Media center visualizer recommendations? \ VOGONS

Media center visualizer recommendations?

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First post, by snorg

Posted on 2018-05-26, 02:20

snorg Offline

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I've got an AMD A10 APU that I set up a while back to be a media center. Originally I was going to use Win Vista as I didn't have a Win 7 license and I didn't want to purchase a Win 10 license as there is no Windows Media Player.
However, I've been thinking about making a mod to the front of my Cooler Master case to have a 5" LCD that could display a simplified media player interface (touchscreen maybe?) and then when actually playing back an audio file it would show either an old school graphic EQ visualization or maybe some trippy OpenGL stuff. Video files/tv would be output to the TV of course. I'm not entirely sure how to make all this work together and make it look like something resembling a store-bought product and not a bodge job. I could use some recommendations on the following:

OS: better to use Linux or stick with Vista? It would be nice to be able to game on the machine when not using it as a jukebox/DVR.

LCD: touchscreen isn't absolutely necessary but I would like something that could display a list of media files, artist info/albums, and then play a music visualization.

THanks in advance.

Reply 1 of 3, by snorg

Posted on 2018-05-27, 06:23

snorg Offline

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Joined: 2011-05-29, 15:32

Well I've done some digging around on the interwebs, here is what I've found:

This seems to be some sort of LCD software, given the page hasn't been updated since 2007 I don't know how useful it will be: http://www.lcdstudio.com/site20/home.php ---- it seems like it would be useful for displaying various system stats, if nothing else.

Here is a pretty cool visualizer plugin for making trippy visuals, I don't know how well this integrates with your typical media player, haven't tested it yet: http://www.vsxu.com/

Here is a pretty neat LCD visualizer: https://www.ebay.com/itm/EVOR04-Color-LCD-tou … YkAAOSw7U5Y9iyN

I don't know how you'd integrate that with a media player interface, though. Seems like you'd need a separate small LCD for that.

I think my best bet at this point is to try and find a small HDMI display I can mod into the front panel, and just use that with Windows and either XBMC or Kodi or something. Then I would just need to figure out how to integrate something like that VSXU plugin and I'd have about 90% of what I want.

Hopefully someone else besides myself will find this useful. It's a shame there aren't many HTPC cases that look like audio components, I do like the Silverstone ones but the ones with LCDs are ridiculously expensive.