[tinux]

Hi,

first of all: this is very _very_ nice (and impressive), Dave-O!
I'm definitely gonna use this; in fact, I resoldered all of the I/O, to let it have two rj45 connectors where I can hookup my lighting and 'coffee cooker'.

Allthough I couldn't test my green channel, I've put it on a test run, and it's very cool to see it change colors.

With the short tests I noticed some things:
1. The LCD clock in screensaver mode is broken, due to a missing character (or two)
2. It seemed that the colors weren't updated correctly after I fast-forwarded the movie (on vcd). (I have to check this again, but I'm in the middle of a new patch myself)

Cheers,
Tinux

(btw, I'm using a SmartXX v3)

[lagwagon667]

thank you very much for your reply, tinux.

Yeah, even if you only had white leds hooked up the change of brightness only would still be cool.

1. The LCD clock in screensaver mode is broken, due to a missing character (or two)

on a first note: I noticed, that on stopping the rgb-thread, the port for setting the modchip-led will be set to a value to set the LCD-Backlight (according to the comment). I'll have a closer look on that this weekend. There's nothing else I can imagine right now, what could influence the LCD.

2. It seemed that the colors weren't updated correctly after I fast-forwarded the movie (on vcd). (I have to check this again, but I'm in the middle of a new patch myself)

I didn't realize that by now, might be that the floating average takes a little until it "fits" again (depending on the FloatingAverageFrames value), but I'll check that, too.

btw. I'm using a SmartXX V3 too.

Thanks for your feedback, I'll try to come up with a new patch soon.

Cheers
Dave-O

[lagwagon667]

ok, just found that on at least some DVDs the LEDs turn off after some skipping. I'll fix this. Also found a little bug today which prevents ambilight from working on some DVDs, so don't wonder if you encounter that. Will upload a little patch tomorrow maybe.
As of the lcd clock. It doesn't work on my lcd even before one single line of my code is executed (say I turn the xbox on and wait for screensaver, no pwmcontrol calls in skin or elsewhere). Also, after a movie I always call the ILED_smartxxrgb::OnExit function so everything should be clean after a movie. Are you sure, that this bug is related to my patch?

so long for now
Dave-O

[erix]

I was playing with this patch to get it on Linux but no luck so far, here is the thread I started: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=38862

[Gamester17]

I was playing with this patch to get it on Linux but no luck so far, here is the thread I started: http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=38862

FYI; LINUX/MAC/WINDOWS Ambilight effect like Smartbytes Ambient Reality Effects (A.R.E.) feature discussion thread => http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=36892

LINUX/MAC/WINDOWS Ambilight hardware:
[/quote]http://www.ambilight4pc.com/ambient-real...fects.html
http://www.arfx.nl/
http://www.ambilight4pc.com/momolight/momolight.html
http://www.ambilight4pc.com/atmolight/atmolight.html
http://www.ambilight4pc.com/home/ambilight-4-pcs.html
http://www.ambilight4pc.com/philips-ambx...-ambx.html

[nluk100]

Hello, sorry for the naive question, but what is the importance of the SMARTXX chip? I have a UK Xbox which already supports RGB out, so can I just tap into this somewhere on the motherboard or even on the SCART connector on the back?

It would be great to get this up and running for XBMC owners who have gone down the soft-mod route.

Thanks in advance

[lagwagon667]

Hi there, SmartXX supplies 3 PWM-Channels necessary to control the ambilight. There is no chance getting it to work without it, unless you can decode the video signal on your SCART connector, e.g. utilizing a microcontroller (however, this would be an universal mod without any relation to XBMC)

Cheers
lagwagon667

[nluk100]

OK, thanks for clearing this up :-(

[bob.smith]

Hi dave-o,

i wandered back in here after a long time out (i'd packed all my gear up for a house move, that thanks to the credit crunch never happened), and thought this must be an old thread someone dug up.

Hats off to you for getting this working!

Tinux and myself are smartxx v3 fans, and we both talked about making use of the extra i/o ports.

Are you still maintaining this patch?

Cheers,

BOB.SMITH

Hi, first of all, i've read the news that svn is frozen for new features, however, i'd like to come up with this new feature, because I think a discussion about it can help improve this and so maybe, when atlantis is out, it can make it to the svn.

So I created a ticket here: http://www.xbmc.org/trac/ticket/4551
This patch adds the ability to use LEDs, connected to your SmartXX Modchip, in a way that is quite similar to the Philips Ambilight system (besides the fact that we can utilize only one single channel). If you watch a game of soccer, the rgb-Led would turn most of the time green, by watching an action movie, during an explosion, the rgb would go red-orange, just to make this behaviour clear.

By default it is disabled, to enable it, you have to change your advancedsettings.xml (details, see ticket). I had to change the settings.cpp to utilize this, I hope this is ok, in general I tried to change as less as possible in the source (its my first contribution so please regard this )

I'm looking forward for your feedback

greetings
dave-o

[bob.smith]

Hi Dave-o

i'll patch my working copy tonight with Ticket #4551: ambilight4.patch and report back. was Ticket #4799 merged into svn?

i'm currently on the HEAD with tinux's coffee cooker patch (Ticket #4870).

Peace,

BOB.SMITH

[lagwagon667]

thanks bob for your reply

I will do another update in february when college tests are finished

I want to resolve the issue of the ambilight going red when watching black or very dark movie scenes.

I havent checked yet but I dont think the patch is already in the svn and from what I heard, the xbox port is "finished" so it probably wont make it there anymore (but Im not sure about that)

cheers
dave-o

[Swifty]

Excellent work Dave-o!

Is there any chance this will support sending the signals to a com port instead of the SmartXX ?

Reason being most people are tending to move from the Xbox to other platforms now and I'm sure there are a few people like myself that have built Momolight/Ambilight systems for their PC's. It would be great to have them working native under XBMC Linux for example without any extra software.
The one most people tend to make is here; http://lx.divxstation.com/article.asp?aId=151&page=1

Cheers!

[bob.smith]

Excellent work Dave-o!

Is there any chance this will support sending the signals to a com port instead of the SmartXX ?

Hi Swifty, the architecture of XBMC for platforms other than an xbox is currently significantly different enough for a port to be non trivial.

The smartxx hooks (API) that dave-o used already existed in the XBMC architecture, i cant see any similar interface in other architectures, because the interface was based around the smartxx modchip.

I'm sure if someone was to donate a media PC to Dave-O that would give him a Raison d'être

[lagwagon667]

Excellent work Dave-o!

Is there any chance this will support sending the signals to a com port instead of the SmartXX ?

Hi Swifty, thanks for your reply, besides what bob already wrote there are some more reasons, why it's not so easy to port this patch into other plattforms:

When using the COM port you would need some extra external hardware, besides my driver circuit, to receive data from the COM and translate it into RGB signals because you cant use the com interface for pwm.

When implementing such a circuit, you could transmit easily data for more than one single RGB-Channels which is the maximum, which is possible with the three smartxx pwm channels, so it would make sense, to also rewrite the code that interprets the image to calculate color codes for different parts of the image (e.g. left and right side) and so have an improved stereo ambilight or something.

even if you would be fine with a single rgb-channel, I'm not sure whether the renderers I use to fetch the yuv chunks are the same on other plattforms.

So, all in all a major rewrite would make sense when utilizing this for other plattforms.

I'm sure if someone was to donate a media PC to Dave-O that would give him a Raison d'être

exactement

[Swifty]

Thanks for the replies, I live in hope there may be a solution for linux that is integrated into XBMC at some point in time.. but I won't hold my breath

In the mean time I have found boblight should fit the bill; http://blogger.xs4all.nl/loosen/articles/408184.aspx