Saturday, January 23, 2010

Grip Growl Notifications in Media Center

There was no Growl display addon for media center. So I decided to get my hands a lil dirty and create one. I found some a source code from MCE 2005 that seemed to do exactly what I wanted. The only problem is that the source code didn't work for MCE 2005 rollup 2, and the link to the fix was long gone. So after some scouring, I found/posted the fix, recompiled the application DLL's, and began testing. It works great on my MCE 2005 boxes, and I even got it working in Windows 7 MCE, didn't test in Vista because vista sucks.

Why did I write this? Because I am an idiot who has a million other paid projects I should be writing but MCE keeps pulling me back in. And also, Notify Pro was released in Cydia which allows your iPhone to push growl notifications from your phone to a growl client, this works with that so new SMS/Incoming Calls alerts etc, work with media center. The alerts vanish after 7 seconds, no remote control needed.



Download the installation files with source code here *fixed carriage return bug

To install the media center addon, exit media center, then copy all files from the MCE-Install directory into C:\Windows\ehome\ then double click the install.bat file. To uninstall run, uninstall.bat file. After this is done, MCE is ready to receive notifications. To send Growl notifications to the media center install growl http://www.growlforwindows.com and then install the scripty display: http://www.growlforwindows.com/displays/scripty

Now you need to configure scripty to launch our custom executable, so go to displays, set scripty as default, then hit browse and navigate to the MessageSender folder, and select the MessageSender.exe If scripty doesn't let you select the MessageSender.exe file then type *.* in the file name box and it should then allow it.

Now start a non maximized media center, and click preview and you should see this:














Now I guess you can install all kinds of growl apps and get your notifications in MCE.

15 comments:

Peter said...

thanks man!
its awesome

a pause function when a call comes in would be great!

Treas0n said...

Thanks for the comment Peter,

I am going to make some changes to the messagesender to truncate the message because it is sometimes too big and overtakes the UI.

I'll try to incorporate pause as well. I assume you are using NotifyPro like I am?

Peter said...

I had no problems with this version of the messagesender yet (i´m using mediacenter of windows seven)

it just works great and yes i am using NotifyPro on the iPhone
i googled for a growl mediacenter display and then i found your great way to show the iphone activities on the mediacenter and i´m really impressed :)

i also tested some other projects of you (Movie Browser and Bookmarkit)


i´m looking forward to the changes!

Treas0n said...

If scripty freezes when choosing the browse for folder dialog box, i copied messagesender.exe into

C:\Users\treAson\AppData\Local\Growl\2.0.0.0\Displays\Scripty

then erased scripty_sample.bat and renamed messagesender.exe to scripty_sample.bat

Peter said...

I had the same problem
i changed it in the safe-mode of windows

Anonymous said...

I confirm what Peter said. On Windows 7, you do have to go into safe mode in order to BROWSE to the folder where messagesender.exe resides from within Scripty.

Unknown said...

Great utility! Any way to change the duration the Media Center? If i'm not looking at the screen, the alert will come and go.

Treas0n said...

yea open up the source code in VB6, from there you can change duration.

Unknown said...

Any thoughts on adding Extender support? (no idea the level of effort needed to achieve that)

Anonymous said...

Hi,

Please, compile mceDialog.dll as anyCPU or x64. The current version don't work on Windows 7 x64. You only need to change the flags and recompile.

Thank you!

plasma2002 said...

I was really excited to download this, until I saw the above comment. Can anybody verify whether this does or does not work on Windows 7 x64?

:-\

Anonymous said...

Can you compile and post a version for Windows 7 x64 please?

kc said...

Hi. I don't have gacutil installed on my Vista MC system, so can't run the install batchfile.
Any chance of an installer?

Michael said...

Hi,

great addon. Installing on Win 7 was easy and things worked immediately. Only one minor annoyance: German Umlauts don't work. They show up fine on my desktop (using any of the Growl for Windows standard displays) but not in media center.

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