Crawling Line

BPP_CrawlLine plugin is intended for output of crowling line to the screen. Crawling line may be any text, contents of text file or text information from RSS feeds from the Web. Plugin may be used for output of any messages for network translation, applying subtitles when recording to file or for preview, for getting the latest news from Web news portals.

Launch and stop of crawling line is performed by pressing hotkey. When the dialog window of plugin settings is opened, the hotkeys are disabled and the button is used to control the crawling line. Line may have arbitrary height, width and may be placed anywhere on the screen. Text and background of crawling line may have arbitrary color and transparency.

To provide the best look for crawling line, it is recommended to turn on the interlaced mode of line output, and set software doubling frame rate and Area Motion or Area Pixel Clipping deinterace methods in Behold TV application. When translated to network, the quality of crawling line completely depends on receiving software and deinterlacing algorithms on remote PC. If the vertical size of video stream is equal to height of one field of picture (XXXx288 or XXXx240), then setting "Interlaced line" become not relevant.

Plugin allows to edit and save separately list of strings, files or RSS feeds. By default, all three lists are empty. To add the new string, file or link to RSS feed, you need to select empty line from dropdown list of a proper list and edit it. To add the text file to list you may through the common menu, using the button . On the left side of each list it is placed button of selection of proper plugin work mode.

On launch of crawling line plugin will show it the number of times given in "Repeat" setting. If the repeat count is set to zero, line will be showed continuously.

If you need to display several strings of text one by one, it will be most comfortable to put them in a text file (file with .txt extention) and point the plugin it's placement on disk. When launching crawling line the text file will be displayed round the number of times set in the "Repeat" setting of plugin.

RSS-feed is the web-page, that contains news, announces, blog changes, forum posts and other information in special format. You may read about RSS in more details here. RSS-feeds are most frequently used in news portals and web press. You may know about the web-site has RSS feed by a set of signs. So, some browsers upon detection of RSS-feed, let know about this by placing a special icon in definite place of window. Also you may switch to RSS-feed if you find a special button, for example such or such . Once you selected and switched to RSS-feed, you need to transfer the link to plugin.

The BPP_CrawlLine plugin has a separate set of settings to work with RSS-feed.

"Date" – if RSS-feed has date/time of publishing, then the year, month and day of publishing will be added to the beginning of crawling line.

"Time" – if RSS-feed has date/time of publishing, then the hour and minute of publishing will be added to crawling line.

"Header" – the crawling line will contain the header of RSS-message.

"Message" – the crowling line will contain the RSS-message itself. If RSS-message is absent or contains only HTML-tags, then instead of message only it's header will be displayed.

"Autoupdate" – set the frequency of updating of crawling line. After the set period of time plugin will load RSS-feed and automatically will restart crawling line. If the value of "Autoupdate" is zero, then automatic update is disabled.

"Latest news" – crawling line will contain only new messages, published during the time from the last start of crawling line. Time of last viewed message is saved by the plugin only for the current RSS-feed. After the change of link to the RSS-feed the date/time of last message is cleared. The setting "Latest news" work only in the case if RSS-feed messages has publication date. If there are no new messages for the time elapsed from the last run, plugin will display string "There are no new messages". This string will be displayed only in manual start (by pressing hotkey) of the crawling line.

If the message in crawling line attracted your attention, then the double click on line will launch the default brouser and open the page with proper RSS-feed, through which you will be able to get more information on the news you are interested in.

On load and updating of RSS-feed plugin logs the Internet connection. All data are recorded to file, that has the same name as plugin itself, with .log extention. Log-file is saved in folder with plugins or in corresponding user directory, if the Behold TV option "Store settings for each system user" is switched on.

For simultaneous output of two or more crawling lines on screen you need to create several instances of BPP_CrawlLine plugin in Plugins older by renaming the original file BPP_CrawlLine.dll for exampe in the following manner:

BPP_CrawlLine_1.dll

BPP_CrawlLine_2.dll

BPP_CrawlLine_3.dll

……………………

Then you may add each instance to the list of plugins for preview or recording, set crawling line attributes, work mode and assign unique hotkeys for each plugin.

List of changes

• First release.

• Removed limitations on URL format.

• Added settings saving under Windows 7.

• Added support of Behold TV instances.

Link to the plugin: BPP_CrawlLine_v103.zip (67.5 kb)

01.03.11