info-beamer pi 0.9.3 released

info-beamer 0.9.3 adds an option that makes it easier to use the official Raspberry PI display.

Support for multiple displays

The new official Raspberry PI display is now available. Unlike normal screens it's not connected using HDMI but uses the builtin DSI port.

It is possible to attach both types at the same time. When you do that, the primary screen defaults to the screen connected using DSI. By default info-beamer uses the primary screen. Using the new INFOBEAMER_TARGET_D variable allows you to explicitly set the display.

To change the default screen (from DSI to HDMI), you can use the display_default_lcd option in /boot/config.txt. Setting

display_default_lcd = 0

will set the default to HDMI. Setting the value to 1 or not using the option will default to the attached DSI display.

Running multiple info-beamer instances

You can start info-beamer multiple times to show content on both screens at the same time. Start the HDMI instance like this:

$ INFOBEAMER_TARGET_D=tv info-beamer /path/to/node

and the DSI instance like this. Notice that you must assign another port to info-beamer manually as the default port of 4444 is already used by the other instance.

$ INFOBEAMER_TARGET_D=lcd INFOBEAMER_PORT=5555 info-beamer /path/to/other/node

Both instances are now running at the same time and show their content.

Query available nodes remotely

When using the TCP interface you couldn't find out which nodes are loaded. info-beamer 0.9.3 adds a new command *query/*nodes that returns an unsorted comma-separated list of available nodes. To enable this feature you have to set the environment variable

INFOBEAMER_CMD_NODES=1

The code for ibquery has been updated to support this feature. The following code will query stats for all available nodes:

import ibquery
ib = ibquery.InfoBeamerQuery("127.0.0.1")
for path in ib.nodes:
    print "%s requires %dkb memory" % (path, ib.node(path).mem)

Bugfix: Audio properly paused

When loading a video in paused mode audio didn't pause as well. This bug is fixed now and audio playback only starts when the video is started using video:start.