Free AOL XM player integrated into C4????

[BobB]

Could this free player be integrated into a Control 4 system and controlled via the MTS? Though it isnt the highest sound quality available today, it is free and sounds a lot better than my streaming Sirius player, which I pay for.

you can find the player here.

http://music.aol.com/radioguide/bb.adp?suppressRadio=true

Thank you

[chirstius]

BobB,

I think the answer to this - like most technical questions - is yes, it can be done - given enough time and money pretty much anything can be done.

The real questions to ask is - is it worth it? There's no way I can think of that the C4 controllers would deal with this directly (without significant modification) so that means putting a dedicated PC in front of it and grabbing the audio out from that PC and feeding it into your distributed audio system. This also means now having to control that PC via C4. You can get a USB based IR port and then use the software that comes with most of them to code up some way to control a browser to do the AOL XM stuff but this is going to be skecthy at best. This may involve also writing an IR driver for C4. You could use a serial port, which means you could impersonate a known device (saves the driver coding on C4 possibly), but now you are going to have to code up your own little daemon program to take serial input and then to control the browser instance - still not easy or very clean.

Lastly, being an XM subscriber myself and having used the web based streamers, I can say that it's not always that reliable. Internet conditions vary, your bandwidth varies, etc. Personally I would not want to rely on an audio source that's going to tank every time I fire up a bittorrent client to download a bunch of illegal, copyrighted content that I can later stream all over my house (not that myself or anyone else actually does this mind you! Just giving a contrived example!).

So again, the question comes down to "Is it worth it?". I would probably say, nope, move along.