Interfacing Telly

Posted by stephen on Wednesday, 23rd November, 2005 @ 02:05

I've been pretty quiet for another week, though in that time I've managed to cook up several blog entry titles and outlines. Hopefully I'll flesh some of them out soon. Here's one to be getting on with.

I spent most of last week working on the interface to the revised Carpenters Connect service. It's all HTML based which makes development fairly straightforward. Here's a little preview of where things are at the moment, currently lacking some topical images and text...

It's coming along quite nicely, and works great on various size TVs and with both brands of set top box we currently employ on the estate (which was one of the aims, a single codebase for multiple STB types).

What I'm most happy with is the system underlying it all. It's been a while since I coded in PHP, and it's nice to know I can still remember how to do it! Building pages like this is now a simple matter of creating an array that specifies the links on the left, what image and text should be displayed and if the images and text should roll over if any given link is highlighted.

#
# Carpenter Connect Sample Page
#

include("libs.php");

$links = array(
	array(
		'url' => 'page1.php',
		'text' => 'Sample Link',
		'image' => 'sample2.jpg',
		'infourl' => 'page1_desc.html'
		),
	array(
		'url' => 'playvideo.php',
		'text' => 'Sample Video Preview',
		'multicast' => '239.192.254.1',
		'infourl' => 'whatson.php'
		)
	);
	

makeMenuPage($links, '', '', '', 'welcome');

And with a little user agent string peeking, it also allows a half-size video preview of a given satellite, terrestrial or local TV programme to be displayed live in place of the image, with guide data in the text area below.

Early impressions seem to be favourable, we'll have to see how it goes on full deployment. I'm not a designer by any stretch of the imagination, but we didn't really have the budget for one. I'm hoping the result doesn't reflect that too much though.