So, next, I concentrated on the other part of the command (for reference this is what gets executed when starting DMAOSD with logging):

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LC_ALL=en_EN.UTF-8 /bin/dmaosd $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 $6 $ERR | tee /tmp/dmaosd.log &


so I searched for tee buffering and I found some resources that shows how processes using pipes behave differently in terms of output/input than processes using a terminal:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/stdio_buffering/

There are several solutions, but the one that is already part of the firmware is to use the program "script" to unclog the buffer:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11337041/force-line-buffering-of-stdout-when-piping-to-tee
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1401002/trick-an-application-into-thinking-its-stdin-is-interactive-not-a-pipe

So, the good news is you can probably apply this patch easily for your firmwares as well. Also, there isn't any noticeably penalty in performance - if you disable DMAOSD_DEBUG the default behaviour is for dmaosd to output unbuffered text to the serial port anyway.

I'll be contacting you soon with more changes you can/should add to your firmwares to have the same php features I added (namely curl support), add webscreenshot support and some other smaller things.

[KAD]

well that's a nice easy fix, that's quite a bit of digging on your part to find it

as for curl php and other stuff, we'll touch base later, but the good news is 90% of binaries that run on the live will run on smp
so I probably just need to copy the new binaries