[werkkrew]

So, I have seen dozens of demo's around the web of various Ambient Lighting solutions where people are using a million different methods for providing an Ambilight Clone feature off of XBMC.

My question is surrounding what is the most commonly accepted or perhaps "best" way to accomplish this at the moment?

So far I have seen solutions which resemble the following:

Custom XBMC Build running a special AmbiPi Plugin
From what I understand this solution is really fast because it doesn't take images of a movie and process them separately, it uses the actual frame buffer. I could be mistaken though and this solution seems a lot more complicated.

Standard XBMC Build running official Boblight Plugin
This seems easiest as running the boblight daemon on some device and the officially supported plugins would be a lot less messy than the above. My concern is that this one supposedly doesn't perform quite as well because it scrapes images from the screen in real time which can become laggy. I am not 100% on that statement though which is mostly why I am here.

My solution will definitely be composted of a dedicated computer running XBMC feeding a separate controller for the ambient lighting, I am not interested in running XBMC and the LED's on one device as I would have performance concerns.

In either case it seems like the controller you use to control the actual LED's can be a variety of things, personally I feel like I would use a Raspberry Pi for my potential solution but in terms of my question I suppose the answer I am looking for would be what sort of controller is best suited for the application (Rpi, Aurduino, OpenWRT based router, etc). Ideally whatever solution I use will be self enclosed behind the TV as possible, which is why I am leaning toward the Pi because I could (theoretically) have the Pi connected to XBMC over WiFi. I have not seen anyone talk about doing this though and I am concerned Wireless latency might be too high or something.

If anyone can offer some insights as to what sort of solutions are being commonly used for this sort of thing right now it would greatly aid in my decision making process.

I have a BS in computer engineering and I am quite comfortable with all of the actual setup of the LED array and microcontrollers, my questions are mostly surrounding the best way to integrate the LED array and controller with XBMC in the most seamless and high performance way possible.

[Memphiz]

Well i can tell you what works for me.

1. Using a custom arduino for driving the ledstripes (this one is attached behind my tv).
2. Boblightd is running on my openwrt router so that every device in my network can control the leds (yes even via wifi - but it doesn't make much sense to have the videoimage on the ipad and the leds acting behind the tv ).
3. Boblight addon on each client (i can't get usable performance on the ios devices cause the framegrabbing/scaling stalls the gpu pipeline - for using boblight i alwas powerup the macmini or the htpc - then there is no performance problem - you could even install boblightd on the htpc and leave the openwrt router out of the equation - i don't expect any performance issues with that setup).

The advantage of having the arduino connected to the router is that without powering up any pc i can control the leds (using boblight-static client and some fhem hack) for using it as a static ambient light (even if the tv is powered off). Or i can just put a static light at the back when watching livetv over the tv tuner (though mostly i watch livetv by using xbmc on the atv2 nowadays).

Hope that helps.

[werkkrew]

Okay so what I'm gathering from this is the boblight is your preferred solution and the custom XBMC built with AmbiPi isn't necessary at all.

My next question is going to surround any possible way for having the ambient light not rely on an external computer at all, for a totally self enclosed solution. While I use XBMC for a lot of my media watching I still use my PS3 for Blu-Ray's and I watch a lot of TV via Comcast.

So Boblight would work to drive the LEDs from computer based media, but I am at a loss as to how to go about having the ambient lighting be able to work from any source coming into the TV.

[werkkrew]

Well i can tell you what works for me.

1. Using a custom arduino for driving the ledstripes (this one is attached behind my tv).
2. Boblightd is running on my openwrt router so that every device in my network can control the leds (yes even via wifi - but it doesn't make much sense to have the videoimage on the ipad and the leds acting behind the tv ).
3. Boblight addon on each client (i can't get usable performance on the ios devices cause the framegrabbing/scaling stalls the gpu pipeline - for using boblight i alwas powerup the macmini or the htpc - then there is no performance problem - you could even install boblightd on the htpc and leave the openwrt router out of the equation - i don't expect any performance issues with that setup).

The advantage of having the arduino connected to the router is that without powering up any pc i can control the leds (using boblight-static client and some fhem hack) for using it as a static ambient light (even if the tv is powered off). Or i can just put a static light at the back when watching livetv over the tv tuner (though mostly i watch livetv by using xbmc on the atv2 nowadays).

Hope that helps.

Another question I have regarding your setup - from what I understand boblightd runs on the device which is controlling the LED array (as a server daemon) and the other devices, namely the one running a video is a client. If you have boblightd on a router so that anything can connect to it, how is the Arduino being controlled by the router via SPI or something similar which is hard wired from the router to the Arduino? Why would I want to run boblightd on the HTPC?

In my setup using an RPi running boblightd don't I accomplish the same thing? I'm assuming your setup is the way it is because the Arduino doesn't actually have its own means of connecting via wifi and running boblightd itself.

I'm so confused!