MP3 playing

Here is a method that plays mp3s on the Audrey reliably without skips: Use phplay to stream the files from a local web server. This seems to work quite well, and works much better (for me, anyway) than using fs-cifs.

The way I did this was:

  1. make a set of .qpl playlist files for phplay. The create_playlists.pl file is a Perl script that will create the .qpl files for all of your directories. Run this script from what will be the base directory of your web server using the syntax "perl create_playlists.pl [basedir] [baseurl] [outputdir]" where basedir is the directory to index (use "."), baseurl is the address of your local web server (e.g. "http://192.168.0.1/" with the trailing slash), and outputdir is the directory where the .qpl playlist files will be stored. See http://www.activeperl.com for a Windows version of Perl.
  2. copy the generated .qpl files to the /nto/photon/.ph/playlist directory. You could also replace the "playlist" directory with a symbolic link to a share mounted using fs-cifs from your PC if you want to store all of the playlists on the PC and save the space on the Audrey. Storing them on the PC makes it easier to regenerate all of the playlists when necessary, but phplay loads the playlists more slowly.
  3. run a simple web server on my desktop PC serving up all of my mp3 files. Any web server should work, but I used Microsoft's sample HTTPSRV program, modified to disable the CGI support and restrict connections to the local network for security reasons. Hint with the httpsvr program: save your configuration to default.hsc, and then make a shortcut in Programs..Startup to run "httpsvr default.hsc" minimized on startup.
  4. run phplay and select the "View..Edit Playlists" menu command. You will see all of the playlist files, and you can select one and press the "Activate Playlist" button to play the album.
The files are at http://www.geocities.com/mp3_playlists.zip

Slide show

Here is a perl script to create .html files for a slide show. Run the script in the directory containing all of your images using the command "perl create_slideshow.pl". To run this script you will need Perl installed. For Windows, see http://www.activeperl.com)

The first image of the slideshow is "index.shtml" so that it will run from one of the Audrey channels.

Once you have the html files generated you can put them and the JPEGS somewhere where the Audrey can access them. A good option is to mount a PC's share using fs-cifs
(e.g. fs-cifs -a //Tiger:192.168.0.3:/audrey_share /share guest guest )
You can get this to mount automatically on boot-up by putting it in your /kojak/go script. In /kojak/go, change the "sh boot.sh" line to "sh boot.sh &" (add the ampersand at the end). This makes the boot.sh script run in the background so it doesn't hang your Audrey if something goes wrong with the fs-cifs command. Then add a "sleep 10" line followed by the "fs-cifs" line to the /kojak/boot.sh script. The "sleep 10" is required to allow the network to be set up before it attempts to mount the PC share. You should also comment out all of the "ln" lines in boot.sh if you haven't done so already, so that your changes to the channels don't get cleared on reboot.

To make the slideshow run on the countertop when the Audrey starts up:

You can also make a channel run the slideshow: