Now playing image in HSTouch

[lj502]

Great plugin, how do we use the now playing image in HSTouch, when I set an image to status tracking of the chromecast device image it errors and says image not available.

John

[spud]

Not sure I'm not a HSTouch expert, but I think you have to tell that this field contains html.

[lj502]

I tried it with a text element and it crashes HSTouch as soon as that page containing the element with its status tracked to the image device.
Is there any way to have that image brought down and updated on the HS3 server, kinda like the other media plugins.
By the way super fast response!
John

[lj502]

Spud,
Wanna make sure you understand what I'm taking about. The way it is now each HSTouch client that I would show this on would need to hit the internet in order to show and update the image, that's not ideal as HSTouch should only need to talk the HS3 server, and HS3 via your plugin would have the image updated in a file with the same name. If we have an element in HSTouch that is status tracking a device on our HS3 server then as the device is updated with a new image of whatever is playing the image sent to the HSTouch client needs to come from the device status but locally held on the server.
I hope this makes sense, I want to use this but HSTouch is a must.
Thanx again,
John

[lj502]

I have the images showing in HSTouch if I manually update the element with the image URL. What I need is a way to automatically update the HSTouch element with the URL each time a track changes, maybe a script to pull the string from the image device and then update the HSTouch element with the new string each time.
Back to searching, probably something similar I can change a little.
It seems more people will need this too as this gets moving forward, I know you put alot of work into your plugins and I hope you can help with this.

John

[lj502]

Found a script and adjusted a little, got it working nicely.

Sub Main(parm as object)

Dim Housemusic_URL as string
Housemusic_URL = hs.devicestring(328)

hs.PluginFunction("HSTouch Server", "","ClientAction", new Object() {43,"","Music:nowplaying", Housemusic_URL})

End Sub

John

[lj502]

I there any way to possibly add a device that just holds to URL to the Image device, just the address would help a lot. The current image device is set at 150 x 150 but the actual is 300 x 300. If it was just the URL string, then it makes it simple to use in HSTouch for status.
Please think about it
Thanx
John

[spud]

currently the string of the image device is set to

<img align="absmiddle" src=url_of_the_image width="150">

I thought there was a way to display such a html snippet in HSTouch, but I just played a little with it, and couldn't figure out how to do it.
If someone know how to do that please chime in.

So, I could add an option to set the string of the image device to the raw url, this seems to work a little better in HSTouch, however the image would not be scaled to 150 anymore and I couldn't find a way to scale it in HStouch. Also using this option the image would not appear anymore in the web interface only the url as text.

Note: I moved your latest post to this thread.

[lj502]

The scaling is a big problem when the status is html instead of an image stored on the HS3 server, all the other media plugins I have used worked this way. The image was retrieved by the plugin and updated in a way to allow easy use. If we had the jpg pulled from the URL and updated all would be good. No offense but I don't see the benefit of the image as it is displayed in the web interface. I understand having it, but what can we do with?
I also understand you don't use, or haven't used much, HSTouch. It has its quirks but it still is the native Homeseer interface and it is rock solid for me. Thing is with this plugin you have the closest thing to a usable Spotify interface, sure we have start the stream, but then your plugin takes over. The album art is a big issue for making it useful in HSTouch and a scalable jpg would solve so much.
Please think about it
John

[lj502]

I forgot to add, I played around with Jons HTML to image script and was able to easily create an image file from the URL of the device, with an ugly white border, but his script runs from an ini file the has to hold the URL. It seemed like a lot of work to end up with an image that your plugin is really already holding. Got to be a solution

John

[lj502]

Spud, Any update on this? I am using a script to update HSTouch elements but it is really not ideal, HSTouch puts an ugly white border on html image as it is now and not being able to scale it makes it unusable for some displays. I have used other plugins (have to remember which) that allowed in the config to set the image size for the HS3 device, but I believe the plugin just downloaded the image and updated a file with each changing image. The other problem I'm seeing is the event that is triggered off the changing device image or even song title fires many times during the same song which can't be good for our systems.
I know that the image URL could be parsed out of the device string but I'm not sure where to start with that, I have searched a lot and it seems it would be easy do with a simple script (just not simple for me). Ideas?

Thanx for helping with this, I know you put a great deal of effort into your work.
John

[lj502]

I found part of what I was looking for..
If you can read a little of this this thread, same problem
https://forums.homeseer.com/showthread.php?t=175463

John

[spud]

in version 3.0.0.9 available here, the images are now downloaded to your HS3 dir in html/images/Chromecast/<chromecast_id>/thumbnail.jpg

so you can now use a static url in HSTouch, but I guess you will need to tell HSTouch to update it periodically.

[lj502]

Spud, I was having a bad start to the week, then I read this and went straight to Designer. The image can scale now and looks great.

Thank you for making this addition!
John