Hey folks, for about 10 months or so been working on a hobby project just to get more practice in Linux application packaging, the Rust ecosystem/utilities, and software development on Nix and NixOS (as well as solve some personal pain points in using a HDMI TVs and projectors with PCs). Disclosure: this project includes AI assisted development, documentation and research, and has been a great help given my physical disabilities in typing.

While I enjoy using large, affordable OLED TVs as a PC display, they do lack in ways compared to regular desktop monitors, such as native power synchronization, programmatic volume and backlight control, etc. Thankfully there are a plethora of PC software projects to replicate these features, with LGTVCompanion for Windows and WebOS hardware being a prominent example. However, having migrated to Linux, and wanting something that would work just as well with projectors as with TVs, I began work on a display vendor/interface agnostic project, named TisVlay.

Over the past year it has grown from a simple CLI into a full system daemon with a GUI, a system tray, and webOS and HDMI-CEC support, plus the desktop integration and profile automation you’d expect from such a tool, like login and idle detection and remote-streaming awareness. That last one matters to me: my desktop pulls triple duty as a workstation, a media PC, and a game-streaming host for my office, living room, and tablet via Sunshine/Moonlight.

The app itself follows more of a distributed pub/sub architecture (my background is in robotics and cyber-physical system design, not desktop software), so converging on IPC and middle-ware libraries I’ve been meaning to experiment while keeping the installable setup self contained was a balance.

While still beta (pre v1.0), it’s already daily drivable and fully documented. Being largely feature-complete, my current focus has shifted towards distro packaging. If you’d like to give it a try, the installation guide and docs are linked below. Or if not and you’re already use something else, I’d like to give a shout-out to netflector, especially for privacy-conscious home-automation users, given how common spyware is in smart TVs and projectors these days. The docs cover using it to keep displays on an isolated network.

• https://tisvlay.readthedocs.io/
• https://github.com/TisVlay/TisVlay
• https://github.com/netflector/netflector
• https://tisvlay.readthedocs.io/en/latest/operations/isolated-networks.html