Dream Web TV for Symbian

Steve Nessen   •   May 25, 2012   •   4 Comments

I canceled the development of my Web TV App for Symbian, because I moved to Windows Phone. Because of many questions, I decided to give some more detailed technical information on how the app works. Advanced users should be able to get it working on their devices. I will not be able to provide any additional support on this proof of concept demo.

First of all download this file package and uncompress:

http://dbwebtv.codeplex.com/downloads/get/278226

Client App

Whithin the zip file you find a folder called WebTV. This is the client application. It is a slightly modified version of the WebTV sample created by Nokia. Basicly it is a simple Podcast/Video-RSS reader. The app is implemented as a widget, meaning it uses web technologies like Html, Javascript and Flash Light.

To get the app runing you have to enter the URL of the Podcast-Server. Open the file “settings.js” and edit the following line:

var RSS_URL = http://[host]:1235/webtv.rss;

Where [host] has to be replaced by the host name of your computer where you will run the VlcWebTvN8.exe. (e.g. homeserver)

To install the app on you phone, you have to compress the folder as a zip file and rename it to WebTV.wgz. Important is the extension wgz. Please be sure to include the WebTV folder in the zip file not only the folders content.

The WGZ can be copied to the phone and installed.

Server App

The Podcast-Server VlcWebTvN8.exe is a .Net application. The source code can be found at http://dbwebtv.codeplex.com. It has some configuration options that can be found in the file VlcWebTvN8.exe.config. You should at least set the vales for

• DomainName (Host name of your server, e.g. homeserver)
• DreamboxHost (Host name of your Dreambox, e.g dm800)
• VLCPath (Path to your VLC player’s vlc.exe)

What does the server do? First it provides your bouqets as an rss feed. It catches you dreambox’ EPG and creates a rss file. This rss is served to the phone client and contains links to the video streams.

Thr second one is the creation of the live video streams. If you select a stream in the client, the server tells the VLC to transcode the live stream from your Dreambox to a local Flash Video (*.flv). The server responds with this FLV to the clients request. But with an important modification: It adds a fake duration to the flv’s header information. Without this duration info, the client would stop playback after one second, because it thinks the file has finished.

I hope I helped some of the lone Symbian+Dreambox users out there to get this sample working.