[THX-SWE]

I have a Antec Fusion case with a LCD/VFD display that didn't show xbmc-stuff (eg. playerstatus-icons and progressbar) as expected.

So here's what i've done to fix it.

1. The first problem was that some LCD-elements such as the progressbar was scrolling, wich looked awful.
I suspected that the width of the display was set too wide somewhere.
The xbmc-log showed that the display was 16x2 which is correct so the problem wasn't lcdproc or the lirc-imon-driver.

I dug thru the xbmc-source and found out that in XBMC/xbmc/Settings.cpp the display was defaulting to 20 characters.
So the solution for this was to create the file: ~/.xbmc/userdata/advancedsettings.xml and put these lines in there.

Code:

<advancedsettings>
        <lcd>
                <rows>2</rows>
                <columns>16</columns>
        </lcd>
</advancedsettings>

2. The second problem was that the status-icons (pause, ffwd, rwd, play) was not displayed correctly.
This was fixed by editing the following file:
XBMC/xbmc/utils/GUIInfoManager.cpp (Changes in red)

Code:

Line 1194: strLabel.Format("[color=red]\240[/color]");
        Line 1196: strLabel.Format("[color=red]\74[/color]:%ix", iPlaySpeed);
        Line 1198: strLabel.Format("[color=red]\76[/color]:%ix", iPlaySpeed);
        Line 1200: strLabel.Format("[color=red]\20[/color]");

Actually only the last three lines worked (ffwd, rwd, play).
For some reason the character \240 doesn't work.
Maybe someone can explain that to me.
If you run the following commands (with lcdproc killed):

Code:

perl -e 'print "\240"' > /dev/lcd0

or

Code:

perl -e 'print pack "c", 0xA0' > /dev/lcd0

it displays the correct character, but not from the xbmc-source.

3. The third problem was that the block-characters used for the progressbar didn't show correctly, in fact wrong characters was displayed.
The full-block-characters showed up as the character ÿ.
This was fixed by editing the file:
XBMC/xbmc/utils/LCD.cpp (changes in red)

Code:

Line 48: 0xff, 0x21, 0x20, 0x20, 0x20, 0x5c, 0x7c, 0x20, 0x22, 0x20, 0x20, [color=red]0x07[/color], [color=red]0x05[/color], [color=red]0x03[/color], [color=red]0x01[/color], [color=red]0x00[/color], // Custom characters

4. The fourth problem may not be a problem for outhers but it´s something that bothered me.
I wanted to display the clock positioned at the center of the LCD when XBMC is in screensaver-mode, and the only way i could come up with was to add some spaces to the left of the clock.
The problem was that this wasn't allowed because the spaces where to be "trimmed" by XBMC.
The solution was found in the file XBMC/xbmc/linux/XLCDproc.cpp where i commented out the following line:

Code:

Line 203: //strLineLong.Trim();

[tsint]

I also have the Antec Fusion (Silver), but I have not experienced these problem.

What I do have problem with is:
1. Text strings that exceed the LCD width is scrolling, that is ok but there is no separator between end and start of the text string. For example the song name "Islands In The Stream (Duet With Reba McEntire)" is displayed "Islands In The Stream (Duet With Reba McEntire)Island In...". I would like to insert some separator, possible?
2. Text that is scrolling is scrolling way to fast (my opinion), is it possible to configure the speed?

[THX-SWE]

Hmm, which xbmc version do you use?
I'm running the latest 8.10 Atlantis release, and also the SVN, on ubuntu 8.04.1.

I'm using lirc, lcdproc and lirc_imon-module that comes with ubuntu.

Have you made any special configuration or something?

Regarding the scrolling-speed, try adding this to ~/.xbmc/userdata/advancedsettings.xml

Code:

<scrolldelay>2</scrolldelay>

[lkraav]

note: add scrolldelay tag inside the lcd tag. thanks for the tip thx!

[Arquizona]

I can´t view in the VFD display the equalizer, running XBMC.

Any idea why?

[Swifty]

Interesting that this post has resurfaced, I don't get the play, pause, stop etc.. icons under XBMC on my HD44780.
I presume you guys have them working under your displays?
Will have to try out the fix posted here and see if it works for me.

[lkraav]

as a matter of fact i dont think i have those characters working. there's also the text separation issue described above. minor annoyances, i guess thats why i havent bothered.

[sirthid]

Hi,
I'm encountering the very same problems than THX-SWE, and as a total Newbie I'm scared/unable to hack my XBMC. However, it would be nice to have that one fixed, wouldn't it? I couldn't find a bug report, maybe I've just overlooked it, otherwise I'm happy to write one...
cheers,
Sirthid

edit: bug report created.