new browser application is ready....

Here are some screenshots !
 

This is the home screen: I can choose between my categories... 

this is how a single category is displayed. the icon shows also the status (waiting, failure, success...) 

in the details page i can view all available metadata and watch the movie... 

 as everything is in a database i can search...

and see where the search-phrase occured.... 

new designs are on the way......

I recently discovered the iWebKit library. It's basically CSS styles to simulate a native iPhone app with a web-app. I must says it is very useful and so i'm preparing a new version of my web-interface. Here is a first preview to the start-page !

BongParser Download

You can download BongParser.exe here.

Installation:
First of all the MySQL-Database must exist. Therefore i would recommend to create and configure the database first. The SQL script can be downloaded here:
For database installations instructions please look here and the Synology website downloads.
BongParser.exe is configured with the settings-file BongParser.exe.config which is located in the same directory than BongParser.exe. The following settings can be adjusted to your personal requirements.

url:
this is the url, where bong.tv publishes existing recordings. This should not be changed, except bong.tv changes there API.
example: http://www.bong.tv/ajax2/api/recordings.xml
login:
please enter you login. This must be configured correctly, otherwise BongParser will fail !
example: user4711
password:
please enter you password. This must be configured right, otherwise BongParser will fail !
example: password4711
path:
this will be the path, where the video files are downloaded. please keep in mind, that this must be a local linux path, which has not drive-letters etc. Synology puts user created directories always under /volume1, so if you create a folder 'video' with the disk station manager, the path would be '/volume1/video/'. 
example: volume1/Video/bong/
quality:
either NQ or HQ (i always use HQ)
example: HQ
connection:
this is the connection string for the mysql-database.please make sure to create a user with sufficient rights for the table.
example: server=localhost;user=remote;database=bong.tv;port=3306;password=bong2010;
filenamegeneration:
with that variable, you can control the filename of the downloaded video-file. the original names are unusable and have your name included. In the moment title, ID, Channel and Date can be inserted. you can change the order or leave out one of the fields, but {fieldname} must be complete and exactly written.
example:  {Title} - ({ID}) - {Channel} - {Date}
invalidchars:
not every character in the title or other fields is a valid windows or unix char. this string must consist of all chars, which must be removed from the filename. as this settings file is an xml not all chars are allowed and must be exchanged by the xml-value. my tip: do not change if possible.
example: \/*?"<>|:
logfile:
this is the path, where the applications writes a logfile. again it is a local linux path and should not have a driveletter etc. if you use this app on windows you can use driveletters.
example: /volume1/Video/bong/parser.log


You can edit the config-file with an editor that is able to write unix compatible text files (LF only). I can recommend EditPad Lite, which is free and is able to convert between windows and unix formats.
Note: To run the exe under linux, the execute flag must be set with chmod.

iPhone/ Browser Interface

This article decribes the browser based interface for the bong.tv download automation. Each video on my DS209 storage, has a corresponding entry in the MySQL database and so it is easy to display the contents of my DS209-box from any connected webbrowser. The interface is written in PHP and consists of several views/pages. I have designed them for using it on my iPhone, so the width is limited to the width of the iPhone.

1. The Status View

when called directly it shows the whole content of the database. By default it sorts for the 'broadcast-date' , newest first. The columns show Title, Duration, Channel, BroadcastDate and the Status. In this picture you can see, that all videos are allready downloaded, except 'Die dreisten Drei', which is waiting to be downloaded. With a click on the video's title the app shows the 'Details View'. 

2. The Details View


The Details View shows all relevant information about a single entry. For about 30% of all videos Bong.TV delivers a picture from the movie. The rest has a default picture with a TV-Logo.  A click
onto the picture opens up the default-player and the video is streamed via http from the DS209. To enable this, i have mounted the bong directly under the 'web'-directory as only the web directory (and subdirectories) is accessible via http (by default apache configuration).

3. The Search View

The Search window allows a search on Title, Description and can select for Time-Ranges, Categories and TV-channels. It simply calls the status-page,and than the search expression via http-post) generates a filtered search in the status view.

The Status Page

 

The Details View

The Search View

The Bong Loader

BongLoader.exe is a console application written in C#. I have developed and tested it on my windows system, but thanks to Mono it runs without any changes on my Linux Box. (DS209). 

What does it do:

• it is executed via cron-job every 10 minutes.
• read settings from config file (BongLoader.exe.config)
• it checks if allready another instance of the applications is running. In this case the applications exits. (I don't want parallel downloads to minimize load on the NAS box).
• It asks the database for the next waiting item.
• If there is one it downloads the file from the Bong.TV server (http-get).
• during the downloads the progress field in the database is updated (and also the FinishDate).
• if the download was successfull the status is set to 'Finished'
• if there was an error during the download, Status is set to 'Failed' and the error(text) is written into ErrorText-field.
• the application writes to a log-file
• applications exits

The Bong Parser

BongParser.exe is a console application written in C#. I have developed and tested it on my windows system, but thanks to Mono it runs without any changes on my Linux Box. (DS209). 

What does it do:

• it is executed via cron-job every 30 minutes.
• read settings from config file (BongParser.exe.config)
• Read current recordings from Bong.TV server. It comes in the shape of a xml-file which has to be downloaded via http-get.
• parse xml and create a list of recordings (List<Recordings> itemList)

The structure looks like this:

    class Recordings
    {
        public int Refnr { get; set; }
        public int BongId { get; set; }
        public string Title { get; set; }
        public string Description { get; set; }
        public string Channel { get; set; }
        public DateTime BroadcastDate { get; set; }
        public TimeSpan Duration { get; set; }
        public string ImageUrl { get; set; }
        public string Quality { get; set; }
        public string MediaUrl { get; set; }
        public string MediaFilename { get; set; }
        public int Status { get; set; }
        public int Deleted { get; set; }
        public DateTime StartDate { get; set; }
        public DateTime FinishDate { get; set; }
        public int Retries { get; set; }
        public string Category { get; set; }
        public int Progress { get; set; }
        public string ErrorText { get; set; }
    }

• inserts each of the items of the list into the MySQL database (table content). It checks of course if the item allready exists in the database (checks this via BongId).
• checks if there are hanging downloads. (This is done via the FinishDate. If Status = Downloading and FinishDate is more than 0.5 x Duration away from the current time, a hanging download is detected). In this case the entry is reset. (Status -> Waiting, Progress -> 0%, etc.)
• checks if entries are successfully downloaded. In this case the recording is deleted from the Bong.TV server via http-delete.
• a logfile is written (for each step)
• applications exits

The Table Structure

In the moment there is only one table 'content' which looks like this:

The first 11 fields come directly from the BONG.TV rest-service for each recording.

I have added:

• Status (which can be 0=Waiting, 1=Downloading, 2= Failed, 3= Finished)
• Deleted (0=File still on the BONG.TV server, 1=Deleted from the Server)
• StartDate (DateTime when the Download process stared)
• FinishDate (during a transfer it is updated by the progress function and when a download finished it shows the finish-time)
• Retries (if the download process failes, the status is set to 0 and so the download will start again after some time)
• Category (the category for the video - with my self defined categories)
• Progress (the download progress 0-100% during the transfer)
• ErrorText ( the error reason if a download failed)
  

MySQL on Synology DS209

To use MySQL on the DS209 it must be enabled. It is actually preinstalled and must only be activated in the WebServices Tab of the DiskStation Manager.

I want to use MySQL and PHP (which i will introduce later) on my DS209, so the settings looks like this:



To manage the sql-database I use phpMyAdmin, which is not preinstalled, but is is possible to download a package with phpMyAdmin from the Synology Website, which can be easily installed on the DS209.

With the MySQL Admin tool i created a database called 'bong.tv' and a table 'content'. I also created a user 'remote' with all rights to the database.

BONG.TV Download Automation

OK, here is the overall structure of my Bong.TV download automation. First of all: All applications run completely on the DS209. There are actually 2 applications the ‘Bong-Parser’ and the ‘Bong-Downloader’. ‘Bong-Parser’ communicates with the Bong-TV Servers and gets an XML-list of all recorded videos and meta data like title, description, channel, download-URL etc. For each entry in the XML file, ‘Bong-Parser’ creates an entry in the content-table. Bong-Parser is started periodically, executes and closes. Of course it checks if an entry is already registered in the database. ‘Bong-loader’ now goes through the db-list and downloads the videos and stores them in the DS209 video directory. After a video is downloaded successfully, Bong-Parser deletes the files from the Bong-Server via a REST-Service. It takes also care that broken downloads are resumed.
In the next post i will describe the content table and the state-machine which takes care that everything runs smoothly.

.NET alias Mono on the DS209

I found out that I can install Mono on my Synology DS209. It has a 1,2 GHz Arm compatible processor and luckily Mono is included in the IPKG Packet system. As i’m a Windows developer i use putty to connect to the DS209 from my Windows machine. This might be interesting for other Diskstations: http://www.synology-wiki.de/index.php/Welchen_Prozessortyp_besitzt_mein_System%3F.
So i have made the following steps to install mono:
1. Connect with putty as root to the DS209
2. cd /volume1
3. wget http://ipkg.nslu2-linux.org/feeds/optware/cs08q1armel/cross/stable/syno-mvkw-bootstrap_1.2-7_arm.xsh
4. sh syno-mvkw-bootstrap_1.2-7_arm.xsh
5. ipkg update
6. ipkg install mono
7. Enter mono to check it runs.

BONG.TV Online Videorecorder

Since last month i’m a happy subscriber of bong.tv. (http://www.bong.tv) It’s an online video-recorder which allows me, to remotely record all the German speaking TV-channels (around 30 free receivable stations). The recordings are done in h.264 with full PAL-resolution of 720 x 576 pixels. Everything is stored ‘in the cloud’ on a 30 Gbyte sized storage, from where i can stream it directly (with my IPhone or PC- based browser) or download it. The latter is my favorite way to consume the videos as i additionally got a Sitecom-HD Player which plays the downloaded videos from my Synology DiskStation DS-209 where i have enough terabytes to store some material.
In the the following post i will describe, how i setup and develop a system which is able do the download and managing more or less automatically. The goal is to run the software completely on the DS-209 !