----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2003 10:20
AM
Subject: [Freevo-devel] Re: LCD
Plugin?
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
