Amazon Fire TV?

[dtguitarfan]

Any chance that there are plans to set up a Fire TV compatible app? I had a Roku, and Subsonic worked beautifully on it. But due to Netflix crashing all the time on my Roku, I bought an Amazon Fire TV box. I was very disappointed to find that Subsonic was not available for it.

[acroyear]

I'm working on it now. http://www.subfireplayer.net/ - I expect to have the web version publicly in beta by this weekend (just playlists playback and random off the music folders - folder browsing next, but that's not an easy task ), with hopes that i can test it and get it submitted for the Amazon app store by the end of the month. No idea how long the review process is after that, of course. We'll see.

See the "SubFire" topic in Clients/Mods area.

[acroyear]

Still working on it. Got delayed by real work and the fact that the MyBookLive box that hosted my music files for my subsonics died (the disk was fine, all files intact, but was a pain in the arse to move everything off to a new drive).

[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.

[acroyear]

I've found workarounds for many of those issues, and am continuing to work on it.

In the mean time, you can preview it at http://p.subfireplayer.net/. Still in an alpha release (see the full announcement over in the Clients and Mods board). Feedback welcome.

[blueturtles]

I can't wait to try out the fire tv app. I have a fire tv stick and I really wish I could access my music easily. Thanks for the updates.

[acroyear]

It's been submitted, been rejected (simple stuff around catching specific Fire events and one thing on the 'game controller' I couldn't test (I don't have one) but I think I coded it right. Waiting on their feedback from the updated submission.

Meanwhile, the app is available online at that site, and now shows up in search results for Chrome WebStore.

The fun is that to keep to "single source" I had to hack a bit to getting it to pull in the amazon APIs only when on the fire platform, as when in Chrome they'll break everything badly if included, and I'm not (yet) really running through a packager.

[acroyear]

It's been accepted and is now on the amazon.com store. Search for subsonic or subfire to find it.

[blueturtles]

Just downloaded it. I will try it out soon. Cheers!

[acroyear]

a new update (0.6.2) has finally made it to the store that should improve some things.

• The colors are different (I found I preferred black for the playlist list - the next update will make them slightly larger)
• The problem of the initially empty screen has finally been fixed (the web tester amazon provides never replicated this issue, which made it hard to track down)
• Better element zooming when it has focus.

I'm still working on 'browse' mode, which when done will properly move it into 'beta'. After that, I'll be adding jukebox and play queue (for 5.2 servers) support and that should make for the 1.0.

[manwithaplan]

Very interesting, much appreciate the work here. Couple questions if I were to venture toward a FireTV...

A. Does your code support the use of SSL for the Subsonic access? Many of us of course would NEVER run Subsonic on straight HTTP, but instead HTTPS with real certificates that we purchase from real CA's, etc.

B. Does your code support Subsonic 5.2, that literally hit the street 2 days ago? If not, when do you estimate it will?

Thanks again! These are interesting capabilities for sure.

[acroyear]

Very interesting, much appreciate the work here. Couple questions if I were to venture toward a FireTV...

A. Does your code support the use of SSL for the Subsonic access? Many of us of course would NEVER run Subsonic on straight HTTP, but instead HTTPS with real certificates that we purchase from real CA's, etc.

B. Does your code support Subsonic 5.2, that literally hit the street 2 days ago? If not, when do you estimate it will?

Thanks again! These are interesting capabilities for sure.

A. There is nothing *I* know of that is stopping connecting to an SSL server. However, I don't have one nor the time or patience to set one up. Everything I have read says that CORS should work without any issues when an HTTP client talks to an HTTPS server, and Adobe's website says that phonegap apps shouldn't care either way what they talk to, aside from certificate signatures.

I do know from reading a bit that Chrome does not like talking to a self-signed cert that doesn't have a CA behind it, without you adding the cert directly to Chrome's cert store on your desktop. When it happens in a CORS situation, the browser doesn't prompt to ask if you want to make an exception the way it does with self-signed certs in other contexts. This would impact using Chrome for the web version of the player as well as the Chrome app in the web-store (which is the same thing).

If it does not work, please let me know because I really don't know why it shouldn't. You can try the web version ( http://p.subfireplayer.net/ ) first before downloading the Fire app to test and verify. It is only using just the html5 audio tag and basic REST calls, so I can only do what the browsers let me do.

B. There is nothing existing that is changed as far as the API goes between 5.1 to 5.2. 5.2 only adds new features like the play queue which I do intend to take advantage of at some point, but I'm still working on the 'browse' mode (viewing folders and playing albums directly rather than shuffled from the top level). The 5.0 requirement was only because of a bug that 4.9 had in its headers for CORS support. While it takes advantage of 5.1 features (things like playlist cover art), if they aren't there the client continues to work properly in every other regard.

I certainly intend to add ID3 support and will take advantage of 5.2's new features in that capacity when I get there, but that's probably still a few months away.

[acroyear]

oh, one other thing? given that it is using CORS (cross-origin), it doesn't care if your server is behind your firewall on your LAN. After it downloads the code and html from the web, it talks directly from your box without ever talking to subfireplayer.net again. So there is nothing wrong with just pointing to an internal http 192.168.1.* address rather than going through the name with the secured server. No info about your server ever gets to me at all.

[acroyear]

Version 0.7.5 has been released and is now available on the Amazon store as well as the Chrome web app store. This now adds full folder browsing support rather than just shuffling the top MusicFolder. More info here:

http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=15393