Mythlcdserver

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Important.png Note: The correct title of this article is mythlcdserver. It appears incorrectly here due to technical restrictions.

Mythlcd.jpg

mythlcdserver is a program for displaying MythTV information on an LCD/VFD screen through LCDproc. This means you can have data from Myth (channel number, show name, current size of pause buffer,etc., etc.) displayed on an LCD screen. So ... possible to do things like play/advance music tracks without your TV having to be on. This can be enabled in the frontend settings.



Important.png Note: If you see messages such as this when running mythlcdserver from a command prompt:

 2006-09-04 23:41:32.448 LCDProcClient: WARNING: Something is gettingpassed to LCDd that it doesn't understand
 2006-09-04 23:41:32.449 last command: widget_set Time timeWidget 5 2 "11 41 PM"

It means that mythtv has been compiled with a different version of the LCDProc protocol.

MythTV 0.19.0 and prior can only communicate in the LCDProc 0.4.x protocol.

MythTV 0.20.0 and up should be able to communicate in both LCDProc 0.4.x and 0.5.x protocol versions. (this may be a build option?)

MythTV 0.21 only partially functions with LCDProc 0.5.3, (released June 2009). SVN and trunk versions may be able to. [1]. The -fixes branch of MythTV 0.21 (released June 13, 2009 or later) has 0.5.3 support built in.

Setup mythlcdserver

mythlcdserver is usually started up by the mythfrontend program. Whether or not it is started is governed by some settings in the mythfrontend Setup menu.

You can find the setup options in Utilities/Setup->Setup->Appearance->LCD device display. Check the "Enable LCD device" item and the following options will appear.

Display Time
Display Menus
Display Music Artist and Title
items  Artist -Title
       Artist [Album] Title

Display Channel Information
Display Recording Status

Display Volume Information
Display Generic Information
Backlight Always On
Heartbeat Always On
Display Large Clock

LCD Key order   - ABCDEF

Menu Pop-up Time : 5 (The time (in seconds) that the menu will remain visible after navigation.)

Running mythlcdserver from the Command Line

You can run from the commandline with the following options

> mythlcdserver

Valid options are: 
-p or --port number           A port number to listen on (default is 6545) 
-d or --daemon                Runs lcd server as a daemon 
-n or --nodaemon              Does not run lcd server as a daemon (default)
-m or --startupmessage        Message to show at startup
-t or --messagetime           How long to show startup message (default 30 seconds)
-l or --logfile filename      Writes STDERR and STDOUT messages to filename
-v or --verbose debug-level    Use '-v help' for level info
-x or --debuglevel level      Control how much debug messages to show
                              [number between 0 and 10] (default 0)

See also

Lengthy discussion regarding mythlcdserver on mythtv-user