While we are waiting for the new firmware which promises a movie wall I figure that in the mean time we may as well have some fun with YAMJ.

There are many tutorial on using YAMJ (Movieplayer) so I am only going to give some of the information specific to the PBO Alpine. The end goal here is to use the html files created by YAMJ through a web browser to have a functional Movie Jukebox to use with our PBO Alpine. All my movies resides on an externally connected USB drive connected to my PBO therefore this is what I will be using going thru the steps but the process is kind of the same for a network connected share since both (USB External Drive / network shares) are mounted on the /mnt directory of the PBO Alpine. As you will see later it is just a matter of using the right path (USB or shares) for your movie collection.

1) First off the PBO Alpine default Web Browser can not handle YAMJ html pages so the first thing we need is a Web browser that can handle those pages properly. I found that both Dolphin HD (not the mini version) and sleipnir web browser can both handle those pages properly. I also found that sleipnir was less bloated than Dolphin and that navigating using the remote was also easier. Therefore I choose sleipnir. Just as a side note; I am hoping that I will have some time soon to develop a quick web view app customized to handle those html pages and make the process of launching YAMJ a little bit better. Here's the link to sleipnir web browser on my dropbox account: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/15169815/And...sleipnir-1.apk . Just install it like you would any other apps on the PBO Alpine.

2) Now you need to download YAMJ http://code.google.com/p/moviejukebox/downloads/list on your PC (Latest version should be fine 2.6.1) and do a little bit of reading http://code.google.com/p/moviejukebox/wiki/Installation . YAMJ has been written in JAVA so it should work fine on Linux, Mac or Windows as long as you have the java interpreter installed on your computer. As per instruction it is probably a good idea to install mediainfo but it is not absolutely necessary; it will just provide more info about the file when viewed in the Jukebox.

3) You should now have YAMJ installed and ready to create the html files required for your Jukebox. Note that this can be a very lenghty process especially if you have a lot of movies and it is the first time it is ran (we are talking hours here for the first run with a lot of movies). But before we get ahead of ourselves we need to create a libraries.xml file in the directory where you installed YAMJ. This file should be custom made for the PBO Alpine. Here's what my library.xml looks like for my USB Drive connected to the PBO Alpine.

<libraries>
<library>
<path>/media/New Volume/Movies/</path>
<playerpath>file:///mnt/usb81/Movies/</playerpath>
<exclude name="sample,tmp/,temp/,RECYCLE.BIN/,/._"/>
<description></description>
<prebuf></prebuf>
<scrapeLibrary>true</scrapeLibrary>
</library>
</libraries>

Just create an empty a file named library.xml and copy the above to it and make some adjustment for the path and playerpath. The path is where the movies are located when connected to your PC and playerpath is the path on the PBO Alpine.

You can see that the playerpath points to /mnt/usb81/.... This is the default location for a USB connected drive on the PBO Alpine. If a second drive is connected it is usually mounted as /mnt/usb817/…. As far as network shares are concern they usually reflect the server directory name; for example I have a public directory on my NAS and it mounts on the PBO Alpine as /mnt/public. You will have to determine your own location for your shares on the PBO Alpine /mnt/ folder; you can just use OI File manager to find that out.

4) At this point I will assume that you have your library.xml proper and now you will need to access your movies by either connecting your USB drive containing your movies to your computer or making sure that the network shares containing your movies are available to the PC. Once that is done you will need to open a console window (Mac/Linux) or a command prompt window (windows). In the console window change directory to where you installed YAMJ ex: cd /YAMJ. Now issue the following command:

For Linux/MAC: sh moviejukebox.sh library.xml -o [Directory where you want the Jukebox to be created]
For Windows: moviejukebox.bat library.xml -o [Directory where you want the Jukebox to be created]

For example on my Linux machine the command is as follow: sh MovieJukebox.sh library.xml -o /media/New\ Volume/Movies/

In other words once my USB drive is connected to my Linux machine the location of the USB drive is /media/New Volume/ and my movies are stored on that USB Drive in the Movies directory.

As I already mentioned earlier running this command can be time consuming. After the process is completed you should now have an index.htm at your movie location directory as well as a new folder called Jukebox that contain all the necessary html/javascript for proper Jukebox installation. This is probably a good time to mentioned that your PC should be connected to the Internet since all the info to populate the html files are pulled from it. Movie filename should also be representative of the movie title and year (see YAMJ documention for more info). You are now ready to access your newly created YAMJ Jukebox.

5) Connect your USB drive if that is what you have to your PBO Alpine or use the PBO network share to mount your network shares. Now start up Sleipnir web browser and enter the location of the index.htm file in the web browser address bar. In my case I need to enter the following:

File:///mnt/usb81/Movies/index.htm

This location will differ if you use a network shares or already have another USB drive connected to your PBO Alpine. I recommend that once you have enter this in the address bar you create a bookmark for easier access next time you want to use the Jukebox.

Anyhow assuming all the paths are correct you should now see YAMJ main page with the movie thumbnail displayed. If you click (Press enter) on one of the thumbnail it should display the movie particular as well as a play button. Selecting the play button and pressing enter will play the movie selected.

That is pretty much it.

Beware that this process will need to be done any time new movies are added to your collection but the process is a lot faster when only updating versus creating for the first time. Anyhow YAMJ is not perfect I would prefer an automatic updating using the PBO internet access but I guess we need to wait a bit for that; possibly the movie wall that Patriot is working on ???? Or some other moviejukebox app??? I don't know ???

Enjoy!!!

Snappy