About the WTVP.NET Project

 

Actually you can consider this project as a kind of spin-off from my experiments DVB.NET and VCR.NET with the Hauppauge Nexus-S hardware. Since this is also a private project all restrictions I mentioned for DVB.NET and VCR.NET concerning the use of the program or the source code stay in place for WTVP.NET, too.

There are two aspects on WTVP.NET. First of all it consists of a couple - ok, only two - DLLs and a project wizard for Microsoft Visual C# 2005 which allows easy creation of plug-in DLLs for the Watch TV Pro DVB application. One of the DLLs hosts a C++ wrapper which is necessary to provide the Win32 entry points used by the DVB application to communicate with its plug-ins. The second one is a Microsoft .NET 2.0 assembly which as its most important class contains a base class for creating plug-ins. The wrapper and this class are tighly coupled and provide wide access to what a plug-in can do. The wizards will create a C# project - actually any other .NET language would do the job, too, but I've only found time to create this wizard - with a single plug-in class in it. Beside some special considerations the class can be compiled at once and will run in Watch TV Pro.

In the DVB.NET and VCR.NET introduction I mentioned that using any stuff from this web site is on your own risk and primarily targets developers. For WTVP.NET I would like to add a short story to clearify what this could mean: the first version of the setup tool thought it had to install some component from the .NET framework itself. After uninstalling there was some lack of functionality - bad things happened! So on the one hand take it on your risk - on the other hand I tried at least to testify the installation path described here as much as possible and I hope that it works without any pain for you.

The installation includes a plug-in sample. This is based on the Plug-In Sample V1.60 Beta from the Watch TV Pro public download area where I got it in June 2003. Although the sample is not directly compilable after installing WTVP.NET it's functional complete and with some minor effort you could make it compile - due to some lack of time I had to stop this private project before I could add the necessary steps: sorry. At least take the sample as a walk-through what functionalities are provided and how it can be implemented in your own plug-in.

Now to the second aspect: the standard installation will not include the sources for the framework DLLs itself - the C++ wrapper and the base plug-in assembly. You can easily install the sources to take a look at how the stuff works. Again I found no time to make it directly compilable - there is a bit of handwork to be done. But this should be the full sources I use and I didn't intentionally hold anything back to disallow recreating the framework itself - this may be necessary if for some reason you want to debug the .NET base class itself. Although I tried to create documentation (XML - automatically integrated with Microsoft Visual C#) the sources may be necessary for a full understanding - it's your choice!

There is a very good chance that I will not be able to further develop WTVP.NET. If anyone from the Watch TV Pro developer community wants to take responsible ownership of this project I would be glad to send over the full development environment - actually there is not much missing from what you can download: the most important part is the setup stuff. If no one wants to do it - well, come back to this site in a year or so and you have a good chance to see no change at all.