Re: Whole House Audio & TV Control

Darren,

I think I have done something close to what you are looking for. What I have is a P133 PC ($300 excluding DVD player) that uses an Interlink IR mouse ($85). The computer runs an a/v control application that I wrote. The computer output is overlayed onto the analog video output of the a/v receiver with a Delta Scan luminance key box ($350-$400). There is no need for a TV card. The result is an analog video stream that can be distributed over a normal video distribution system. This approach has the advantage of maintaining the quality of the original analog video.

To turn the system on or off, you click on the right mouse button "right-click". If you left-click the main interface buttons appear to float over the video output of the a/v receiver. There are three buttons on the right(CD, DSS, DVD), three buttons on the left (TV, Tuner, VCR), one drop down box on the bottom which controls channels for the tuner, tv and dss, depending on what is active, and four buttons on top (mute, vol+, vol- and surround). A left-click on a button will make the main buttons disappear and the selected screen will appear. A left-click on an open space will make all of the buttons disappear.

I will attempt to describe the cd screen since that is your primary interest. The cd screen features a simple player interface, one of the buttons will trigger the selection screen. The selection screen features ten thumbnail pictures of your cds at a time. You can scroll back and forth through all 200 of your cds, 10 at a time. If you click on a thumbnail, the cd will be added to your playlist. Clicking again will remove it from the playlist. The order of selection will determine the order of play. Once you hit play, the selection screen disappears and you are back at the player. As the cds play, a larger image of the cd is displayed with album artist and title. The system scans the cds in the player but the lookup is in a local MS-Access table and the images are bitmaps (with 5% luminance tinting which is not noticeable) stored local.

The interface has been written to be attractive on a TV and everthing is very legible. I wrote this to have a GUI on-screen control with a simple two button remote mouse (spouse test). The system is always on and has been up for a month at a time so far. The one glitch is the first time, and only the first time, after you start the application and you select the cd screen you get an error message about unable to end receive thread. You should be able to go months without seeing this message box. There is nothing unique about the program as to how you handle the echoing of the IR mouse. Does this sound like what you are looking for.

Tom