Anyone have cinema curtains?

[wickedlemon3 1]

I'm working on a project to have a pair of (real) curtains open when a movie starts. I'm concerned there doesn't seem to be any way to start a movie using CV without being able to see the screen and go through the whole context menu options, which obviously won't work. The whole idea of home automation/cinema experience seems at odds with the way CV has to be started.

Has anyone set up a system like this? If so how have you got around this?

[OTA 66]

I plan on doing this with a projector a few years down the line.  I initially only planned on using CV to change my curtains for masking my 2.35:1 screen to 16:9 as I can have an action file change the scope using tags in the .nfo.  I didn't think about how to initially open the curtains.  You'll have to likely open them without CV.  Maybe using a trigger on the projector to open the curtains when it's powered on, or use Alexa like how I power on my subwoofers now?

What curtain system are you running?

[wickedlemon3 1]

9 minutes ago, OTA said:

I plan on doing this with a projector a few years down the line.  I initially only planned on using CV to change my curtains for masking my 2.35:1 screen to 16:9 as I can have an action file change the scope using tags in the .nfo.  I didn't think about how to initially open the curtains.  You'll have to likely open them without CV.  Maybe using a trigger on the projector to open the curtains when it's powered on, or use Alexa like how I power on my subwoofers now?

What curtain system are you running?

Haven't settled on anything yet.

 

Having to navigate Kodi on screen after the curtains open would kill the experience though. 

[OTA 66]

If you aren't wanting the screen on to navigate Kodi, the only other thing I can think of is some kind of remote option, maybe by using an app on your phone or another computer.  I guess you could also use Alexa.  I've seen videos on YouTube where people have configured it.  They ask Alexa to play a specific movie via Kodi and it does it, but I don't know if you can use CV this way.

[wickedlemon3 1]

5 hours ago, OTA said:

If you aren't wanting the screen on to navigate Kodi, the only other thing I can think of is some kind of remote option, maybe by using an app on your phone or another computer.  I guess you could also use Alexa.  I've seen videos on YouTube where people have configured it.  They ask Alexa to play a specific movie via Kodi and it does it, but I don't know if you can use CV this way.

I use remotes normally. The problem is you're right, there's no way to start CV by remote.

[wickedlemon3 1]

Been having a play round and got CV working (just).

I'm not a plugin expert, but I've sorted Kodi to play all movies with CV automatically so I can just pick movies with my remote. I've used the Kodi Callbacks Addon to fire an event every time a video is started. This then fires a small addon that I wrote which grabs the id of the playing movie, stops it, and launches CV with that movie id. I'm still tweaking it to get it working right, but it's better than nothing. I'm sure somebody who knows what they're doing with addons could probably replicate the bits of using from Callbacks and just make one addon to do all this.