HA : Can I broadcast a signal to slimserver ?

[Alaric]

Hi Guys,

I have a slimserver PC and a couple of squeezeboxes with some speakers about my home. I'm also looking at installing a few more with ceiling speakers and bits....A kind of distributed home audio system.

I'm also curently playing with a few bits of Home Automation, particularly in respects to my cinema set-up and just hit on the idea of re-using some stuff that i already have - Ie the Squeezebox network.

So, is it posible to do a broadcast to the squeezebox, say such as a doorbell message or similar - Ie briefly interupt the curent program, play the message then resume the current program for that box ???

Would be a wonderfuly useful feature if its posible ???

Thanks,
Lee

[Patrick Dixon]

Have a look at the Plugins that have already been written.

http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.cgi?SlimServerPlugins

Announcement may well do what you want as it can play a file and display a message from an external trigger:-

http://www.gwendesign.com/slimserver/dev_software.htm#announcement

[Alaric]

Hi There,

It looks interesting, however it is a perl script and from having a quick read through it, it has only been tested on Linux. I'm running a win NT/2000 server for my server box !

Ta,
Lee

[mherger]

> It looks interesting, however it is a perl script and from having a
> quick read through it, it has only been tested on Linux. I'm running a
> win NT/2000 server for my server box !

I've been running perl scripts on Windows platforms all the time - not
only SlimServer related scripts. That's no problem.

Michael

[aubuti]

perl on Windows is essentially the same as perl on linux, so you can check it out easily by installing perl on your server. It's free software http://www.activestate.com/Products/ActivePerl/

[Alaric]

Hi There,

Yeah i've used that before a long while back....However i still think of perl as linux based !

Curiously do you have to run this script on the slimserver box, or can it be from anywhere ???

Ta,
Lee

[aubuti]

They are slimserver plugins, so they must be installed in slimserver's plugins directory. Slimserver takes care of triggering the script.

NB: slimserver itself is written in perl (although there is a compiled exe for Windows) and all the plugins are perl scripts.

[peterw]

They are slimserver plugins, so they must be installed in slimserver's plugins directory. Slimserver takes care of triggering the script.


The Announcement script Patrick suggested is a standalone script that uses the CLI, so it does not need to run on the same machine as Slimserver itself. It will need TCP access to the CLI service on the Slimserver host, and appears to require that any sound files be accessible by the Slimserver application as simple files (I haven't run the script, but I expect Felix's note that $szSound should be "path on the machine where announcement.pl runs" is wrong, and $szSound should be the path on the machine where Slimserver runs).

-Peter

[aubuti]

Oops! Sorry for the misinformation I posted, and thanks to Peter for setting it straight.