HomeVisionXL

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Audio Player Plug-ins

There are HomeVisionXL plug-ins for several popular audio players: You can control the audio player of your choice from HomeVisionXL by installing the appropriate plug-in. The plug-ins for all audio players behave pretty much the same towards the outside world. As a result you will not be sentenced to use a specific audio player just because you did all the programming for it in your schedule and control plug-in. Simply switch to another audio player plug-in when you switch audio players and the major functions will still work.

Controlling the audio player from within the schedule is done by sending serial strings to the main serial port. The following commands are supported:

music play
start or restart playback
music pause
pause playback
music resume
resume playback after pausing
music toggle
pause or resume playback depending on the current state
music stop
stop playback
music next
jump to the next song in the playlist
music prev
jump to the previous song in the playlist
music delete
delete the current song from the playlist
volume up
increase volume by 5% of maximum volume
volume down
decrease volume by 5% of maximum volume
volume <level>%
set the volume level between 0 and 100
playlist "<filename>"
start playing the playlist stored in the specified file.
shutdown
Close the audio player and shutdown the computer.¹
music finish
Shutdown the computer after the current song finishes.¹

Note 1: These commands are designed for KDE. For other X-window managers the plug-in will have to be modified. The commands are not implemented in the winamp plug-in.

Examples: 
   Serial port 1: Transmit string 'music stop'
   Serial port 1: Transmit string 'volume 80%'
   Serial port 1: Transmit string 'playlist "rock.m3u"'

Control plug-in additions

The audio player plug-ins can be used in combination with the Control plug-in. They all add the MusicCommand that can be used by actions attached to Control plug-in buttons. The MusicCommand command supports the same actions as the serial commands described above:
  • MusicCommand("play")
  • MusicCommand("pause")
  • MusicCommand("resume")
  • MusicCommand("toggle")
  • MusicCommand("stop")
  • MusicCommand("next")
  • MusicCommand("prev")
  • MusicCommand("delete")
  • MusicCommand("volume","up")
  • MusicCommand("volume","down")
  • MusicCommand("volume",<level>)
  • MusicCommand("playlist","<filename>")
  • MusicCommand("shutdown")¹
  • MusicCommand("finish")¹
Note 1: These commands are not implemented in the winamp plug-in.

The audio player plug-ins also report information about the current state of the audio player back to the Control plug-in. The following control variables will be updated as appropriate by the audio player plug-ins:

wavolume
wastatus
watrack
walength
waartist
watitle
waalbum
washuffle

Audio Player plug-in specifics

WinAmp

To use the HomeVisionXL WinAmp plug-in also on the WinAmp side a plug-in is needed: The ActiveWinAmp plug-in.

The HomeVisionXL winamp plug-in uses the tcom package that is installed by the wintts plug-in. So, to use the WinAmp plug-in you have to also install the wintts plug-in. If you don't need Text-to-Speech functionality, you can leave the wintts plug-in disabled.

The WinAmp plug-in will only work on various Microsoft Windows platforms, which I don't use myself. As a result, the initial version of the plug-in was only an example of the possibilities. The example code was extended to the current version of the plug-in by Bob Gardner.

X Multimedia System

The XMMS Control plug-in for the HomeVisionXL works together with the Inet Control plugin for XMMS by Gerry Duprey.

Amarok

The HomeVisionXL Amarok plug-in comes with a Tcl script that needs to be installed in Amarok to work. This means that a suitable version of tclsh must be present on your computer. On most Linux installations that will normally already be the case.

Last modified: 6 August 2007, 23:43 CEST