The Problem
KissD is a
linux replacement for the 'PC-Link' software provided for network DVD
players by
Kiss Technology. It's
really quite nice. However, in trying to use it with large collections of
videos or music it becomes tedious. It is only possible to scroll through
a page at a time. This means that scrolling 10 entries at a time through
1300-odd artist directories becomes frustrating. It's made worse that the
page down button does not seem to auto-repeat.
My Solution
My solution is to add a separate sub-level to the navigation in the
daemon. What happens is that when there are a lot of entries in a menu (more
than 200 is 'a lot'), the daemon will instead present a single menu of the
initial letters in the folder (eg '[R]'). Selecting one of these will
produce a new list with just the entries which have that character as their
prefix. For my large number of artists, this means that I get about 30
entries, one for each letter of the alphabet and a few numbers.
Adjunct
Whilst using the daemon it became obvious that the program would create a
directory and files within the served files in order to provide the
'recently used' menus. This is handy, but I would prefer to not modify the
served folders. A small modification forces the 'recently used' code to
store its links in '/tmp/' instead of the top level of the served folders.
Download
The sources for the modified version of kissd 0.13 can be found
here. The changes over the regular 0.13
are described in the CHANGES file. The sources are,
as with 0.13, covered by the GPL.
Where reasonable, changes have been bracketted by '#ifdef' statements, which
should allow them to be disabled easily and to identify changes more
readily.
This page is maintained by
Justin Fletcher
(gerph@gerph.org).