Information Browser

Information Browser Addons

The Information Browser plugin included with SqueezeCenter 7.0 allows information sources to be displayed on all user interfaces supported by SqueezeCenter, including Squeezebox family players, Transporter and even Squeezebox Controller. The plugin supports 3rd party addons which add the ability to fetch and display additional information sources which are not in simple rss format. This plugin was known as InfoBrowser.

Installing Addons

To install an addon, ensure the folder server/Plugins/InfoBrowserAddons (Mac and Unix) or server\Plugins\InfoBrowserAddons (Windows) exists and unzip the addon into this folder. Then restart the server. The new menus offered by the addon should automatically appear within the Information Browser menus.

You may reorder or remove menu entries from Server Settings - Information Browser. This also allows all menus to be reset to the built-in menus plus those provided by all Addons you have installed.

Addons

BBC News and Sport - read BBC News and Sport web pages

Slim Devices Forums - read latest posts to the Slim Devices Community Forums

UK Tv Guide - read TV listings from tvguide.co.uk

SomaFM - shows playlists of recently played tracks on SomaFM stations.

SkyFM - shows playlists of recently played tracks on SkyFM stations.

ClassicFM - shows playlist of recently played tracks on UK ClassicFM station.

Radio Paradise - shows playlist of recently played tracks on Radio Paradise station.

BBC Weather - Show 3-day weather forecast reports for some example cities and also user can input numeric city code for other cities (See BBC Weather to lookup numeric code for a city). Edit OPML file to add own city entries.

BBC What's On - Gives radio schedule (up to 7 days) for all BBC Radio national, regional and local stations. This is a more complete version of the WhatsOn in AlienBBC.

RSS Feed Filter - An addon which can reduce the number of RSS entries displayed based on a filter phrase. Examples shown for BBC Feed for UK Premier football and US Major league baseball scores. OPML files will need to be updated using a text edited. This Addon is also an example of user input to provide filter phrase.

Details for Developers

Addons are folders under the main Plugins/InfoBrowserAddons folder which include an opml file and optionally a set of perl parser files. The opml file should include addon menu entries in the format understood by xmlbrowser, with the addition of the 'parser' tag if a remote url should be parsed by a perl parser. The parser tag should define the perl parser package to load and use for parsing. When a remote url is fetched the parser subroutine within the defined parser package will be called. This subroutine should return a hash representing the menu structure in a format understood by xmlbrowser. This allows HTML::Parser scripts may be used to convert web pages into information displays. The server also includes cookie support, so it is possible to log into a web site and parse its page for display.

Please feel free to develop Addons and attach them to this wiki page.