PicCap - Hyperion Sender App | Ambilight for LG WebOS TVs

What's this?

PicCap?

PicCap is an frontend app, which you can install on your TV, to make TV content capturing as easy as possible. It ships and controls the seperated hyperion-webos background native service, which uses capture interfaces on your TV based on reverse engineering, proccesses the output and sends as result a low quality image to a receiver like Hyperion's flatbuffer server.
On newer TVs there is no official way for capturing DRM-protected content like from Netflix or Amazon. This restriction doesn't take place for content comming from an HDMI input.
So currently as a workaround you can play your media using your PC, FireTV-Stick or Chromecast and still enjoy your LEDs.

Hyperion?

hyperion.ng basicly is a server service, which transforms incomming image data to an LED output. The idea is to have an ambilight like it's known from Philipps TVs. It is used in DIY-environments, like builded up in this tutorial.
You can also run Hyperion.ng webOS loader or it's fork HyperHDR webOS loader directly on your webOS TV, so you don't need any further hardware, expect of your LED driver. Both apps can be found in Homebrew Channels app repository.

https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/51515147/192116249-f5080f02-3566-4c94-b9e1-bdb11aba2698.mp4

This footage is captured on a webOS5-TV using vtCapture as library.

How to install

What do you need?

Root access to your TV
webOS 3.4 or above
Latest version of Homebrew Channel installed, as we take use of its elevate-service script
Brain with some basic knowledge - We haven't encountered any bricks, but standard no warranty clause applies

Easy way

Open Homebrew Channel and install PicCap directly from there.

Manual way

First you will have to build it from scratch, or download pre-compiled IPK from releases.

# Copy IPK to TV 
scp /home/[USER]/downloads/org.webosbrew.piccap_[version]_all.ipk root@[TVIP]:/tmp/org.webosbrew.piccap_[version]_all.ipk

# On TV install IPK
luna-send -i -f luna://com.webos.appInstallService/dev/install '{"id":"org.webosbrew.piccap","ipkUrl":"/tmp/org.webosbrew.piccap_[version]_all.ipk","subscribe":true}'

How to use

First start

Wait a few secounds to let the service elevate root permissions through Homebrew Channel-Service. Check status message in bottom right corner, to see when it's done.

Settings

If you use hyperion.ng or HyperHDR loader, you will have to fill 127.0.0.1 as IP address.
Change priority if you have other capture or effect sources for your Hyperion or HyperHDR instance.

Backends

We use different libraries to capture TVs content. These are used by hyperion-webos and described here.

Advanced settings

Some TV models are comptabile with a specific backend, but require a slightly different routine to work reliably. You can find an explaination for these so called quirks here.

Development

Dependencies

To build PicCap and hyperion-webos you will need:

You will also need clang-format-14 if you want to contribute.

How to build

We have tried to make build proccess as easy as possible. After building all files can be found in ./build.

# Setup buildroot-nc4 (needed for hyperion-webos)
cd /desired/path
wget -O toolchain.tar.gz $TOOLCHAIN_URL_FROM_RELEASES
tar -xvzf toolchain.tar.gz
rm toolchain.tar.gz
arm-webos-linux-gnueabi_sdk-buildroot/relocate-sdk.sh
export CMAKE_TOOLCHAIN_FILE=/desired/path/arm-webos-linux-gnueabi_sdk-buildroot/share/buildroot/toolchainfile.cmake

# Clone project and submodules
git clone --recursive https://github.com/TBSniller/piccap.git
cd ./piccap

# Install node dependencies
npm install

# Build
npm run-script build-all        # Build PicCap & hyperion-webos + deps
npm run-script build-frontend   # Build PicCap only
npm run-script build-backend    # Build hyperion-webos + deps only

# Package IPK-file for TV installation
npm run-script package

Other

Known issues

Expect bugs - This app is still in early development
No issues are known so far, if you find one, feel free to raise an issue!

Please see hyperion-webos#known-issues for issues regarding the backend service. - This only is the frontend application and has nothing to do with capture related things!
Version tracker is available in hyperion-webos#16.

Credits

This project would never ever exists without help from @Mariotaku and @Informatic. Both programmed important things at the beginning of this whole ambilight project. @tuxuser also made some important changes in the mid of this project.
Share them some love if you can, they teached and showed me alot!

You should also check out the other contributors. Some nice enhancements wouldn't be there without them :)

Check out OpenLGs-Discord server, if you have some questions. You will find a very helpful community. <3