Integration (of a sort) of Control4 within SageTV

[wayner]

I am working on integrating Control4(C4) into my SageTV setup - what I have been able is actually quite simple and is somewhat similar to the C4/Slingbox solution (I think) with a few drawbacks. (Control4 is a company that makes home automation equipment and software. I use C4 for many of the lights in my house and my HVAC. I would like to be able to integrate C4 into Sage so that I can control my lighting from within Sage)

What I have done so far is to plug the video (and audio) outputs of my HC-300 controller into the composite input of a spare TV tuner card in my Sage/WHS box. This tuner is then mapped to channel 1 on my SageTV guide. When I switch to LiveTV on channel 1 on any Sage client I see the C4 Navigator interface, just as you would if the HC-300 was hooked up directly to your TV. Right now this tuner always says "No Date" which is a bit annoying but livable.

There are some downsides however - right now the only way to "navigate" in Navigator is with my C4 remote. This is on a bit of a delay as the video signal from the HC-300 has to be encoded by my tuner card and then streamed over the network. This delay is just under two seconds. In other words if you push the "right" button on my C4 remote it takes about two seconds for the screen to react (I imagine there is a similar delay with Slingbox?). This is not ideal but it is somewhat livable - in fact it is not too dissimilar to the slow response of my Control4 V2 remote control while switching rooms, etc. The delay is much worse when using PlaceShifter over the net and you can't use your C4 remote when you are not at home. I have deloped a rudimentary web interface that allows me to send navigational commands to C4.

To be honest the ideal solution to what I am trying to do would be to write a native SageTV addin version of Navigator that would list all of your devices with UI elements to change them. But that is a lot more work, requires a UI design and requires learning how to use SageTV Studio and/or Java as well. I may be dabbling with this if I have the time to learn these items but I thought that using the existing TV version of Navigator would be a start.

[CollinR]

I do this with lots of stuff can't help you with Control4 but there are a few things you can do to improve your current situation.

1: Use a menu item and macro to launch your custom channel, the macro will stop currently playing, change to channel 1 and FF to the front of the buffer.

2: Check your client properties look at.

videoframe/time_behind_live_to_disable_fast_forward=6000
videoframe/time_behind_live_to_disable_skip_forward=4000
videoframe/time_to_start_into_tv_file_playback=0

play with those to reduce your delays.

Pretty damn cool though once you start playing as if your control4 has an RS232 output you may be able to add a serial text inserter build complex status displays and whatnot. I have a DVD changer connected this way, also rather complex CCTV system.

I also have HAL2000 and it's plugin, thats why I'm no help with Control4 specifically.

[andypitt]

How did you go about creating the macro from a menu item, and do you know how to do this from a custom command? I can see how to map ir to custom1 - custom5 although cannot figure out how to add functionality such as a macro to said command.

Also what did you find were optimal settings to reduce the delay on the streamed ui such as Control4 navigator?

Andy