u/Logansfury

Playing around with Willem's recently released files :)

His frosted glass style made me think of ice so I did some edits to bring in icy blues and whites in place of the greens and green gradients.

I found a nice wallpaper of melting ice cubes, set my semi-transparent Cursor theme, my custom Transparent icons set (I have picked up a few new panel items since I last ran this set, I need to make replacements for the new icons.) The Mint-Dark-Aqua theme, and called it a GUI!

Hello everyone,

MKControl is now v5.8.2

I have added an Audio tab!!

Now in addition to video and radio, it can cast any standard MP3 to my Smart TV's.

Function:

Clicking the Search button opens the last navigated directory. Selecting a file automatically adds it to the Playlist, and shows its album art and metadata.

Clicking the Add Folder button opens the last navigated directory. Selecting a folder automatically adds all accepted extention contents to the playlist.

Remove button removed an item from the playlist. Move Up and Down changes the item position in list appropriately. Clear Playlist removes all items and creates blank list.

Opening the Playlist dropdown menu and clicking any file other than 1st changes album art and metadata display to the new file.

Cast button starts playing the first item in the list. Pause and Resume work on currently playing file. Stop stops play. Previous and Next change the track appropriately, stopping at first and last track on standard Cast, or going from first track to last track and last track to first track if Repeat Playlist is checked. Shuffle randomizes play of the list when checked.

The progress bar is draggable and will immedately restart play and any changed time position.

I am very happy with it so far :)

Future version features to come:

Save/Load Playlists

Drag & Drop file and folders

Overthrow small Latin-American government (still going in circles with the bot about the ethics of this one)

Stay tuned!!

Hello everyone,

MKControl is now v5.52 and probably final :D

I have the screen all black for the radio station display, and have added album art!

Image of the new gui with Radio Tab: https://i.postimg.cc/cJvvsT9X/ksnip-20260702-041422.png

Hello everyone,

I have done more work on MKControl. It is now in v5.x

First I got the idea, hey if we can cast local media, how about casting local radio station streams to my TV with the great sound system?

I got with the bot and we got my 3 favorite stations assigned to buttons in the new Radio tab that each wake up the TV and cast the appropriate station.

Then I got the idea to put the metadata onscreen. Bot accomplished that.

Then I got the idea to use the metadata to search out the lyrics and display timed karoke style lyrics over the currently playing local radio station song! Bot accomplished THAT.

Here we are, I am now seeing if we can add album art :D

I will update if anything interesting happens!

Image of the new gui with Radio Tab: https://i.postimg.cc/cJvvsT9X/ksnip-20260702-041422.png

Hello everyone,

Plex has never worked on MInt for me, so I rely on MKChromecast for casting local and networked videos to my smartTV/Surround sound bar. MKChromecast is all terminal commands however, so I went to ChatGPT and asked if we could make a GUI for it. This evolved into the full blown application I am showing here. I call it MKControl v420.

To start, has a Find button to search the home for any smart TV devices and makes a config file of what it has found in case a device is offline (it uses chromecast detection on the appropriate port to find and wake sleeping TVs)

Next is the Search button, which can navigate all local and networked drives for media. When a file is selected, the search window auto closes andd the Video File field populates with the file name. The Command field auto populates the terminal command to start the selected file. A thumbnail image of the select file appears in top right corner.

Cast sends the file to the selected TV, waking it if necessary.

+/- 60 second buttons restart the cast at the designated time. Dragging the progress thumb or clicking on the progress bar restarts the cast at the designated time.

The cast stream may be Paused and Resumed with the matching buttons. Cast may be Stopped or Restarted with the matching buttons.

The stream may be cleared, and if the stream is a movie file with chapters, the Next and Previous Chapter buttons navigate thru the movie. The current position is printed on the app as "Chapter: X of X"

The volume may be muted with the Mute button and unmuted by clicking the Mute button a second time. The Volume slider may be used to adjust the selected TV volume up and down.

There is a Pair TV button that once used, allows the app to Power Off the selected TV with the matching button.

I spent a lot of hours on this, adding feature by feature and testing and retesting that no other features broke on any edit.

I then returned to the bot with my MKControl v420 files and we have began coding of version 5.0 - overlaid timed lyrics on playing music-videos!

IT WORKS :)

It took some tinkering, we found there was a 5 second buffer delay between ffmpeg generating the lyric overlay and the on TV display. A timing variable has been implemented to start all lyrics 5 seconds ahead of website listed times and the synchronization is almost perfect :D

The python script running this tests about 4-5 different online resources for timed lyrics after pulling the artist and title fields from the current media.

Currently this is accomplished by two python scripts working in tandem, with the primary script launched via terminal. The next step is to put the lyrics scripts functionality into the GUI python for MKChromecast.

I AM SO FREAKING EXCITED!!! :D :D :D

Latest work has been testing and confirming that MKControl v5.x is working as intended. Here is a picture of the latest GUI with new buttons and a short film taken from my cell phone of my bedroom TV while MKControl v5.1 is casting a video with Live Lyrics option enabled :D

Hello everyone,

Testing and confirming that MKControl v5.1 is working as intended. Here is a picture of the latest GUI with new buttons and a short film taken from my cell phone of my bedroom TV while MKControl v5.1 is casting a video with Live Lyrics option enabled :D

https://i.postimg.cc/W35m2CtR/ksnip-20260630-124806.png

Hello everyone,

I have returned to the bot with my MKControl v420 files and we have begun coding of version 5.0 - overlaid timed lyrics on playing music-videos!

IT WORKS :)

Here is the official video for RUSH - Subdivisions, which is the same duration and has lyrics in the same timing as the album audio, displaying the currently sung lyric on my bedroom smart TV. It took some tinkering, we found there was a 5 second buffer delay between ffmpeg generating the lyric overlay and the on TV display. A timing variable has been implemented to start all lyrics 5 seconds ahead of website listed times and the synchronization is almost perfect :D

The python script running this tests about 4-5 different online resources for timed lyrics after pulling the artist and title fields from the current media.

Currently this is accomplished by two python scripts working in tandem, with the primary script launched via terminal. The next step is to put the lyrics scripts functionality into the GUI python for MKChromecast.

I AM SO FREAKING EXCITED!!! :D :D :D

Hello everyone,

Plex has never worked on MInt for me, so I rely on MKChromecast for casting local and networked videos to my smartTV/Surround sound bar. MKChromecast is all terminal commands however, so I went to ChatGPT and asked if we could make a GUI for it. This evolved into the full blown application I am showing here. I call it MKControl v420.

To start, has a Find button to search the home for any smart TV devices and makes a config file of what it has found in case a device is offline (it uses chromecast detection on the appropriate port to find and wake sleeping TVs)

Next is the Search button, which can navigate all local and networked drives for media. When a file is selected, the search window auto closes andd the Video File field populates with the file name. The Command field auto populates the terminal command to start the selected file. A thumbnail image of the select file appears in top right corner.

Cast sends the file to the selected TV, waking it if necessary.

+/- 60 second buttons restart the cast at the designated time. Dragging the progress thumb or clicking on the progress bar restarts the cast at the designated time.

The cast stream may be Paused and Resumed with the matching buttons. Cast may be Stopped or Restarted with the matching buttons.

The stream may be cleared, and if the stream is a movie file with chapters, the Next and Previous Chapter buttons navigate thru the movie. The current position is printed on the app as "Chapter: X of X"

The volume may be muted with the Mute button and unmuted by clicking the Mute button a second time. The Volume slider may be used to adjust the selected TV volume up and down.

There is a Pair TV button that once used, allows the app to Power Off the selected TV with the matching button.

I spent a lot of hours on this, adding feature by feature and testing and retesting that no other features broke on any edit. I am really happy with the final result!

Hey everyone,

This if off-topic but I'm so excited I had to post :D

I just had just a huge success with ChatGPT. I asked it if it were possible to script a GUI for the command line app mkchromecast that would include a search button for media, and then auto insert the correct file name and file path into the default mkchromcast command. After getting the basic GUI up and running I refined. It now includes a Clear button to kill any previous processes and ensure the selected media plays and not something prior that is stuck in memory. It now also remembers the last directory that media was selected from and opens that when the search button is clicked. Added a search the house for smart devices button, and finally a nuclear option close button if any video gets hard stuck in memory. I am so happy with it!!

I just added a SWAP clearing button to my Tolkien Rig Minimalis.

​

Required an edit to visudo file to allow the sudo swapall commands to be used by conky, and conky v1.19.8 for click events.

​

Clicking the RESET button text overlaid on the conky plays a blip tone for confirmation of sucessful click, and runs the SWAP clearling command.

​

Just something I whipped up while in between deliveries at work :)

​

Here it is in action.

​

I was talking with Koentje about text effect .lua scripts and I got the idea for script bent at a 90 degree angle.

​

I got with ChatGPT and it very quickly generated a nice working .lua.

​

It needs some troubleshooting. As the weekday name in the horizontal text gets longer, the whole conky moves making it partially offscreen. When I corrected for this, I ended up with the shorter weekday names causing the conky to display further to the left of the right monitor side than I want. I need to figure out a way to anchor the conkys top right corner to a screen coordinant, and have it expand to the left. Not sure if that is going to be possible.

​

Shown here with my customization of the retail Anurati font.

​

I kept seeing this date/clock item on desktops, and felt it was some kind of desklet or plasmoid or something other than a conky. It had a fascinating font that I looked up online and found to be Anurati.

​

After closer look at the date/clock I noted that Anurati font was just the weekday name, and the date and time were a different font.

​

I soon discovered that the free version of Anurati was nothing more than the capitol letters of the alphabet. The retail version is what included the numerals and other punctuation characters.

​

I was very impressed with the font so I got the retail version, then worked with online tools to customize my own version of the font with a few unique characters. I used that to make a recreation of the date/time widget in all Anurati font with conky:

​

I hit basement dweller on the 4th but I wasn't feeling well for a few days so I haven't had a chance to post the achieve til now.

WAZOO!!!

Conky Tweaks.

I edited the code used by the local IP section from something that displayed a column of two local IPs to a simpler hostname command that prints just my one true intranet IP on one line. I then eliminated the Top Processes list from top 10 to top 5 and created the room for an Internet Consumption section. The overall result was a shorter conky so I edited the size of the surrounding frame accordingly. I am really happy with the addition of information:

Hey Everyone,

I was adding an image to my collection of Tolkien wallpapers when I noticed this wallpaper of Galadriel, sized, sharpened and ready for viewing, that I had forgotten to add to the wallpaper list in the python file that runs my slideshow. With all the gold colors and elements I have added to the Tolkien GUI, it's particularly suited for this workspace. Also I personally find it to be one of the lovliest interpretations of the Elf Lady I have ever seen.

Golden kind of translates to bright, but I'm not finding the GUI too glaring on the eyes with this wallpaper loaded. Actually very happy with the overall composition.

I redid my Rig Minimalis. Glyphs from TheOneRing font used at all the headers, and the linear graphs replaced with circular graphs color matched to the rest of the minimalis.

I absolutely LOVE my Kubuntu box.

Here is a project I worked on a bit ago but never published the results of. I had noted Hobbit and LOTR ambient music videos on my YouTube recommendations, and I got the idea to load these into Video Wallpaper Reborn.

I found an app capable of downloading local copies of these up to 9.9GB files (ranging from 1-3+ hours long), then ran them thru HandBrake to convert from .mkz to .mp4 format and dramatically reduce file size, as well as standardize the codecs. It all worked like a charm. Reborn accepted the huge files with no issue and plays them beautifully.

After collecting and converting several LOTR videos (some of the download times were over 20hours per file) I switched gears and spent a few days downloading Steampunk ambient videos, as this system featured several workspaces with a dedicated Steampunk GUI.

Then I got more creative, and had AI generate a python script to launch a window full of thumbnail image buttons that activated the depicted video, and cleared and reset the conky array and cursor theme based on whether a Steampunk or LOTR themed video had been selected. It works fine but sometimes needs to be clicked twice to launch the video on both my monitors.