Connecting to Windows Phone 7 devices

[solitaire]

Is there anyway that we can upload books to these devices either directly or via "Connect to Zune"?

I just purchased a WinPh 7 device (HTC HD7) and it is not recognised by Calibre (0.7.27).

[kovidgoyal]

see http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual...pported-in-app

[chaley]

In the meantime, you can use connect to folder. I use that with Freda on WinMo 6.5, and it should work just as well with Freda (or anything else) on WinPh7. You might need to ensure that your books are on a storage card and not in main memory.

[solitaire]

@Kovid: will try to get the information to you as per the guidelines in the user manual, but I am not sure if the debug output will help as the device is not recognised by Calibre.

@Chaley: thanks for the tip. I will install Freda and see if there is an option there to locate the books on the storage card. WinPh 7 has spanned the Storage card as an extension of the main memory.

(In HD7 you cannot replace it without voiding the warranty; on Samsung devices I believe you can change the card, but you will have to factory reset the device for the new card to be accepted by the system.)

[itimpi]

Originally Posted by solitaire

@Kovid: will try to get the information to you as per the guidelines in the user manual, but I am not sure if the debug output will help as the device is not recognised by calibre

the debug output shows if the device is recognised at the OS level as a USB drive, and if it is contains the information necessary to add Calibre recognition of it.

[Jim Chapman]

Hi,

The Windows Phone 7 version of Freda can access your Calibre library over the network, but Microsoft doesn't provide any generic way to put your own files onto the phone - there is no 'ActiveSync', and in fact WP7 doesn't support the idea of a generally accessible file system that you can copy files into so that apps will be able to see them. Each app runs in its own isolated little piece of file system, and in general they can't share files between them.

As for ways to get your book collection onto Freda, the best way is to install Calibre on your PC, point Calibre at your book collection, then start the Calibre Content Server. Then you create a Freda catalog that points at your Calibre content server (actually Freda ships with a predefined catalog item that you can adapt), and you will see all your books as entries in that catalog; when you click on one of them, it will download onto your phone, and you can read it. Once a book is downloaded, you can read it whenever you want (you won't need to be connected to the network to see it, because it's now locally present on your phone; Freda will store up to 20 books on your phone in this way). There is a link to a detailed 'how-to' walkthrough in the manual at http://www.turnipsoft.co.uk/freda .

You can also, using DropBox and a program called Calibre2Opds, post your book collection on line so that it's always accessible to Freda as long as your phone has internet connectivity (because the solution I described previously will only work when Calibre Content Server is actually running on your PC). But the DropBox approach has privacy issues because it means publishing your whole book collection to everyone on the internet.

Ideally what you'd want is a way to copy your entire book collection up onto your phone, so that all of it is accessible to Freda, whether you have network connection or not. I'm still pondering the best way to do that, because it's kinda fiddly. The basic idea would be to run a SOAP web service on your PC that exposes all the files, and have a client on your phone that downloads whatever files you tell it to (and puts them into Freda's private file system). But from a design perspective this will be complicated, because:
1) It is going to involve some very long file transfers (a moderately large book collection could take an hour or more to copy over WiFi), and these need to start/stop/resume tidily, without losing or corrupting files.
2) I need to store metadata, or at least a file/folder structure.
3) The phone-side client has to deal sensibly with moving and renaming files (and the WP7 operating system actually does not support these operations, bizarrely enough).
4) I need to protect the user from filling up the phone file system (but WP7 doesn't give me any APIs that I can use to check whether the file system is full).

An alternative would be for Freda to interrogate your Calibre library for a list of all books (or all books meeting some criterion), and then download them in some sort of 'batch mode'. That still leaves me having to deal with all the issues 1-4 above, but at least I don't have to write a SOAP web service (and I get a solution that will let you download book libraries from any machine that can run Calibre). But this solution brings complexities of its own (not least: Kovid might consider it an abuse of his APIs!).

So in short the answer is: right now, you have a couple of not entirely satisfactory ways to do this, and I am continuing to think about the best answer.

Cheers,

Jim

[solitaire]

@itimpi: thanks for the clarification.

@Jim: a very detailed explanation. Much appreciated.

However, I am reluctant to start my content server (other considerations) and am happy to wait until you design your intended solution.

If I may make a suggestion: why not piggy back on top of WinPh 7 feature of wireless sync? More details here:

http://www.wpcentral.com/guide-setti...indows-phone-7

If one could transfer the books from Calibre to a local directory for WP7/Zune (the same way as Chaley done for iPad/iTunes) then Freda copies them across to the WP7 device in the background onto the storage card as Chaley as stated.

But I leave it to you geniuses to come up with an appropriate and an elegant solution.

[chaley]

Originally Posted by solitaire

If one could transfer the books from Calibre to a local directory for WP7/Zune (the same way as Chaley done for iPad/iTunes)

Small clarification. GRiker did the iDevice/iTunes interface, not me.

[solitaire]

Originally Posted by chaley

Small clarification. GRiker did the iDevice/iTunes interface, not me.

This was an inadvertant oversight on my part. My apologies to GRiker.

[solitaire]

@Kovid: I am attaching the two txt files with the device connected and disconnected. I am also attaching an image of the my PC's device information related to this device.

As to the format that this device will support, I suppose that will depend on which ereader one will use. ATM there is Freda that supports the ePub format.

HD7 does have a storage card, but the file system is closed and I cannot state which directory the books will be stored. Again that will depend of the reader software.

[kovidgoyal]

Your device needs to appear as a disk, which it isn't according to the debug output you posted.

[solitaire]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Your device needs to appear as a disk, which it isn't according to the debug output you posted.

In WP7 there is no choice to connect as a disk or via ActiveSync (as was the case in WinMo 6.5). WP7 uses Zune instead of ActiveSync to connect to the PC.

This is exactly the same way as iPad connects via iTunes.

Any other steps I can take?

[kovidgoyal]

Short of figuring out Zune's automation interface and writing a driver for it like GRiker did for iTunes, not really.

[solitaire]

OK, I think that we are making some progress.

I am now able to see the storage card as a drive (without a letter) and am able to copy files to it via windows explorer. This is what you need to do (all credit to the guys over at xda-developers http://forum.xda-developers.com/show...6&postcount=93). This will work on Win 7

- Make sure your WinPh7 device is not plugged in and your Zune software isn’t running
- Open up Regedit by going to the start menu and selecting “run”. Type regedt32 and hit “OK”
- Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\ControlSet002\Enum\USB\
- Search for “PortableDeviceNameSpace”. This should be contained in the Vid_####&Pid_####\########_-_########_-_########_-_########\Device Parameters within the above …\USB\ The ##’s listed here will be numbers and letters specific to your Zune.
- Change the following values:
* EnableLegacySupport to 1
* PortableDeviceNameSpaceExcludeFromShell to 0
* ShowInShell to 1
- Plug in your Zune, and make sure the Zune Software starts up.
Repeat this for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\ControlSet\Enum\USB\

You will have your device listed in Win Explorer WITHOUT any drive letter. But you can copy files and folders onto this drive.

To see the contents of this folder make sure that you also change the following on your windows machine:

under windows 7 :
goto folder options (control panel-folder options)
goto "view"
select "Display the full path in the title bar (classic theme only)

@Kovid: Now that the device is visible as a drive I am attaching the two outputs from Calibre (0.7.28) to see if a driver can be written for a WinPh7 device (my hardware is HTC HD7)

[kovidgoyal]

the debug output is still showing no removable drives, I'ma fraid