Subsonic for a centrally controlled, multipoint jukebox
Posted: Fri Sep 02, 2011 2:49 pmHello,
First of all congratulations for this great piece of software.
I need to use subsonic for something a little different than what -I understand- was designed for. Although it does 95% of what I need, perhaps with your help I could fulfill the other 5%.
Here is the situation:
There are a couple of remote clients that I need to control centrally what they are playing. Currently those clients are running Winamp with HTTPQ plugin.
Subsonic covers wonderfully the playlist management part, but feels a little unnatural/unflexible on the controlling part. From what I understand, using the user system for this purpose is not possible, as each user operates on an isolated environment where it is not possible for an administrator user to control what other users are playing. Thankfully, using the "players" system comes pretty close: I make as many players as simultaneous streams with different content I want for the clients and then push the urls on the clients via HTTPQ, defining the value of the "player" GET variable on the URL appropriately, depending on what stream I want them to play.
So far so good, however it would be very helpful if I could achieve the following things:
Thanks in advance!
Nik
First of all congratulations for this great piece of software.
I need to use subsonic for something a little different than what -I understand- was designed for. Although it does 95% of what I need, perhaps with your help I could fulfill the other 5%.
Here is the situation:
There are a couple of remote clients that I need to control centrally what they are playing. Currently those clients are running Winamp with HTTPQ plugin.
Subsonic covers wonderfully the playlist management part, but feels a little unnatural/unflexible on the controlling part. From what I understand, using the user system for this purpose is not possible, as each user operates on an isolated environment where it is not possible for an administrator user to control what other users are playing. Thankfully, using the "players" system comes pretty close: I make as many players as simultaneous streams with different content I want for the clients and then push the urls on the clients via HTTPQ, defining the value of the "player" GET variable on the URL appropriately, depending on what stream I want them to play.
So far so good, however it would be very helpful if I could achieve the following things:
- Be able to see the currently connected clients: who they are and what they are playing. Status page serves fine for this, except for the "who they are" part: clients can't be identified uniquely (many share same PLAYER, all share same USER). Ideally, it would be possible to display some unique value that I defined through the stream URL. I.e.:
How easy would it be to set such custom variable via the URL and modify status.jsp so that it prints it's value? I noticed there is the CLIENT_ID column on the Player table of the database, perhaps I could use this somehow? Where does it draw it's value from?http://1.2.3.4/stream?player=1&suffix=.mp3&client_id=prince11 - Be able to add playlists/folder content on multiple Players at once (just a feature request).
- Avoid popping the download of the .m3u every time that I want to start/stop/restart the stream of a player through the browser. Since the players are not local and I am pushing the url externally, via HTTPQ, it's irrelevant.
- Also, is it possible to use the REST API to control the players' streams separately and/or draw information about the connected players? I couldn't find something related.
Thanks in advance!
Nik