Home Hacking Projects for Geeks

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Part II: Home Entertainment

So how would you like to be able to access your collection from anywhere,

using nothing but a web browser? This project, conceptualized in Figure

10-1, makes it possible. You can even use the architecture of this project to

create web sites that allow you to access other media formats such as images

or video. In fact, anything represented as a file on your computer can be

accessed similarly.

Project Overview

In order to expose your media collection to the Internet, you’ll be creating

Active Server Pages (ASP) to access a backing store of media files and format

it for viewing as a web page.

This project basically consists of three layers, as shown in Figure 10-1.

There’s a backing store that contains all the media files; you’ll be accessing

this information and reformatting it for presentation through a web browser

by the web interface. Then we have the web interface layer. Although you’ll

be using ASP to generate the pages, they could just as easily be written in

Perl, JSP, or any other language that supports dynamic page generation. In

addition to presenting the files in a manner that allows for easy navigation,

the scripts will also dynamically generate WinAMP-style playlists that auto-

matically download to the Media Player layer.

Figure 10-1. Conceptual diagram of a

web-accessible media library.

Project Overview

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