SubFire Player coming soon...

[acroyear]

So I just got an Amazon Fire Stick, and low, they don't have a front end app for SubSonic. Well, pooh. Guess I gotta make one.

http://www.subfireplayer.net/

Still a work in progress (right now only works hard-coded to localhost:4040/subfire/subfire) but the raw basics are there - connect/ping, playlist display for select, play/pause/next/prev with looping (automatic for now), and cover art.

Implemented in jquery,jquerymobile,stativus,observe-js, along with the vanilla-js html5 audio tag and api. The latter limits the browser support to only things since 2013, but that's my target audience so I'm hardly worried. They have other options.

Code will be open source (MIT license) when it is ready for public release. I'll probably charge a buck or two for the amazon fire app, but the web page version when turned public will be free since it will talk directly to your own server. The main focus will just be playlist playing at first, and I'll go for full browsing capabilities later.

I hope to be able to go public-beta with the web-page version in a week or so.

[acroyear]

actually, as a simple html5 webpage, it probably would be possible to easily package it with adobe air as well. i will need to do a little more work on responsive layout for portrait mode, of course. and a 'mini mode'.

Or not. Looks like air still has their obnoxious sandbox system that requires using their proprietary APIs which I have no interest in at all. Standards is what Standards does, sir.

[acroyear]

Lots of progress made. Audio/SubSonic Features:

• Login (to single server), with initial default to the demo box so it is operational as soon as you get there
• Bitrate changing
• View all playlists and select to play one (in order)
• View all top-level MusicFolders and select to randomize one (50 songs)
• Play via streaming call (so no need to enable downloads permission)
• Album artwork

HTML5/Responsive Features:

• Native HTML5 Audio tag (only - no flash fallback)
• Scales up to 1080p resolution (larger font)
• Scales down to below 600 px wide (smaller font)
• Portrait mode below 600 will re-order view to vertical layout

Tested on:

• Chrome > 37
• Firefox > 33
• Safari for OSX Mountain Lion and Yosemite
• Safari for IOS 6 (an ipod touch)
• Android browser for 4.2 and 4.4
• Chrome for Android

The eventual goal is to work on the Amazon Fire TV/Stick, of course, but getting it to work at all comes first. I may also use Adobe's tools to package it as an Android app directly, but we'll see what the demand is.

Next features to come:

• Folder browsing
• Display current song position and song duration
• seeking (likely just +30 seconds, -15 seconds, similar to Plex) - remember I'm doing this for a platform that works of a 9 button remote, not a touch screen)
• Remembering where you last left off
• better error handling when connection is lost
• playlist artwork when that feature goes live in 5.1

I'll keep testing and tweaking it myself and probably go public with the beta this Saturday.

What does it take to get listed in the apps page, anyways?

[acroyear]

also, being html5 native audio, it means that what formats are supported (and this will be audio only) is very dependent on the browser. mp3 is supported by almost everybody with the possible exception of open-source Chromium (but you can hijack the library/dll for that from Chrome itself). Thus if you have files in other formats like ogg, you may need to ensure the bit rate is not unlimited so that it converts them through ffmpeg on the server. I'm not going to go out of my way to try to convert things on the client.

[acroyear]

Ok, I for the first time ran the app through the Amazon Fire WebAppTester, and for the most part it actually worked first time.
Things I still need to tighten up:

• Not all the remote buttons are mapped correctly, so it can be tricky to scroll down the list of playlists.
• Amazon's html5 audio tag is not sending the 'end' playing event that it should be, which I would need to know to start playing the next song.
• Amazon's html5 audio tag is not quite sending the duration value either which may be contributing to the previous problem.

Still, much more functional for a first time try than I expected. I have similar problems with the 'end' on the Android 4.4 browser (though Chrome on Android works a little better), which implies they're probably the same version of webkit.

Now that I've made this progress, I'll keep pushing each night, but because I have a personal/family trip to make next weekend, I won't be able to deploy anything 'til February.

[titooo]

Although I don't own a Fire TV is good to see people working on Subsonic.

Good luck