rxvc

A superfast command line controller for Yamaha RX-V series receivers. It's written targeting Python 3.5>, and uses the excellent rxv library to function.

The key reason I wanted this is because the RX-V477's web interface appears to not feature a way to control inputs and volume like my old RX-V675 did.

However, because the thing lives at a random place on your network, finding the receiver can cause CLI tools like this to be quite slow due to the fact that rxv has to use SSDP to find the IP of the receiver. rxvc gets around this by caching the receiver control url and name info to ~/.rxvc_cache on the first run of a command. This cache can be cleared with a command line flag.

Usage

This is a Python 3 project. I'm using this on 3.5, and am not trying to support older versions of Python. Check out pyenv if you need an easy way to get 3.5, or if on a mac you can just use homebrew.

With Python 3 (probably in a pyvenv virtual environment), you can install rxvc with pip:

$ pip install rxvc
$ rxvc --help
Usage: rxvc [OPTIONS] COMMAND [ARGS]...

  Control your Yamaha receiver from the command line, really fast.

  Taking advantage of caching (which can be cleared buy running rxvc with no
  command but with --clear), after the first run it's super fast. This cache
  is stored in ~/.rxvc_cache.

  Have fun!

Options:
  --clear     Clear the cache and look for receivers again.
  -h, --help  Show this message and exit.

Commands:
  down    Turn down the receiver volume in 0.5...
  input   See the current receiver input or set it if...
  inputs  List valid input names for this receiver.
  power   Power the receiver on or off.
  status  Print overall status of the receiver.
  up      Turn up the receiver volume in 0.5...
  volume  Show the current receiver volume level, or...

Volume

The way volume works might confuse you at first. There are three commands for controlling volume, volume, up, and down.

The lowest level command is the volume command. It can be used to simply print current volume or set it to an absolute number with the -v option. Keep in mind that these receivers only accept volume levels as negative numbers in -0.5 increments, so an error will be printed if you tried to do something like this:

$ rxvc volume -v -40.2
Volume must be specified in -0.5 increments.
$ rxvc volume -v 39.5
Volume must be specified in -0.5 increments.
$ rxvc volume -v -39.5
-39.5

The last command is correct and the others are error cases.

In addition to this low level volume command there are easier to use commands, up, and down, for adjusting volume incrementally. They work on a concept of 'points'. You simply pass an integer to them and it gets multiplied by 0.5 and added or subtracted from the current volume level and the new level is printed unless the receiver responds with an error (presumably due to the new volume level being out of range).

up and down default to 2 points, which would result in an increase or decrease of 1.0 respectively. Here are some examples:

$ rxvc up
-38.5
$ rxvc down
-39.5
$ rxvc up 3
-38.0
$ rxvc down 3
-39.5
$ rxvc down 1000000
New volume must be out of range.