[Freevo-devel] Re: LCD Plugin?

[Rob MacNeill]

Hi Starkeeper and everyone else,   I have been working on a standalone DVR using freevo as a school project.  (The same project for which Kyle Weston wrote his Record Schedule Menu code).  Anyways, I have been writing code to display current status on a vacuum fluorescent display.  I am using a 2x20 IEE display connected directly to the parallel port (you can also use the serial port, but we're using that for LIRC, and besides this is easier).  I am new to python, and could not figure out how to interface to the parallel port with it, so I wrote my code in C and compiled into a python module using SWIG.  I also ended up having to add a bunch of extra code for mplayer for displaying track time.   As of now, my code displays a welcome message on startup, name of the currently playing video file, current track time, movie status (eg play/pause/>>/<</stop), current television channel and a recording message.  Also if you play a video file while recording, a different recording message will appear with the rest of the video display.   I will send my code when I get a chance if anyone is interested.  It is spread all over the place, mainly in /tv/mplayer.py, /video/mplayer.py and record_daemon.py as well as the MPlayer files mplayer.c and mencoder.c. One of the major issues I had was when two processes (eg current time and play status) try to write to the screen at the same time.  To get around this, I set a flag bit in shared memory which each process must poll before it can write anything.  As a result, mplayer will no longer run from the command line - freevo must be running, or else a segmentation fault will occur.  That's fine for my purposes, but I imagine that would be a major issue for most people! (Sorry haven't written any code for audio!!) -Rob M