Weekend coding project: replacement "EyeHome" software

This weekend, I wrote a replacement for the server software for the "EyeHome" device.

The Eyehome is really a somewhat generic "Syabas" media thingy. I think the DLink and Netgear units are also really Syabas. I got my Eyehome for $99 (refurb).

The server software is a Tomcat-hosted java web application. The ElGato version is wrapped up as a Mac application, and depends on (is linked to) the Mac-native Bonjour (zeroconf) libraries. You can't simply scrape it off the Mac and run it on a Linux server.

I used Ethereal to sniff the traffic between the Eyehome and the official server software to figure out what it's doing.

I have a 1TB file server onto which I've placed MPEG-4 (Divx plus MP3) versions of my DVD collection.

Then I wrote an application (cleverly named "MyHome") using Ruby on Rails and Apache to replicate the functionality, and add some features I wanted in there. I wrote a companion Mac desktop application to get movie info from IMDB and do two things: (1) rename the an AVI movie file with the "IMDB long name" (example: "Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta (1986).avi") and (2) save a "plist" xml file with the same name (example: "Tenkû no shiro Rapyuta (1986).plist"). If the server app sees a plist, it will read the additional info out of it, so that the Eyehome will display "movie details" including the IMDB box shot, MPAA rating, plot summary, etc. Otherwise, it'll just display the file name minus the "avi" part as the movie title.

It works! Muhahaha!


I plan to add virtual directories (based on the list of genres for each movie) and parental controls (kiddies get a separate list of movies after "logging in" using the remote).