Home Theatre Device Control

Will — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:43:04 +0000

Home theatre devices do not like to play nice together. They each use separate protocols and methods for command and control, and finding documentation or sample code on how they work is often difficult.

I have written two small libraries and put them up on GitHub for devices I have come in contact with:

The code for the Viewsonic Pro 8100 will let you control every feature documented in the manual over a serial connection. Reading data back from the projector is not yet fully functional, however.
The code for the Onkyo Receiver should be compatible with other Onkyo devices using their ISCP protocol over Ethernet. With a bit of elbow grease, that library should also be useful for those wishing to control their Onkyo serial devices.
If you find either library useful, please drop me a note — and patches are always welcome!

Fix a Broken AVI Seek Table/Index

Will — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 16:21:42 +0000

Recently I was given a video by a friend in AVI format that caused trouble when playing it on my Neuros OSD. When I watched the video on my laptop with mplayer, everything was fine, but when you tried to seek with the Neuros it reported a video 16 minutes in length instead of the full hour it should have been. Poking around the internet I found the following solution: Use mencoder to rebuild the AVI index, and write it out to a new copy of the video.

$ mencoder -forceidx input.avi -o output.avi -oac copy -ovc copy $ mv output.avi input.avi

After that, the new input.avi should be playable, and seeking should work properly again.

compbrain.net » video

Home Theatre Device Control

Fix a Broken AVI Seek Table/Index