Frequently Asked Questions - ambilight-4-mediaportal/AtmoLight GitHub Wiki

##General Questions

Question: What is AtmoLight?
Answer: AtmoLight is a MediaPortal plugin that allows to send the screen content directly to your target software, making this way more efficient and cpu friendly. AtmoLight also acts as a remote for your target software, allowing the user to enable or disable the leds, aswell as change effects and lots more. It is highly recommended that you use the AtmoLight plugin, if you want to use MediaPortal and your ambilight.


Question: What are these "targets" you talk about?
Answer: We call the software that AtmoLight controls a target. For example, if you use AtmoWin in addition to AtmoLight, then AtmoWin is the target you use. If you use a RapsberryPi with Hyperion, then Hyperion is the target.


Question: What is AtmoWin?
Answer: AtmoWin is a standalone software that analyses the content on you screen and then sends the colors to your Ambilight controller (Arduino, SEDU and so on).


Question: What is Hyperion?
Answer: Hyperion is a network controlled Ambilight system which is fully supported by AtmoLight. It's usually installed on an Raspberry Pi and you can find more about it on the Hyperion Wiki page.


Question: What is Hue?
Answer: Hue is a system Philips developed to support remotely control lights. AtmoLight does support it indirectly by means of an application called AtmoHue and you can find more about it in the AtmoHue forum thread listed under Useful Links.


Question: My video playback stutters/I have a lot of dropped frames. How can i fix this?
Answer: Make sure that AtmoLight uses the "MediaPortal Liveview Mode". This way AtmoLight handles the capturing of the screen and not your target software. As AtmoLight can work directly with MediaPortal rendering assets this is way faster. Open the MediaPortal Configuration, navigate to Plugins and open the AtmoLight configuration. For Video/TV/Recordings choose "MediaPortal Liveview Mode". Click Save and exit MediaPortal Configuration with OK.


Question: What does the frequency mean for the delay feature?
Answer: During implementation of the delay feature we discovered that the delay depends on the refresh rate of your monitor/tv. For example, on the same system a video played with 50hz needs more delay than a video played with 24hz. AtmoLight can calculate the delay for every refreshrate, if you define one delay at one refresh rate. To set this up, simply start a video, figure out the needed delay and then note the refresh rate the video was playing at.


Question: The colors don't seem right. What can i do?
Answer: Chances are that everything is setup to use RGB values. But many leds actually use BGR or GRB, or another order. Playback one of the many demo videos for ambilights. You can find thoose on youtube. You want one that only displays different colors on the whole screen. It should be obvious what is wrong right away. If the screen shows red but your leds are blue then you have to switch R and B and so on. You can change these options in the config file of your hardware or with a specific tool to access the firmware of your hardware. If you have done this and still have problems with wrong colors, especially where red, green and blue mix, finetune your system further by performing a "White adjustment".



##MediaPortal 1 Specific Questions Question: I can't open the context menu/toggle leds/switch profile with the color buttons. What is wrong?
Answer: You will need to add some new actions to the remote buttons. Open MediaPortal Configuration and navigate to Remotes. In the tab for you remote press on Mapping (for some remotes press Learn and then Mapping). Navigate to "Teletext specific buttons", here you can see the 4 color buttons. Open the button you want to use (e.g. red). Under "No Condition" you will have to add the action "Remote Red Button". This way everytime you press red, no matter where you are in MediaPortal, the "Remote Red Button" action gets triggered and AtmoLight gets informed. Repeat this for all the buttons you want to use.


Question: I choose "MediaPortal Liveview Mode" for Music, Radio or GUI/Menu, but its not working. Why?
Answer: To use the MediaPortal Liveview Mode outside of video playback you will need a patched MediaPortal.exe. You can find the exe here: https://ambilight-4-mediaportal.googlecode.com/git/MediaPortal/MediaPortal.exe/ If you use a version that has no patch yet, please let me know and i will generate one for you.



##AtmoWin Specific Questions Question: AtmoLight cant connect to AtmoWin, what can i do?
Answer: AtmoWin needs to register its COM interface first. To achieve this, open the command prompt (Win+R and type cmd), navigate to the AtmoWin directory (C:\ProgramData\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal\Atmowin) and then execute "AtmoWinA.exe /register".

If you have connection issues after resume you can enabled AtmoWakeHelper in the AtmoLight configuration window under the AtmoWin tab.
You need to set to your AtmoWin COM port (the one from your initial AtmoWin setup) and can adjust times if needed as some machines take longer during resume but the defaults should be alright for most.

AtmoWakeHelper requires to run its sub process (USBDeview) as administrator so might require additional setup if you have UAC set up strictly (default), to run it as administrator you need to do the following:

• Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\Team MediaPortal\MediaPortal
• Right click on USBDeview.exe or USBDeview-86.exe if you're on 32bit windows and select Properties from the context menu.
• Click on the Compatibility tab and tick the "Run this program as an administrator" box.
• Now press Apply and Ok to close the window, AtmoWakeHelper can now properly control your COM ports.

Question: How does Color/White adjustment work?
Answer: AtmoWin and many other ambilight programs expect the leds to be perfect. However they are not. The 3 different colors (red, green, blue) do not all have the same brightness. So we need to adjust some settings to get a nice result. Click on the "Configure software adjustment" button. Now we can adjust a lot of levels. We recommend to first change the gamma. In short, gamma will adjust the brightness. To get brightness levels that are similar to the ones from your tv you have use the same gamma as your tv does. If you dont know what value your tv is using or cant test it, use 2.2 (optimal value for tvs). Also dont forget to enable gamma adjustment by changing the mode to "Global". Now you can adjust the rgb values. The idea is for the leds to display a perfect white. If you feel your leds are to blue, then lower the blue value, and so on. After you have done that, you may want to play some videos and when you see that one color is to dominant or to low, adjust the levels accordingly. The end result should look something like this: