Imon LCD Display (e.g. Silverstone GD01)

[thanatos]

stupid me - you are right, nothing changed in the logs..

Glad to hear, that your case is finally on its way!

[thanatos]

I also put a post in the Soundgraph Forum.
Maybe its a good idea to put as much posts there as possible.
I suggest that everyone, having problems with his soundgraph/imon lcd display, posts there.

Here is the link

Maybe we can get Soundgraph to help us!

[Orco]

Ok, what I noticed: The Silverstone Display (MFP51) is just the Display part from the new iMon Ultra-Bay. This one has also two knobs for volume control and navigation. And it has buttons for traveling through the menu (tv, music and so on) and to play media files (play/pause, forward and so on). On the soundgraph homepage is noticed that the display has vista and mce /xp drivers so no additional plugin such as frontview is needed for mce. Nice, but I don't want to use mce as long as I can use mp.

[Johan]

Where on soundgraph.com have you found just the mce/xp drivers for the LCD? I can only find the iMON/iMEDIAN package which containts the manager and frontview programs. LCD works great with Winamp and WinDVD and some other program. I wonder how they can communicate with the LCD!?

[JoeDalton]

They = soundgraph themselves. I guess they know how to program their own displays

Their iMon and IMedian packages are the only ones that communicate with the display. They figure out somehow what Winamp, WinDVD, MCE, etc... are doing and send the status to the display.

So either we need to give them a way to figure out what MP is doing (difficult, believe me ) or they need to give us a way to tell their software what we want to have displayed.

I'm using the latter option with the iMon VFDs and so far that was working great.

Joe

[Johan]

Hehe well I was refering the programs. I wonder how and what they "output". I was not even aware that windvd or winamp was sending out any data to anything. It supports also MCE. Isn't it possible to "emulate" MCE output for display in some way? Just a thought. Should be a good solution if it worked since I think a lot of display manufacturers are aiming for MCE compatibility. Are you good in reverse engineering?

[Orco]

Hm, ok, but with Version 6.0 of IMon / iMedian (supporting Vista) you can use it to control and to display MCE stuff (within the soundgraph faq they mentioned that imon vfd (and so also the ultra bay) can display graphical eq and playing informations from ms mce application.

Hm another idear:
Is the ms mce dispay output api aviable (is it called so?)? so we (or Joe) can program an mp interface that acts the way mce acts to give 3rd party applications (ex. iMedian) informations about the status.

[mpfrank]

Hi guys,

I'm not a developer, but I cannot understand how e.g. Winamp can operate the iMon VFD display even with eq output under Vista without changing the iMon software to the plugin mode.
Is it also possible to get eq output within MP? It is a great eye catcher ;-)
Something like this:
Displaying album/track information when changing the song and every 60 seconds for some seconds and displaying the eq output for the rest of time....
Would be great!!

Cheers
mpFrank

[JoeDalton]

As I said before, it is not winamp that operates the display. It is the imon software that sees winamp running and reads its status. I know winamp has support for this but I don't know the details.

MCE is a bit different. MCE uses a COM+ interface to talk to. I guess the iMon software implements this interface, so it can send MCE's messages to the display.

I have already done something similar for MP. The result can be found here: http://forum.team-mediaportal.com/mc...ble-t2860.html. Unfortunately MP works totally different internally than MCE, so this way is really hard to implement right now.

Joe

[mpfrank]

Hi Joe,

this threat is very interesting!! Thanks a lot!!

will your plugin work with the latest SVN build MP 0.2.2.1?


mpFrank