Overview

Controlling your lights and electronics for events in MediaPortal, such as when a movie starts playing.

Requirements

Since the HTPC now is in control of the lights we need it to turn the lights off when a movie starts playing. It should also turn them back on when pausing and at the end of the movie. For this purpose we will use eventTrigger. Click on the link below for download and installation.

• eventTrigger sends an event to EventGhost instead of controlling the TellStick directly. This means that you can control other equipment such as a projector or an amplifier via RS232, a ceiling fan or motor curtain over IR, VoIP phone software... any other ideas?
• Support for sending events over TCP/IP which means that EventGhost can be installed on another computer.

Features

• Dim the lights depending on media played (if the hardware supports it). For example, set the lights to 80 % when playing TV, recordings or radio, 40 % when playing music and 0 % for movies.
• Control the lights only after sunset (based on your location and time of day and year). You probably don’t need the lights to turn on and off during the day.
• Disabled if the video being played is shorter than X minutes. Good idea if you like to watch trailers or short video clips and don’t need the lamps going on and off every time.

Configuration for EventTrigger

Using eventTrigger's events in EventGhost

1. After installing and configuring eventTrigger be sure to add the plugin Network Event Receiver to EventGhost's Autostart folder and configure it to use the same port and password as is set in eventTrigger's settings window. You can find it at Add Plugin > Other > Network Event Receiver.
2. Uncheck Log only assigned and activated events in EventGhost or you won't see the generated events.
3. Start MediaPortal and generate five video events: Play, Pause, Resume, Stop and End. They will turn up as TCP.MediaPortal.Video.Play in EventGhost's log pane.
4. Drag and drop TCP.MediaPortal.Video.Pause, TCP.MediaPortal.Video.Stop and TCP.MediaPortal.Video.End events to the TellStick: Turn on Lamp 1 macro created in Step 3 - Replace TelldusCenter. This means that the next time you stop or pause a video or it ends, EventGhost will turn your lights on.
5. Drag and drop TCP.MediaPortal.Video.Play and TCP.MediaPortal.Video.Resume events to the TellStick: Turn off Lamp 1 macro.

The example above will only affect videos. You may also add events for music, radio, recordings and TV if desired.

Configuration

This is what the EventGhost configuration looks like so far:

There’s lots more help to get about configuring EventGhost at their forums.

Notes

There is a problem with eventTrigger's Issue the event locally which will launch several EventGhost processes if UAC is enabled.