OKAY so here is how the setup is put together. I will try to post as much details as I can hopefully can help others towards their projects. If I confuse you please ask questions, I will do my best to answer them.
A lil background first currently have a collection of over 1000 avi movies and over 20 individual tv shows with multiple seasons with a total episode count around 2000 plus all legal of course. Currently I have 4 sata drives running on a windows server 2k3 box. I also run a ftp server which you will understand why I even mention the server later on. I did it this way but you can do it on any OS of your choice such as win7 winx xp linux whatever you use to serve your drives.
I purchased three viewsonic v210 tablets cheap which I use daily. I can go into detail on these but they are 10" ARM based wifi touchscreen tablets I couldn't find anything else that I wanted without spending a crap load on each one. The tablets use embedded windows ce which is perfect for an instant on touchscreen remote. From cold boot they load in 30 seconds and from stand by they load immediately which is perfect for me.
They look like the Icon I created however I will post a pic of the remotes running my setup.
THE DETAILS NOW
I built my camera box using a very small hp epc-42. its not the fastest pc in the world but for streaming its small and robust. Loaded a clean install of xp pro and webcam software. I put in a 1gb stick for memory and loaded it with a small 10gb drive which is for OS only. I chose webcams for a lot of reasons and I use a special adapter which converts usb to rj45 Ethernet cable and back to usb for long runs. each cam,adapter and wire cost me less than 60 bucks each look on craigslist for cheap high Megapixel Cams I use microsoft and logitech webcams and yes they can be used outdoors just look at the specs before you buy them.
After I setup the cameras within the software, I setup motion zoning. The motion security is set to take a snapshot and upload it to a ftp server, record a video to a mapped network drive ( SERVER) and send me a sms pic alert which is kinda nice.
You can use zoneminder, or yawcam, however I chose webcam xp. One of the ftp options is to set a certain file name convention which is cool but since I have to make it easy for XBMC to understand I had to use some trickery.
The magic happens with two tools EVENTGHOST and WINAutomation. Originally I used Python scripts within eventghost but it kept crashing for me so I decided to kill the scripts and just use a running service with a couple of self executables.
Win Automation can do some real slick stuff like create self executable processes for anything such as batch file renames etc but I use it to copy camera motion snapshots to an archive then rename the files to a simple Cam1 Cam2 Cam3 Cam4 and place them in a another folder called XBMC ALERT. I did this because I did not want to loose the time stamp that is part of the original camera snapshots file name obviously for archiving. I also created another self executable for deleting everything in the folder XBMC ALERT after pop-ups alerts have finished displaying within XBMC.
EventGhost which you all know by now, using plug-ins directory watcher, XBMC is all that is needed for the pop-ups to alert.
Basically there's two directories being watched the first one is where the the snapshots were ftp'd to the other is XBMC ALERT.
When directory watcher sees new files created within a certain directory (ftp directory) it starts the self executable to copy those files untouched to a archive folder then takes a copy renames the files Cam1 ,Cam2 etc and places all new renamed files into XBMC ALERT folder. Within eventghost I used eventghost jump after this process finishes sucessfully then it goes into another eventghost process.
The second process then watches the directory XBMC alert and using the XBMC plugin sends the popup with a custom message which is your choice on the message. The camera pic will not show up this way you must adjust the DialogKaiToast.xml for XBMC and point it to the image files. From there the popup will display the image properly. After eventghost waits 1 second with the event timer being used after a second it runs the self executable to delete the files in the folder XBMC alert.
This works as a loop over and over again.
Heres the changes I made to DialogKaitoast.xml
<window id="107">
<animation effect="slide" start="0,80" end="0,0" time="200">WindowOpen</animation>
<animation effect="slide" start="0,0" end="0,80" time="999">WindowClose</animation>
<coordinates>
<system>1</system>
<posx>500</posx>
<posy>650</posy>
</coordinates>
<controls>
<control type="group">
<control type="image">
<posx>-100</posx>
<posy>-500</posy>
<width>700</width>
<height>500</height>
<texture border="20,20,20,2">InfoMessagePanel.png</texture>
</control>
<control type="image" id="400">
<description>avatar</description>
<posx>-70</posx>
<posy>-450</posy>
<width>640</width>
<height>360</height>
<aspectratio>keep</aspectratio>
<texture>I:\\xbmcalert\cam_1.jpg</texture>
