touch screen and "now playing" with CD changers

[ziocan]

No matter what I try, every other picture is much smaller. Adding a 2nd picture doesn't change the behaviour...

[ziocan]

Looks like the screen saver is presenting pictures with different zoom levels. Maybe it's a feature, I don't know; for sure it hurts in my setup!

[ziocan]

LOL, trying to change the PHOTO_TIMEOUT programmatically, I must have sent something odd to the director, which crashed.

Lo and behold, after director restarted, the touch screen now "behaves" and no longer alternates between original and zoomed-out version of the picture.

I re-restarted director and the "right" behaviour seem persistent. Oddly enough, now it works perfectly.

 

[ziocan]

OK just to recap how it works now...

- when disc changer turns on, touchscreen changes screen saver from "blank" to "custom+picture"

- on track and/or disc change, an announcement pops up announcing artist, album, track complete with cover art

- after set timeout, screen saver kicks in and shows current song playing (artist, album, track, cover art), this changes automatically when track and/or disc changes

- when disc changer turns off, touchscreen screen saver reverts to "blank"

So everything works nicely. Only remaining issue is, the screen saver image only gets updated when the next image refresh is due and therefore there is a bit of delay.  When the track changes, the touch screen wakes up and shows the announcement, then after a bit the screen saver kicks in again, but it shows the old image, even if the image has already  been updated. Looks like the screensaver has some kind of "cache" that keeps displaying the old image even if on disk there is a new image, and this until the time-to-refresh from image shuffle is reached.

Anyone out there knows how to send a message to the touchscreen to reset/force the image change of the screensaver? I found an old hack by RyanE that contains a script to send a PICTURE_ADDED command to the touchscreen via C4Soap but it doesn't seem to change anything....

 

Thanks

Rick

 

[ziocan]

On 27/4/2016 at 9:51 PM, Cyknight said:

Curious what version you're on - loop backs to 127.0.0.1 were blocked as of one of the more recent releases, as it caused issues.

And to stick with it - while you have cover-art, there is still no disc/song/artist info

Just found out last week. They blocked the loopback mount starting with 2.8.  I have put an old USB stick in the back of the secondary and am using scp to copy the updated screensaver image over there. Works just fine.

[565557030]

I would like to ask how you displayed the picture on the screen? Thank you

[ziocan]

Hey guys,

resurrecting this thread because I have been porting the "now playing" driver to OS 3.1 / T3's and in the process I made it independent from any shared folder whatsoever.

The new version uses announcement agent or (preferred) popups to display the current song information, so no longer tied to screensaver (which was unreliable and appears to not work anymore on T3's anyway)

So basically the driver will display cover art and album/track info from the currently playing CD  on any enabled touchscreen in real time. Track changes, info changes.

Personally I find it very cool although I seem the only one left who runs 777 changers  

Please do not lecture me again on how CDs could be best stored on hard drives, etc - I'm too old for that, and right because I'm an old dog I love to keep my 777's chumming along! 

 

I also thought to share the driver here in case someone is curious. Hey if you still have CDs on  777 changers you will love this.

 

Rick

 

 

nowplaying777.c4z