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[monkbroc]

Hello,

First, I want to say thanks to the J River team for putting together such a great set of tools for media playing! Since purchasing MC a year ago I've used it exclusively. Gizmo is also great for controlling my media center from my phone.

Now that I have an Android tablet one area where there's room for improvement is video play in Android through Gizmo. It works, but it's not possible to change audio streams or subtitles, the video player takes a while to seek, it doesn't remember the last position and it does crash once in a while.

One workaround is to use the excellent MX Player. It supports streaming video quite well and has all the features I listed above.

To do this, I modified the Web Gizmo HTML files to have links to the video file stream instead of to the Flash video player usually used in Web Gizmo. This change is in the attached libraryfiles.html.

I also made a change to allow longer titles below the thumbnails. This change is in default.css and library.html. These two files are not necessary to get the external video to work, but I'm including them because I really wanted that functionality in Web Gizmo.

Steps:
1. Install MX Player on your Android device.
2. Copy the attached files to C:\Program Files (x86)\J River\Media Center 18\Data\Library Server\Gizmo\Default (or make a copy of Default before unzipping the attachment per the instructions on http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/WebEngine_SDK)
3. On your Android device, browse to http://<your MC server IP address>:52199/Gizmo/ (be sure to bookmark this address for future use)
4. Select a video, then pick MX Player from the list that pops up.

I realize that this change will probably break functionality that some people use like video through WAN, but it works great for my main Web Gizmo use case: viewing videos on Android through a LAN connection.

I hope this is useful for some people.

Technical question to J River: I initially simply changed WebPlayPlayLink with FileLink and that worked on Chrome on the desktop. However on Android, FileLink returns a playlist file instead of a direct link as documented on the wiki at http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/WebEngine_SDK. Why was this choice made? What's the use of returning an MPL playlist on Android? Is it possible to use an external player to play MPL files in Android? I worked around this with a bit of Javascript, but the change is now more complicated that I originally thought.

[bob]

WebGizmo will fall back to flash, it uses html5 if possible.
Gizmo uses the default android video player to play html5