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Considering New App - Hotkey Monitor

General support forum for Chameleon MediaCenter (formerly MM Browser)
Teddyboy
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Re: Considering New App - Hotkey Monitor

Post by Teddyboy » Fri Apr 02, 2021 7:34 am

How’s your progress been on your skunk works project. Checking in! 😉
Mechanical Engineer, Solidworks junkie, Reef aquariums, sci-fi, weight training, orchids, Ferns, Kaiju, model kit building, balboa park, scripps aquarium

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Pauven
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Re: Considering New App - Hotkey Monitor

Post by Pauven » Fri Apr 02, 2021 2:28 pm

No progress. :( Life keeps getting in the way. Soon.
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Teddyboy
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Re: Considering New App - Hotkey Monitor

Post by Teddyboy » Mon Apr 19, 2021 12:28 pm

So how has your progress been? :)
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Re: Considering New App - Hotkey Monitor

Post by Pauven » Mon Apr 19, 2021 1:36 pm

To be honest, I've been taking an extended mental break from programming. Each day I tell myself that tomorrow I'll get back into it, and then each new day I feel a bit overwhelmed at the idea of trying to figure out where I was 6 weeks ago to pick back up on development. Instead, I've let my energies flow into other projects.

Nothing to worry about, I've been here before, and I always find my way back. Part of the solution is completing other projects which will allow my mind to focus where I want to focus it.

The good news (to me, at least) is that CMC is chugging along working well for users, with only minor support requests the past few months. This is a fairly remarkable milestone, as at one point in time I was spending more time supporting users than developing CMC.
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Teddyboy
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Re: Considering New App - Hotkey Monitor

Post by Teddyboy » Mon Apr 19, 2021 7:07 pm

Yep been there done that. No worries. That’s really good news on the CMC support front for you. It’s pretty stable and it hasn’t really caused any show stopper issues for me. The only other issues I’m having are windows related. Sometimes the ir receiver doesn’t respond to the remote, and I have to unplug it and plug it back into the usd port to get it working again. A hdmi issue. On my old board the hdmi audio would be active. It’s not like that now even though the panel display is active.
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Re: Considering New App - Hotkey Monitor

Post by Pauven » Mon Apr 19, 2021 7:13 pm

With the MCE remote receiver I would have it stop responding a lot. Most of the time I would just reboot to fix it. A real pain. Sometimes the Inteset stops too, but it's pretty rare. With it being internal, a manual reboot is the only solution. Has only happened maybe once in the past 6-months, so not bad at all.

Regarding HDMI audio, assuming it's not a driver issue, here's a tip that might help. Open up your audio properties to find all your output devices, and right-click and disable all of the ones you don't want to use, only leave your HDMI audio enabled. This has helped me a ton on one of my PC's that kept changing my audio output to a device that wasn't even hooked up.
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Re: Considering New App - Hotkey Monitor

Post by Pauven » Sat Nov 06, 2021 11:46 am

Here's a little secret about why I write so much in my posts: I just spent the last two hours reading through this entire thread, to remind myself where I left off and what was left to do!!! I use this forum not just to communicate with fellow users, but also to serve as a development log for myself.

I know many users may find the amount of info I write overwhelming, but man oh man has this provided useful for myself to get back on track. I had stopped working on this in February even though it was very nearly complete. 9 months later, not only could I not recall what was left to do, I obviously had forgotten just how much capability I had packed into this little tool. It was kind of a surreal experience to read these posts and go "oh wow, it does that too!".

I am planning to include the new remote control monitoring functionality in v5 - this is actually the last major holdup to releasing it, as pretty much everything else is done. I'm resuming work on this today. Based upon my old notes, it seems I was estimating about a week's worth of programming left to do, so finger's crossed that's accurate. ;)

Paul
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Pauven
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Re: Considering New App - Hotkey Monitor

Post by Pauven » Sat Nov 06, 2021 4:27 pm

Argh. Somedays I love Windows. Somedays I hate Windows. Today is full of hate...

As a developer, one of the benefits of resolving a HD crash with a fresh Windows install is that I get the rare "end user experience" when trying to run my own software. Often, during the course of development, I make system tweaks and changes to support new functionality, and then of course everything runs perfect on my machine. With today being the first day I've run my CMC SysTrayService for monitoring the remote since I reinstalled Windows a few months back, I was greeted with many frustrating errors.

The first error I experienced was that it couldn't bind to TCP port 51408, which is needed to allow the My Movies iOS/Android app to control CMC. Not too surprising, as this would normally be blocked by the Windows Firewall. Instead of manually opening a port like I did last time, I figured it was much better to program the app to open it for the user.

So I created some new code to check if the port could be opened, and if not then to automatically add a new firewall rule if you are running as Admin (prompts to to run as Admin if you are not). The new code runs great, and sure enough I could see the new firewall rule being created, but for whatever reason it wouldn't take effect.

After trying many different solutions, I finally rebooted after creating the rule. Sure enough, that worked (even though according to MS documentation, rule changes are supposed to be immediate).

With the app now binding to port 51408, I decided to test removing the new firewall rule and trying again. And this brings me to the moment I really, truly, and completely hate Microsoft - now Windows behaves completely different! $#*%!

Now, instead of getting a failure to bind to the port, my app somehow always succeeds. Instead, Microsoft pops up a nice little Windows Security Alert:

image.png
image.png (178.4 KiB) Viewed 2994 times

If I "Allow access", it adds an exception to the firewall rules to allow my app full access (not just the one port). If I click "Cancel", it still adds firewall rules, but now says my app is blocked. But, and here's the really fun part, my app no longer get's the error on binding to port 51408 even if the firewall blocks access, so it acts like everything is just fine, yet you can't control it from the My Movies app because the firewall is blocking access.

I've tried deleting all the new rules in the firewall and rebooting, but no matter what I can't get back to the original behavior where my app couldn't bind to port 51408. At least with that binding error, I could give helpful info to the user that the port needed to be opened, and even open it for them.

This also means I don't have a way to predict which experience end users will encounter. I suppose it doesn't matter too much - if they get the bind error, they can let the app resolve it. Otherwise, if they get the security alert / access prompt, then as long as they click Allow Access all is good.

But if they get the security alert and don't allow access... joy, I get to support those users who can't get it to work and now need firewall help...

/rant
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Jamie
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Re: Considering New App - Hotkey Monitor

Post by Jamie » Sun Nov 07, 2021 8:50 pm

Your scenario makes me so happy that I no longer have to support windows software any more.

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Pauven
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Re: Considering New App - Hotkey Monitor

Post by Pauven » Sun Nov 28, 2021 11:41 am

Woohoo! I think I have finished the last of the major programming challenges, and hope to have CMC v5 ready for beta testing very very soon.

The new remote control configuration tool can now detect if the MCE IR Remote background Windows service is installed, and let's you install and remove it freely. While this does require admin privileges, you don't have to start CMC with admin rights, instead you provide them on an as-needed basis. I included an option to disable/reenable the HID service, which similarly asks for admin rights to toggle this as-needed.

I've also got the configuration tool complete to the point where you can add new profiles, add/remove buttons, reconfigure everything as needed, save and load the config. I know all that sounds pretty basic, but where I left off coding back in February none of this was possible, it was all hard-coded static configuration for testing.

Everything was much harder to accomplish than I ever dreamed, due to the remote configuration GUI being the most dynamic GUI I've ever programmed. Typically on most settings menus, everything is static and I can easily define everything at development time. With the remote config, because you can add new profiles and buttons on the fly, and configuring a button removes it from being available for other buttons, I had to do a ton of extra programming and testing to make sure this worked.

I'm now working on buttoning up everything for beta release.

My plan for the beta is to provide just a bare-bones remote config out of the box. I'm hoping some of you fine gents will be so gracious as to spend some time configuring profiles for different programs like PowerDVD, JRiver, VLC, MPC, etc., and share your config with me so I can include in the final v5 public version.

How soon is "very very soon"? Well, there's a 50% chance I may release Beta 1 later today...

Paul
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