Some notes from experimenting with my new toy!

The device (DMX) plugs into HDMI port of the TV and has its own HDMI input allowing pass-through. The control of DMX is done from a USB cable which is attached from the TV to DMX (Wonder why they do not use the HDMI for that!). DMX has an ethernet port which can get autoconfigured using DHCP (or can also be configured for manual settings from the TV). Sony has licensed a lot of content providers (slacker for radio and tons of other video providers like youtube, Amazon, Yahoo, Blip.tv). They have a portal (http://internet.sony.tv/) which allows you to add your own video links and some browser extensions which allow you to link your favorite videos which the DMX can then play for you. The firefox extension unfortunately requires older (2.X) version of firefox and does not work with newer versions (3.X). I tweaked that extension and it now works okay without significant changes. Here is a link to it. This extension adds a context menu to firefox and you can use it to direct the DMx to start playing the linked video, bookmark it etc. The caveats are that the link needs to be a raw video file (mp4, mov, avi, divx etc.) and not HTML file or any other kind.

Here is what I learned from reverse engineering the extension code.

The DMX runs a primitive web browser on port 9784. The server is reportedly called "Callisto Debug Server v0.2". There is a php script running which responds to URLs like the following
Send commands using the following REST API:

http://192.168.0.101:9784/renderer.php?method=play&url={encoded URL}

The firefox and internet explorer generates these URL's.

Here is what I gathered from the extension code about the API:

Available commands and arguments:

• play (url => encoded URL to mp4, AVI, MOV file to play)
• pause
• stop
• addbookmark (title=> encoded bookmark title, description=>encoded description, icon => ???, source =>encoded URL)

It seems to play the mp4 files quite well (I had good success with HD mp4 links from youtube and dailymotion websites which have a lot of bollywood movies). The streaming is very smooth and video quality is acceptable. You can use a website like http://keepvid.com/ to see the hidden video links. These links are then directly playable by DMX. I will experiment with AVI, MOV, DIVX files next...

Next step for me is to create a simple webservice which does all of these steps and posts the link to the DMX! Can't wait till I can manage to do that...