MCE-YAC: a network caller-id add-in for Media Center

(c) 2004-2005 David Ethan Zoller 

MCE-YAC home page - Media Center blog

Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 can host managed code applications that can control Media Center and display notifications, among other things. MCE-YAC is an add-in acts that as a client for called YAC, a networked caller-ID application.  

MCE-YAC features

• Receives network messages from a YAC server and displays them on your Media Center .
• Supports custom images for each telephone number, area code and state/province.
• Displays locations for unrecognized callers (ones without a picture for its phone number or area code).  No more wondering, “where the heck is 775?”
• mainly for people with multiple Media Center boxes: settable image path, so you can keep your pictures in one place (say, on the YAC server) and have all your Media Centers point to it.
• Keeps a (relatively boring) call log.

I’d been using YAC for years; it lets me put a modem & phone line to one computer in my house, and then send caller-ID notifications everywhere else.  In the Media Center case, this frees me from choosing between caller ID and dual tuners in my 4-PCI-slot Gateway 901x.

(There’s already another app, TAPIRex, for Media Center that does some of this, but I didn’t write it. :)  More Media Center apps!  Yay!)

System Requirements

• Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
• A working YAC installation on your network, including a caller-ID capable modem

Download, version 0.51 (see version info for details)

• Installation files (source files are below)

Installing

• Close Media Center
• Copy the zip file your desktop (or somewhere)
• Extract its contents
• Run registeryac.cmd; it should return success before the command window closes.
• Launch Media Center .
• SP2 will alert you that Media Center is trying to access the network. You should choose “unblock this program” (if you don’t see this dialog & you have SP2’s firewall turned on, you may have to alt-tab to it.)

That’s it! To demonstrate that MCE-YAC is working:

• On the machine with your caller-ID modem, install YAC (from http://sunflowerhead.com/software/yac/).
• Add your Media Center to the list of listeners in YAC.
• Receive a caller-ID call or send a test message to your listeners.  You should see a notification message on the Media Center screen.

Troubleshooting and known issues

• Ensure caller-ID messages are arriving to the YAC server. Do you get YAC’s pop-ups with phone numbers on the server, entries in the server’s log, or notifications on other machines?)
• Does the log file get generated? (See notes below.)
• If you want debug messages (lots of them), put "DEBUG" at the beginning of the Context property in YACAddIn.xml and re-run registeryac.cmd.
• In some configurations, this add-in will cause a ~20 second delay on exit of Media Center .  It used to happen on *all* configurations, and I did even a little more than I thought I’d need to fix it, but at least one machine still has the problem.  I’ll put up a fix once I’ve got one, or I’ll decide that the problem is only on my upgrade-over-upgrade box.

• The app doesn’t work for multiple concurrent users on the same machine (for instance, in a Media Center Extender environment). 

Some notes

• You can install the YAC server & my client on the same computer, if you want to use my add-in instead of the native caller-ID feature of MC; just put the name of your computer in YAC’s Listeners dialog. (Don’t forget to turn Media Center ’s native detection off.)
• I’ve included some sample caller images in the \windows\ehome\yacpix folder, and you can make your own as well (jpgs only, no bigger than 120x148 for best display).
• Look in the nanpa-area-codes.xml file to see what you should call your state/province pictures.  For the United States , it’s the two-letter abbreviation.
• To set a path for your images, just change the currently-null Context property in YACAddIn.xml before you install it (or change it there and then re-rerun registeryac.cmd). you can put your pictures on any local, UNC, or http path.  (you need a trailing slash). Note that if you keep your files on a *nix system, you’ll also need to ensure that your .jpg filenames are all lower case.
• The call log is stored in the %ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application Data\mce-yac directory.

Closing thoughts

This application isn’t really “finished,” but I’m ready to release it & its source code.  If there’s a lot of interest, I’ll compile other people’s additions in, but it’s feature-complete enough to leave home.  Hopefully, y’all will help get the rest of these features in:

• Call log display from inside Media Center .  I’ve posted some proposed XML for the log .  Logging that way, plus some XSLT, and you could see who called from right from the couch.  (You could even use the SubmitNewForMe API to flag the call log app in More Programs with the number of new calls since you last looked.)  Most likely, this would be more-properly implemented as a server-side call log, so even if the client isn’t running, you see the authoritative list of calls as the server transmitted them.
• Support for picture types other than .jpg (and filenames that include the *name* of the caller.  Thank goodness for XP’s thumbnail view for pictures.  GetFiles would work fine for discovering matching files for local & UNC, but not over http.)
• Client/agent/server architecture to enable Media Center Extender support.  This app currently tries to open a TCP port when it starts, and you can’t do that twice for the same port. Perhaps a YAC listener that runs as a service?  (This implementation would allow Fast User Switching sessions to get the same benefit, but that’s less of a core scenario.)
• YAC has built-in support for text messages (“dinner’s ready!”); it would be neat to be able to reply to those (“ok, dad, I’ll be right there!”).  This is a shift in YAC’s current notion of “server” and “listener”, so that any server might also be a listener.
• if there's running media, mute or attenuate the volume when the phone rings & then restore it when the dialog goes away.  (Probably needs to be optional, since some folks may be sending digital output to their receivers, so Media Center ’s volume is less-relevant.)
• allow addin to run from \Program Files instead of the \ehome directory.

Of course, some clever person might do entirely different things, or riff on some of my suggestions.  Go crazy.  For more information on building applications for Media Center , see the SDK.

The fine print

Please see the license.txt file for licensing information.

The video playing in the screen shot is one of the “Configure Your TV” videos in Media Center ’s Settings area.  This set of videos help you make sure that your television is doing all it can to provide great picture quality, especially if you’ve got a swank TV with lots of dials and buttons.

No, the telephone number in the screen shot isn’t really my number.  It’s the one for Congress.  Have you talked to your Representative lately?

YAC is from Sunflower Software.  Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition is from Microsoft.  You probably know that.