I just wanted to take a second on Valentines Day to take a minute to thank my wife... I have 4 young kids at home and she has put up with a lot over the last 2 weeks... without her this whole project would not be anywhere! I have been going to be between 3-4 in the morning everynight for the past 2 weeks and even when I am here I am only really half here because I am constantly thinking about how I can do certain things in the app. 

 

I probably wont be doing much today but I will try to get more content loaded and more of the images up... A release should be coming out tomorrow some time that fixes a bunch of issues!  Hope everyone has a great Valentines Day!

Lots of people have posted that once they are in full screen playing a video that they have to hit the green media center button to get out of the video and go back into SecondRun.tv from the beginnnig... JUST USE THE CANCEL or CLEAR BUTTON ON YOUR REMOTE!  Im pretty sure ALL Media Center remotes have this button... basically its the same as pressing the ESCAPE key (which is how you exit full screen using the keyboard normally)... then you can just hit the back button to go back to the previous screen!

OK... So I spent most of the night last night trying to find a new way to do the full screen stuff as well use the remote to play/pause, etc... I finally built a new routine that will do the following:

The struggle here is the fact that we are trying to interface with the flash content and not an actual video... From what I have see of vmcNetflix they actually get the URL to the .flv (flash video file) and have that transcoded and streamed via Media Center as an actual video file (that is how it works seamllessly with the remote)... hulu and other providers don't want you to do that because its their flash players that control the ads in the videos so while you are watching a video it will pause it and show you the 30 second ad every once in a while.   Hulu and other providers actually make it very hard to get that URL and if you do get that URL and stream it to MC you are bypassing their ad serving component (which is not good)... that could actually get hulu and other content providers to start making changes to mess up how SecondRun.tv works because if we went that route tons of users would be using their content and their bandwith without displaying their ads.

 

So... as you can see... Ideally we play the content just the way we are... its the nice way to do it and it probably provides a great benefit to hulu and other because we are not bypassing their ads... since we are just opening the main page for the movie and playing it just like you would if you were browsing their site then we are actually probably providing a little bit of a boost to the number of people watching content on hulu.

 

So... to make a long post short (I know too late...) I have all along wanted to keep the content playing the way we are so we were looking at as a benefit to the content providers like hulu and now I think we have a solution in place that will allow us to interface with the videos pretty close to the way you would if you were watching them natively in Media Center!

I just dropped a new build out that should fix the display problems with the 4:3 aspect ratio users! If you are running 4:3 and had a problem with the previous build just download it again and try the new one... please post comments to this post with your results!

I have just posted the first beta build download! Grab it while its hot!!!! Just click the big red button to your right!  Let me know what you think!  Also remember... there are alot of images and content that are not in this build yet! I will fix that over the next day or so!!! I just wanted to get this out for people to test!

In preparation for the release today I did some testing last night the the first build on Windows 7... After a few kinks in the installer not allowing you to run the install on Windows 7 (It was looking for specific versions of Vista) I was able to get SecondRun.tv to run and install fine on Windows 7!  So when the release comes out today any of you early adopters shouldn't have any problems using the app in Windows 7...

 

My testing was done on a Windows 7 install on a VM as well so there shouldn't be any problem with a real install on a PC.