LCDSmartie plugin (2 Viewers)

[Anonymous]

@badsector
The idea of navigating through MP sounds good. What would you find most helpful for this. Is this mainly for music playback ?

Yes, it would mostly be used for playing music. So If I boot my htpc the mediaportal will start and will be in the mainmenu. Without turning on the TV I have to know in which menu I am in. When I press down or up on my remote I would like to see this on my LCD. Is it a solution to display the same text on the LCD as the buttontext in MP? In that way we always have the right text on the display for navigating.

Thanks!

 

[archimede]

I have tested it on 0.1.0.9 and it worked for me. So that shouldn't be the problem. As I said before, can you paste in the exact string you are using that is not working. At the moment I'm still unclear exactly what is not working.

Here is what I have tried:

$dll(LCDMediaPortal.dll,3,,)
- when MP runs: "Welcome to MediaPortal..."
- when not: "MediaPortal not running..."

$dll(LCDMediaPortal.dll,4,,cycle)
- always "22 mar 19.31.28"

$dll(LCDMediaPortal.dll,5,#id,)
- when MP runs: "0"
- when not: "Nothing"

$dll(LCDMediaPortal.dll,5,#currentmodule,)
- when MP runs nothing is displayed!
- when not: "Nothing"

$dll(LCDMediaPortal.dll,5,#TrackPosition,)
- when MP runs nothing is displayed!
- when not: "Nothing"

$dll(LCDMediaPortal.dll,6,CurrentPosition,)
- when MP runs: "0"
- when not: "Nothing"

Actually, I don't know what to think!

 

[AllenConquest]

Actually, I don't know what to think!

Hmm... I'm not sure either. For your description I assume you are only on the Home page on MP. What do you get if you play a music file or video?

The first 3 would be correct if you are just looking at the home page.

 

[archimede]

Hmm... I'm not sure either. For your description I assume you are only on the Home page on MP. What do you get if you play a music file or video?

The first 3 would be correct if you are just looking at the home page.

I've tried everything with myTV, myMusic, myVideo and so on... those strings are not changing

Unfortunately I won't have time to make further tests untill end of next week, but when I'll be back, I will install the latest release from scratch and configure everything again. I'll let you know then how is going

BTW, thanks for helping!

 

[cedriclocqueneux]

I have a problem with caracters: my MP is in French, and all accentued caracters like "é" "ï", etc... are not good, i have in the same place cray caracters like AE, etc...
Have you a solution ?

 

[AllenConquest]

I have a problem with caracters: my MP is in French, and all accentued caracters like "é" "ï", etc... are not good, i have in the same place cray caracters like AE, etc...
Have you a solution ?

I'm not sure at exactly which point this problem is occuring. I put some debugging code in my plugin and when I view the text that has been written into the file from MediaPortal, it too has this problem with accented characters.

Edit1: When debugging this interactively the characters are coming out of MediaPortal correctly. So I guess this is a problem LCDSmartie is having. I'll do some investigating.

Edit2: This has been reported as a bug in LCDSmartie: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1112684&group_id=122330&atid=693136 hopefully future releases will address the problem.

 

[jf2020]

AllenConquest Very good job! This was a long awaited plug-in and your plug-in is working very well!

Now to the accented characters problem.

The issue here is that the standard dot matrix font in classic LCD/VFD controllers doesn't innclude any accented characters in its extended set (besides ä, ü and ö) but has the full range of japanese characters instead.
There's no way to change that unfortunately. What would have been very nice is that those controllers have TWO sets of extended characters, a japanese one and a european one...
So if one wants to display accented characters, he needs to use a user defined character. The problem here is that there are only 8 of them (so you can defined only 8 accented characters at the same time) and that if you have to use them for that you can no longer use them to display a bargraph for instance. That means that you can't have a bargarph and accented characters on the same screen.
Defining accented characters on the fly as user characters is a feature that I hope will be sometime soon implemented in LCDSmartie, but there will still be the issue that it will then not be possible to mix a bargraph on the same screen.

The best way to handle this now is likely to filter the accented characters and to replace them by their non accented counterpart in the string that is sent to LCDSmartie. There are quite a few advantages to this:
- it's very easy to do,
- Ok you don't have accented characters but the text is readable and not messed up by strange characters,
- you can keep using the user defined characters to have a bargraph.

Allen can yo implement a filter in the plugin, at least until LCD Smartie provides support for accented characters?

It will just be a function like this

Function ReplaceAccentedChars(ByVal input As String) As String
    input = input.Replace("À", "A")
    input = input.Replace("Á", "A")
    input = input.Replace("Â", "A")
    input = input.Replace("Ã", "A")
    input = input.Replace("Ä", "A")
    input = input.Replace("â", "a")
    input = input.Replace("ã", "a")
    input = input.Replace("ä", "a")
    input = input.Replace("à", "a'")
    input = input.Replace("á", "a'")

    input = input.Replace("È", "E'")
    input = input.Replace("É", "E'")
    input = input.Replace("Ê", "E")
    input = input.Replace("Ë", "E")
    input = input.Replace("ê", "e")
    input = input.Replace("ë", "e")
    input = input.Replace("è", "e'")
    input = input.Replace("é", "e'")

    input = input.Replace("Ì", "I")
    input = input.Replace("Í", "I")
    input = input.Replace("Î", "I")
    input = input.Replace("Ï", "I")
    input = input.Replace("î", "i")
    input = input.Replace("ï", "i")
    input = input.Replace("ì", "i'")
    input = input.Replace("í", "i'")

    input = input.Replace("Ò", "O")
    input = input.Replace("Ó", "O")
    input = input.Replace("Ô", "O")
    input = input.Replace("Õ", "O")
    input = input.Replace("Ö", "O")
    input = input.Replace("ô", "o")
    input = input.Replace("õ", "o")
    input = input.Replace("ö", "o")
    input = input.Replace("ò", "o'")
    input = input.Replace("ó", "o'")

    input = input.Replace("Ù", "U")
    input = input.Replace("Ú", "U")
    input = input.Replace("Û", "U")
    input = input.Replace("Ü", "U")
    input = input.Replace("û", "u")
    input = input.Replace("ü", "u")
    input = input.Replace("ù", "u'")
    input = input.Replace("ú", "u'")

    input = input.Replace("Ý", "Y")
    input = input.Replace("ý", "y")
    input = input.Replace("ñ", "n")

    Return input
End Function

that will be called with the message string just before it is returned by function 2 or 5

				}
    		}
			return ReplaceAccentedChars(message);
		}

PS: Credit for the replace character function should be given to Marco Bellinaso.

 

[AllenConquest]

jf2020

Thank you for that explanation and the code snippet. I have now added this to the plugin and released a new version (v2.1). At least the accented characters will now be readable. Let's hope they can add this dynamic support to LCDSmartie in the future.

 

[lugiber]

Ok, here i am again with more feature requests.

1.) Reset the "percentage flag" to zero when nothing is playing.

2.) The ability to "split" the output from $dll(LCDMediaPortal.dll,7,0,0) in order to get the info on different lines. I have a four line display and i don't like too much scrolling so i would like to output the tetris info on two (or three) lines.

3.) I don't know if you read it since i posted it in an edited post, so i am sorry if you allready know about this. Using the $dll(LCDMediaPortal.dll,6,***,0) when media portal is not running makes lcd smartie freeze/hang. (I use the gplayer info to switch screen to specific music/video/dvd playing screens.)

4.) Keep up the good work! I really love your plugin, i already have 17 screens exclusivly using it.

By the way did you manage to get info from media portal so that the display can show if you are recording tv or not?

Thanks!

/Peter

 

[cedriclocqueneux]

@jf2020

Thank you for that explanation and the code snippet. I have now added this to the plugin and released a new version (v2.1). At least the accented characters will now be readable. Let's hope they can add this dynamic support to LCDSmartie in the future.

Sorry, but there is always a problem: per exemple, i don't have "Météo" on my VFD, but "Me'te'o", not "Vidéos", but "Vide'os", etc... It's strange !