• Thanks for visiting the Kaleidescape Owners' Forum

    This forum is for the community of Kaleidescape owners, and others interested in learning about the system, equipment, services, and the company itself.

    It is run by a group of enthusiastic Kaleidescape owners and dealers purely as a service to this community.

    This board is not affiliated in any way with Kaleidescape, Inc.
    For official technical support, product information, or customer service, please visit www.kaleidescape.com

  • You are currently in "Guest" mode and not logged in with a registered account.

    The forum is free to use and most of the forum can be used by guests who are not registered....

    ... but we strongly encourage you to register for a full account. There is no cost to register for a full account.

    Benefits of registering for a full account:

    • Participate in the discussions! You must have a registered account to make posts on the forums. You will be able to start your own thread on a topic or question, or you can reply to other threads/discussions.
    • Use the "Conversation" feature (known as "private messaging" on other forums) to communicate directly with any of the other users here.
    • Access the Files area. The "resources" area of the forum contains many "Favorite Scene" and Script files that can dramatically increase the enjoyment of your Kaleidescape system. Go directly to great scenes in your favorite movies, created by other owners, and add automation to playback of your system with Scripts.
    • You won't see this annoying notice at the top of every screen!😊

    It's easy and free to register for the forum. Just click the "Register" button in the upper right corner of this page, and follow the instructions there.

iPhone Roomie Remote

sbutter

Well-known member
⭐️⭐️PATRON⭐️⭐️
Authorized Kaleidescape Dealer
I love the official iPad app, but I find myself using the Remotescape App for my iPhone. Remotescape has not been updated to support Scenes and Extras.

Roomie Remote just released an update for control of Kaliedescape players. The best part is it has a media browser with cover art and direct access to Scenes and Extras bookmarks.

The video below shows the interface on the iPad, but the features are similar on iPhone. About 3:34 minutes into the video, starts the Kscape demonstration.
http://www.roomieremote.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/21features.mov

http://www.roomieremote.com/

It is very easy to setup and auto discovers the Kscape players.
 
I've paid some attention to Roomie, but haven't looked at it in a year or so, so thanks for this. It's really come a long way. What's still missing, to me, looks like some only slightly advanced features but often very important. First, while there may be a way, I can't find info on learning IR commands. If you can't, then the list of supported hardware they have is all they support and you're at their mercy to add remote codes for you somehow. Hopefully that's not true, but I can't find mention of learning IR codes, anyway. The Global Cache devices *can* do this (at least the IP2IR can, and I assume the Flex can).

There's also no mention of any custom usage capable of serial control, so again, unless your device is explicitly listed, I see no way to use serial. More advanced systems can definitely be customized to handle serial devices of just about any type.

The last thing is something I wonder if they aren't on the verge of, and that's advanced state control and monitoring using the OSX Agent they now have. For now it does NOT seem capable of monitoring IP devices for state info, but maybe they are working on it? For example, as of now I don't see a way with Roomie to let the Kscape iPad app control volume on your system using Roomie. But with Indigo, I can (at $100 for Indigo Light or $200 for Indigo Pro, so it does cost more). You simply configure Indigo to "listen" to the proper port on your K server for the volume up/down requests and Indigo then initiates the proper output to your system to actually change the volume. Sounds complex, but it's actually not hard to do at all.

Now, I know you're saying they have a nice enough interface that you may not want to use the K app, which I haven't seen and can't say if it's as good as the K app or not. I gotta think it's not quite there on the iPad side, anyway, so I really like this feature.

I don't do it, but others like to have their control system listen for the "credits" notification from the server and bring the lights up automatically. Can't do that with Roomie yet, but it might be close.

But for common bedroom or even living room systems, Roomie really might be pretty good now. Still not quite there for more advanced theater things, but really seems to be working that direction...


--Donnie
 
One thing that just hit me, though. I think Roomie does something that my iRule/Indigo solution does not do, and no Crestron system I've seen does, either (though maybe newer Crestron stuff can, I'd love to know).

Basically, it's this business of knowing state across different control devices. It appears that with Roomie if one has OSX Agent running -or- there is always at least one Roomie application running on an iOS device SOMEWHERE (ALWAYS!), then the following would work:

Run Roomie on iOS device ABC. Turn on living room system. Switch apps on ABC to some other app. Pick up iOS device XYZ that was NOT already running Roomie. Run Roomie. Boom, it KNOWS your living room system is on and carries on as if you had picked up your first device.

Now, my previous Crestron system couldn't do that with its tablet remotes. My current iRule/Indigo system can't do that without a LOT of custom programming. Currently you'd get a normal source selection screen and you have to pick your source again as if you're turning it on again. That doesn't hurt anything, really, though I do get some TV glitching because the input gets set again. (Okay, it's probably not a LOT of custom programming for the basics, but on more advanced systems it could be a LOT.)

Given how people tend to use iOS devices in households where there are many such devices, this is actually a pretty cool and useful thing. Right now I have a dedicated iPad mini in each room. They all share an iCloud ID that is JUST for our AV controllers and thus do not have any apps I have on my personal devices. More importantly, no kid apps. That way they wouldn't be stealing remotes to play games when their own iOS device batteries were dead or whatever.

But with Roomie it wouldn't be as big of a deal to just have it on each device and maybe not even have dedicated room remotes. You might would want to have *one* spare device around that you could give guests or something, but otherwise each family member just uses their own device.

Something to think about.


--Donnie
 
Control4 does it. AMX can do it. I don't work with Crestron, but I would hope it could be done and should be done.

On Control4, the app syncs anytime it's open. With AMX you handle the app like any other touch panel. Which means when you receive an ONLINE event, you need to resend all information to make sure it's in sync. (including checking if the room is on and changing the screen to the appropriate pages).

Like I said, I pretty sure the same thing can be accomplished on Crestron, but it would require programming on the back end.

Kevin D.
 
It's interesting that Roomie now has a module for Kscape that includes cover art. This must have taken a fair amount of effort. I wonder if this is an indication of how well the Cinema One is doing in the market.......

Also, as Donnie has noted, it has the ability to keep track of status between handsets (compared to iRule which does not). It also uses all of the same gateway hardware as iRule so it would be fairly easy to check this out.

I may need to look into this.

John
 
FWIW, I bit the bullet and bought Roomie last night. And I went whole hog setting up Roomie Agent, two clients (an iPhone and an iPad Mini). I got the Theater and Agent add-on as well as the subscription.

Note: You only have to buy those things ONE time per iTunes ID (or home share, I believe). But when you run Roomie on the subsequent devices from the one you used to do the in-app purchases, you need to go into the Store on the subsequent devices, scroll down, and "Restore purchases." That will get you setup on the subsequent devices for your add-ons.

It took me about an hour to setup my bedroom system, which is a meager Sharp TV, AppleTV, DirecTV box, and M300 (there's an aux sound bar, but it's not controlled currently). It wouldn't have taken nearly that long if the TV didn't need an annoyingly long delay to change sources after power-up.

I did not play with the whole thing much, but I actually am impressed so far. One annoying thing is every time you add a "device", it dynamically scans your network for EVERYTHING. It seems pretty good at finding everything, too. Only problem is my network has 8 DTV boxes, about 8 iTunes/ATV devices, 10 or so Global Cache boxes, and another half dozen things it finds. In a normal home I could see it being fine, but with THIS much stuff it gets a little wonky. I'm going to see if they can give the user the option to make it static and add a reload option to the list instead. Dynamic is fine for most, but for installs like mine I'd rather have it static and be able to reload that if I add or remove devices from the network.

Also, I've currently not been able to make the two devices sync. It's probably something I'm doing wrong and I haven't dug into it far.

Oh, and it did NOT automatically find my Kscape stuff. But that's because we have that stuff on a private subnet. I entered it by IP (and port 10000, which was annoying to have to find) and it worked. That functionality actually isn't as interesting to me as some other things (I mean I love the Kapp) so I didn't actually poke at it much yet.


--Donnie
 
Roomie does support iOS App URLs, and has a return url Roomie://.

So you can set up Roomie to automatically select the official Kscape iPad app, and return back to Roomie.
 
Thanks Donnie.

It looks like to have full support I would need to get:
Roomie Remote
Home Theater Pack
Subscription Service

Is this correct?

When I have some free time I will probably try this out and see how it compares to iRule.

John
 
Roomie does support iOS App URLs, and has a return url Roomie://.

So you can set up Roomie to automatically select the official Kscape iPad app, and return back to Roomie.

Yeah, iRule does this, too. Amazingly, at last check, the Apple Remote app does *not*. Would be cool if more of those apps did...especially since ATV has no decent remote control protocol, but Apple Remote does work very well. But the iOS app switching feature isn't horrible and is what I tend to default to anyway...

Thanks Donnie.

It looks like to have full support I would need to get:
Roomie Remote
Home Theater Pack
Subscription Service

Is this correct?

When I have some free time I will probably try this out and see how it compares to iRule.

John

Yeah. Basically with RR by itself you can make one room and only support two IP devices (no IR or serial). If you want unlimited rooms and unlimited IP devices, you add Home Theater. And if you want IR you have to add the subscription.

Their pricing model is pretty wonky, IMHO, but it's still not terrible for what you get. You're basically looking at a one time $30 and a recurring yearly $17.


--Donnie
 
Back
Top