Webmc - A Web Based Controller for Windows Media Center
Webmc is a simple touchscreen based music controller for Windows Media Center.
The UI is simple by design - I just want to browse my music collection
to play albums without having to turn my TV on. The toughest requirement
is that my wife has to be able to use it! Webmc has three parts:
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A WMC plugin that implements a small HTTP server to give some control and retrives music listing as JSON
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A web page for playing music, specifically designed for my 800x480 touch screen LCD from Nanovision
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An AutoHotKey script/executable to change the default sound output between my TV and Q-Acoustics speakers.
The screen shots below show the main features of the UI:
- Volume down/up/mute buttons
- Output sound to TV, Speakers buttons
- Play/Pause
- Playing media status
- Close popup
- Scroll artists left
- Jump to artists starting with these letters (multiple presses cycle through the letters)
- Scroll artists right
- Albums arranged by artist
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Album popup
- Album details
- Track Listing
- Play now button
- Queue button
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Download and Installation
Download the windows installer.
After installing, re-start Windows Media Player.
Then point a web browser at
localhost host port 40960>.
I only have Windows 7-64 bit machines, and do not guarantee that this works
on any machines other than mine! Please send me feedback
on your experiences using Webmc. Be aware, that this is just a hobby project of
mine and I am not necessarily able to repond quickly to problems.
Information for hackers
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The internal web server serves files from the CommonApplicationData folder,
typically C:\ProgramData\dmlb\webmc\htdocs. You can put whatever you like in
here to replace/overwrite the default UI.
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The images used in the default UI are stored as resouces in the application.
There is no particular reason not to have them in the CommonApplicationData folder.
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Going to an unknown URL will generate a missing page report that gives
usage information.
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All internal pages serve data as HTML, JSON or PNG (for images) depending on the
extentension specified to the query:
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JSON properties starting with "x-" are internal/debugging data, and
must not be used.
Previous Versions
A older version that is based on VMCController and
requires a local PHP server, is available here.
It works, but is slower and not as polished as the version above.