[mythtv-users] Serial control of a TV

Ronald Frazier ron at ronfrazier.net
Tue Mar 17 12:42:45 UTC 2009


> As a matter of interest, what do you intend to use the serial control
> for? The only benefit I can see for it is to switch inputs directly
> instead of repeated "input" presses. One of those things I've thought
> about but not had a pressing enough interest in to pursue.

Here are a few things I currently do

1) Control volume. My favorite remote is the one that came with my
hauppauge PVR-350, but it isn't programmable, so I have a script that
reads the lirc codes and then sends the serial control messages

2) Power on the TV and set the input on bootup/wakeup, and power the
TV off at shutdown/sleep

3) Switch the input back to the mythbox when I hold down a remote
button for 1 second (for example, when I'm done playing video games)


Some other things I want to do but haven't gotten around to yet (some
are trivial)

1) Set the volume to a predefined value on startup. Useful if you've
ever turned on the TV only to be BOLDLY reminded that the last program
you watched yesterday had a very quite volume level :)

2) Monitor the TV periodically, and if it is turned off then escape
out of live TV. That frees up a tuner, takes a little load off the
master server, and prevents the hard drive from filling up with a
bunch of livetv stuff (which isn't a problem, except that I might
prefer it not to clear out some deleted programs to make room when it
really doesn't need to)

3) If it's past 9PM and the TV is off, then just put the system to
sleep (I run separate systems for frontend and backend)

-- 
Ron
Ronald Frazier Photography - http://www.ronfphoto.com/
Blogging About Photography - http://ronfrazier.blogspot.com/


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