Topic: XboxMediaCenter widget
A quick introduction: I'm a web developer (java, jsp, javascript etc) living in the UK. I've been following the Chumby project since Kevin Rose showed his FooCamp prototype on Diggnation about 18months ago. I tried the Nabaztag but was really disappointed with how it worked - but the Chumby seems to address all the issues I had with it. I registered for the Chumby insider release but found out they couldn't yet be shipped to the UK so a few days ago I bought one from the US on eBay.
I'm also a big fan of the open source XboxMediaCenter (XBMC) project (a fantastic media player for the original Xbox), so decided to have a go at writing a widget to display the tracks in the XBMC "now playing" queue. To do this, I've written an asp script which sits on the XBMC web server and dynamically generates an RSS feed of the track in the queue each time it's accessed (I think there's probably a more efficient way to do this with a python script, but this is just a prototype for now). I've then created a Flash widget for the Chumby - ActionScript compiled using FlashDevelop and MTASC - that retrieves the RSS file and displays the artist name and track title. You can see my widget running in the virtual chumby here: droza.net/chumby. I don't know for sure whether it works on a real Chumby as I haven't received mine yet. Also this prototype is accessing a fixed rss file on my public webserver as my Xbox web server isn't exposed to the public internet.
I've never written any kind of Flash before, so this is really just for my own curiosity at this stage but I'd like to extend it so that it displays the album art for the currently playing track and eventually add controls so that I can adjust the Xbox volume and skip tracks etc so that the Chumby becomes a remote display/controller for XBMC. It also needs error checking, and a config app for the rss url.
I managed to get the ActionScript compiling to swf pretty easily but had trouble getting it to run in the virtual chumby: I wasted a lot of time because I assumed it was a problem with crossdomain.xml but it turned out to be to do with the way I created the text controls. Strangely, it ran fine in the preview on the MyChannels page, but not in the virtual chumby. I have to thank "raff" for the FlashDevelop template and the pointers in this thread that got me on the right lines.
If anyone has any comments/suggestions about my widget, please let me know in this thread.