Visual indicator when recording. (1 Viewer)

[Donald J. Michaud]

I am running MP1 v1.12 currently. I just recently left Windows Media Center behind when I upgraded to Win-10. That is when I joined the MP family. There are two features I miss from WMC.
1. The ability to skip to a specific location in the recording by point-and-click on the recording track scale. VLC open source media player also has this capability and it is nice to be able to skip over a block of commercials or jump to a specific block of time in a movie.
2. When the computer is recording something in the background, it is really convenient to be able to see in the lower right corner near the clock a red ball, letting you know that MP1 is recording something. WMC did this and it was really nice to know at a glance whether it was safe or not to shut down the computer. If something was being recorded, I left my computer run over overnight. Without this feature, I have already lost some TV series I record that are on later at night (because I forgot they finish later than when I need to go to bed.) Does MP1 or MP2 have this recording indicator capability now, or can it be added in the next release? If it can be added now (via a plug-in), please let me know.

Thanks! djm

 

[hurley]

Hi Donald,

1. You can jump to a time position in a video using the number keypad on your remote. I'm not 100% sure if that works in the Recorded TV section though. Maybe someone else can confirm this.

2. Micropolis (possibly the most prolific plugin contributor here) has answered your request with -> HTPCInfo TVServer Monitor <- a tray app for monitoring the status of recordings. Discussion forum here: HTPCInfo plugin v1.13.1 for MediaPortal 1.3.0 and higher

Out of interest or inspiration: I've actually set up a bank of 4 LED's on my HTPC, 1 for each tuner, to show recording state even with the TV off. These are just wired up to a pair of USB-Serial port modules with a basic background app to control them. You can do it all with MediaPortal!

 

[tom_ktom]

Hello Hurley,

I am just trying to implement nearly the same (just one LED instead of 4). Could you please explain how you got it working?

My first steps were installing LEDsDriver to control LED connected to the Serial port and trying to use Eventghost for listening to MP events. But I didn't get MP to send recognizable Events ot listen to. Should HTPCInfo help there?

Or do you have a basicly different set-up running?

regards
Tom

 

[hurley]

Hi @tom_ktom, that sounds like a good approach if you can somehow get events from MP. Less/no coding required.

I went with a quick and dirty console app and I think I used polling to interrogate the tvservice on a timer.
It must be 5+ years ago now but I looked at the source code for the tray app part of HTPCInfo to work out how to do it, so that would be a good place to start if you are comfortable with C#.

It would have had to reference some MP libraries to get at the tvserver information.
Probably TvControl.dll which has the RemoteControl.Instance interface in it.
And it used System.IO.Ports.SerialPort to toggle pins DTR, RTS and BreakState which are wired up to the LEDs.
I do remember having to subscribe to SystemEvents.PowerModeChanged and close/reopen the serial ports on hibernate/resume.
If I can find my source code, I'll pass it on...

Having said that, if I was to re-write it from scratch now I'd make it a TV Server plugin and watch the TvServerEvents for recording status. It could then have a configuration page to map tuners to serial ports and pins.

Actually that's a great idea for a plugin!
Good luck with it.

...Just remembered I think I stumbled on a plugin somewhere which passes on MP messages to other apps, maybe have a look for that one it could be useful.

 

[Stéphane Lenclud]

I'm currently working on such a TV Server plugin.
See:
https://forum.team-mediaportal.com/threads/tv-engine-3-plugins.129692/

 

[tom_ktom]

Ah! Sounds very interesting