Video and audio control

[Barf]

Hi,

after one year on my TODO-list, I have finally dived into EG...

- I have an LCD-screen as Monitor 1 (for "work"), and a projector as "Monitor 2" (for Hometheatre applications). I would like to switch Monitor 2 on and off with EG; how? Possibly also change "Primary Monitor" between the LCD screen and the projector. Finally I would like to turn off the LCD screen "as much as possible". Turning OFF is preferrable to blanking, not only for energy reasons, but also for the -- in a hometheatre environment slighty disturbing -- residual light. Yes, there is the possiblity of showing a black picture with "Show picture" -- anything better?

- I would like to switch the soundcard between 2.0, 5.1 and 7.1 mode from EG. How can this be done?

- How can "Show Picture" be reverted?

- Probably simple for windows wizards: How do you find out the WM_COMMAND codes, e.g. in the WMPlayer plugin?

I have now spent spent several hours with EG, WITHOUT crashes, hangers, or finding bugs!! Great, Lars!

[Bitmonster]

1. Take a look at the System/Set Display Preset action. It will query the current windows display settings, stores them and can revert to this setup on execute.

2. Currently not possible. I'm also not sure if this functionality is exposed by the driver.

3. I would guess by setting the path to an empty string.

4. There is no common way. The vendor of the application has to document them in some way or you will unlikely find them.

[Barf]

Thanx for your anwers!!

1. Real cool feature.

2. Hmmm. Since Zoomplayer has a /speaker:n command line option that does exactly what I want (see http://www.inmatrix.com/zplayer/parameters.shtml) I suspect that it should be cleanly doable at least from the Win32 API. Anyone?

3. Confirmed. Again thanx.

4. Ok. I thought I had seen a "sniffer" somewhere, but I may be wrong.

[Bitmonster]

2. The SoundMixer-API is very complex. If you want to take a look:
http://www.borg.com/~jglatt/tech/mixer.htm
Since I don't use much sound-control, my motivation to enhance it is very low. And Vista has a new mixer API (EndpointVolume API) that is needed to make "global" settings. Under Vista all settings of the old API apply only to the current program (which is quite useless for EventGhost, as we want to modify the global sound).

4. Well, you can use a message sniffer (like WinSpy++), but to actually see the needed messages, some program has to send them to your target. So you could use it to find out how other programs control WMPlayer for example, but you can't enumerate all messages the program might understand without any sample.

[CollinR]

You can use IR or serial to switch your reciever from 2.1,5.1 and 7.1.


The WD_COMMAND codes are basically the only holdup, try to pick only software that defines them.

[Bitmonster]

You can use IR or serial to switch your reciever from 2.1,5.1 and 7.1.

He wants to change the speaker set-up in the audio control panel. Switching it by hardware is not sufficient for his setup, because he would miss some channels if he wants to switch to a headphone for example and uses software decoding of AC3.

The WD_COMMAND codes are basically the only holdup, try to pick only software that defines them.

Quite right. The world would be nice, if every program would expose and document some automation interface.

[CollinR]

You can use IR or serial to switch your reciever from 2.1,5.1 and 7.1.

He wants to change the speaker set-up in the audio control panel. Switching it by hardware is not sufficient for his setup, because he would miss some channels if he wants to switch to a headphone for example and uses software decoding of AC3.

Yes it has limitations however better then nothing. For me it works perfectly however I never use headphones or software decoding.

Really though I have been using SageTV on MVPs so much EG has been getting neglected.

I did notice a SageTV plugin! Thats somthing I'm going to play with ASAP.