Plugin: MizookLCD (Alternate SageTV LCDSmartie Plugin)

[FidgetyRat]

sorry, I meant MP3 through the sage player. I am using sageMC is it possible that uses a completely different music player then the default STV?


I telnet'd into the external status monitor during mp3 playback and its true, nothing shows up for now playing, so I guess i'ts not your plugin but an incompatability with external status & sageMC

[pjwerdna]

Originally Posted by FidgetyRat

I telnet'd into the external status monitor during mp3 playback and its true, nothing shows up for now playing, so I guess i'ts not your plugin but an incompatability with external status & sageMC

FYI
I've got the following setup
* SageTV 5.0.4
* SageMC 6.8, with the following imports

+ Video Library times 0.3
+ Favourites Channel Lists 1.1.0

* Web Server 2.11
* Java 1.4.2_06

Playing mp3s shows all the info I'd expect as does telneting into the status monitor.

[FidgetyRat]

Wonder if its a sage6 problem then

I have the newest MC 6.3.2 and Sage6.0

Gah.. nothing ever goes right :argh:

[pjwerdna]

Originally Posted by FidgetyRat

Wonder if its a sage6 problem then

I have the newest MC 6.3.2 and Sage6.0

Gah.. nothing ever goes right :argh:

I've just tried my test server and the following setup also works fine.
SageTV: 6.0.19.120
SageMC: 6.0.3
Java: 1.4.2_11

Telnet to 20000 cshows (amonst other things)...
Type: music
show: the right mp3 title
episode: the right album info
artist: the right artist
state: playing

Anyuthing unusual about your setup?

[FidgetyRat]

I guess the only difference between mine and yours is my newer version of MC. I will try another telnet later. maybe after a reboot things will work..

[FidgetyRat]

I got a pretty good idea that works well last night.

Not "EXACTLY" related to this plugin, more of Smartie in general.


I wanted a way to know what is going on behind the scenes as far as show analyzer or transcoding is concerned so I threw together a few plugins and came up with this idea.


There is a handy plugin called processes.dll that allows you to search if a process is running and it returns a boolean value. Pairing this up with the search and replace plugin sandr.dll I now have a status screen.

To get it to work with multiple inquiries, I combine all of that processes calls in one string, so

**Note, in the below example, I forgot the actual spelling of the transcoder so I just used SageTV_Transcoder for the example.

$dll(processes,2,ShowAnalyzer,)$dll(processes,2,SageTV_Transcoder,)...
would normally produce "00" or "01" or "11" depending on which process is running.

Using sandr, you can setup the .ini config to handle these binary combinations, so

1="00"
2="01"
3="10"
4="11"

Can be replaced by

1=" "
2="T "
3="A "
4="AT"

Or however you want it displayed. I use single letters since I take up alot of my main screen with other information.

So just wrap the other dll calls inside the sandr.
$dll(sandr,1,$dll(First process)$dll(Second process),"Path to the .ini)

Now, if you are transcoding, analyzing, or any other process, you can get a handy status update on the LCD.


I also use this approach with Mizook's tuner status. So if any of my 3 tuners are recording, I have its binary pattern show up and replace with characters (or custom symbols) representing which tuner is active.

[heffe2001]

It'd be cool if you could take that one step further on the ShowAnalyzer. On my system I have it showing me all my tuners, and what's recording on each at any given time. It'd be nice to see if that particular show is being processed by SA (maybe an asterisk at the beginning of the name if it's being processed, or something like that). Probably no really easy way to get the info from SA as to WHAT it's processing though.

[owilsky]

Is anyone still using this?
Today I am trying to get this to work and it works fine but I don't get this progress bar to work:

$Bar($dll(MizookLcd.dll,7,1#cp,1),$dll(MizookLcd.dll,7,1#d,1),16)

This does not work for me, I guess because the cursor position returns a floating point number but here in Germany the comma is the decimal separator and so #cp returns a number like 1234,123 instead of 1234.123.

I tried using the search and replace plugin to replace the "," to ".":
$Bar($dll(sandr.dll,1,$dll(MizookLcd.dll,7,1#cp,1),C:\LCDSmartie\plugins\omit.ini), $dll(MizookLcd.dll,7,1#d,1), 16)

Now I get this error message on the display:
'1234.123' is not a valid floating number

Any ideas?

[cslatt]

Throw each of these functions on a line of its own and tell me what value they're spitting out for you (when you play a video).

$dll(MizookLcd.dll,7,1#cp,1)
$dll(MizookLcd.dll,7,1#d,1)

[owilsky]

934,121
5400

Thanks!

[cslatt]

owilsky,
Try the attached version and see if it fixes your issue.

Chris

[owilsky]

Originally Posted by cslatt

owilsky,
Try the attached version and see if it fixes your issue.

Chris

Works fine now! You simply cut the decimals?
Thanks a lot!

[cslatt]

Originally Posted by owilsky

Works fine now! You simply cut the decimals?
Thanks a lot!

Yep - the decimals were just an artifact of the way the number was stored and didn't actually represent additional accuracy. No need for sub-second accuracy in a progress bar.

All this revived talk about LCD Smartie makes me want to find a new use for my LCD. It's been sitting in a box ever since I moved Sage to my basement rack. Hmm...

[robk]

I have been using MizookLcd with LCDSmartie to display a few things going on in SageTV and it has been working very well for a while. Actually, I've gotten so used to it, I use it to quickly get an idea how much of a movie is left (bar graph), Title, channel, etc - very useful, very cool blue 20 X 4 line display!
Well, thanks to Microsoft, today it stopped working. Win7 took the updates in the screen cap attached... and the error "DLL no bridge func" appeared on the LCD. I had to roll back to a restore point before the updates to get it working again.
Apparently a couple of these updates are considered "critical", so I don't know what to do - don't want to lose the LCD, but the update(s) may be important. Also, I can't tell which update is causing the problem as the KB#'s don't match up with the uninstall files - I just eliminated all 5 of them for now.

Any ideas on a solution?
Thanks!
Rob

[cslatt]

Originally Posted by robk

Any ideas on a solution?

It looks like the issue is with the .NET Framework version 4 (listed in your update as "Microsoft .NET Framework 4 Client Profile") Don't install that for now - the LCD Smartie folks are investigating this right now and working out the best solution going forward (if you're interested, it is being hashed out in this thread http://forums.lcdsmartie.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2011) so I expect a solution in the next release of LCD Smartie (though there are workarounds if you end up needing to install .NET 4 for other reasons.

[robk]

Thanks for the link! I thought the Smartie project was dead, last release I think was in 2007.
I had some time on my hands, had a few LCD displays so I built one parallel port device and another USB device based on a PIC18F2550 that I found while browsing. Glad to see someone is still working on the software.
Thanks-
Rob

[robk]

If anyone is interested in this "dead" thread, there is a fix for LcdSmartie plugins and dot net 4 framework that works (for me on MazookLcd). It's a new config file, available here:
http://forums.lcdsmartie.org/viewtop...p=16594#p16594

Rob

[owilsky]

I got a forum notification of a new post at this thread, but where did this post go?

It had this test:

Reviving an old dead thread... it seems that the latest version of SageTV has broken the MizookLcd plugin that sends info to LCDSmartie.
I've been using it for quite a while, but now one of the commands (Channel number) doesn't work. It's not related to dot.net like last time, it doesn't report any errors and only affects displaying the channel you're tuned to (blank - no number).

Here's part of the ini file:
Text01="* $dll(MizookLcd.dll, 2, 0,) * "
Text02="Chan:$dll(MizookLcd.dll, 5, 2,)"
Text03="$Bar($dll(MizookLcd.dll,7,0#cp,1),$dll(MizookLcd.dll,7,0#d,1),20)"
Text04="mem/cpu%[$dll(HTwoBar,1,10#5#6#7#4,$MemF%#100#$CPUUsage%#100)]"


It displays:
1- Title (works)
*2- Channel (stopped with v7_0_20)*
3- Time bar, elapsed time (works)
4- combo mem usage over CPU usage (works)

Anyone still use LCDSmartie and see similar problems?

Thanks-
Rob

I am still using LCDSmartie and see exactly the same problem ever since I started using V7, even earlier than 7.0.20. But I guess it has something to do with the new status plugin which was adapted to V7.

Oliver

[robk]

Oliver-
I deleted the post cause I felt so stupid when I figured out what was wrong.
The tuner number changed. In the line:
Text02="Chan:$dll(MizookLcd.dll, 5, 2,)"
the "2" referred to tuner #2, which was my HD PVR. Either because I disabled the other tuner (HVR1600) or Sage decided to renumber the HD PVR, there was no tuner #2 to read. I changed it to "0", meaning "now playing" and it works on the HD PVR live TV and movies played back. "Now Playing " is what I wanted anyway - it's been wrong for months... I was more interested in displaying that rather than what each tuner was recording. (because there is no Channel to display when playing back a recording)

Also, it seems that you don't need the updated plugin "get status", works with it and with it disabled. Hope that helps!


From Mizooks Documentation:
Function 5
Channel
param 1 - Device
0 = now playing, 1 = first recording device, 2 = second recording device, etc.

Examples:

* $dll(MizookLcd.dll, 5, 0,) = 3 - WDCW
* $dll(MizookLcd.dll, 5, 1,) = 4 - WRC

[cslatt]

Glad it is still working for you guys. If you run into any other trouble, let me know. I'm subscribed to this thread and still have the source code (and every once in a while, some free time).