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Archive for the ‘Media Center’ category

The snag list

October 14th, 2008

Ok, it is time to admit it. All is not well in the geeky home. There are little niggles, everythings working but it’s not slick and it’s not well integrated enough. It’s time to start finding some solutions. Here are the snags, if you know a way I can overcome any of them, then let me know in a comment on this post, email me, or twitter me.

There’s an annoying .net framework error popping up on the Media Center every so often.
My Harmony remote isn’t quite set up well enough. It doesn’t work well when the Media Center is already on. The problem is that I’ve installed a standby saving power bar, which I want to keep, but it doesn’t play nice with the remote.
I need to find a way to ARM the Y-CAM when we leave the house and disarm it when we return. Or I need to move it to an area with slightly less traffic, i.e. where we don’t walk all the time so that my mailbox doesn’t fillup!
I need to be able to view the Y-CAM stream on my Windows Mobile device, or at least be able to see the latest image. That might mean configuring FTP, which means finding a secure FTP server on the net.
I want to workout the overall power consumption of the kit in the house. I might be scared.
The TV Arial just doesn’t seem to be quite right, it’s a few degrees off! Time for cable?
My Windows Home Server is using a bit too much power, 40kwh in standby – that needs to come down.

Technorati Tags: y-cam,media center

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Posted in Cool geek stuff, Home Server, Home automation, Media Center, Windows Mobile

Y-CAM

October 13th, 2008

For a while now I’ve been looking at some home monitoring systems and how I can best integrate them into my digital experience. Previously I’ve used Yawcam with some pretty great results but currently I’m trying to reduce my carbon foot print and I want to make everything that has to run as low power consumption a possible. For that reason I really wanted an IP Webcam that didn’t need a PC powered on all the time.

Having done loads of looking about the only really good thing I could find was from Y-CAM. It’s now been delivered and it’s installed. I picked the Y-CAM Black and bought from ebuyer, since it was about £30 cheaper than everywhere else.

Having installed it, at first it really wasn’t a great experience, it didn’t like my router and it brought down the whole network…I’ve done a firmware update now and all seems to work well. Very well.

This camera sees really well in the dark with its knight vision, and the management software is pretty good. Actually it’s a breeze to setup. It can do motion alerts to email, which again was simple to setup and allows me to select 4 regions of the picture to watch for motion.

Two I need to work through at the moment:

I need to setup FTP publishing to somewhere so that I can view the camera at work since I can’t see the active X control
I need to get an app for my WinMo phone that allows me to view mp4 encoded RTSP…unfortunately HTC Streaming media won’t cut it.

Finally I’ve also emailed the manufacturer to find out if they have an API, so that I can develop something to easily arm the motion detection.

Technorati Tags: Y-cam,ip webcam,camera

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Posted in Cool geek stuff, Home automation, Media Center, Mobile, Windows Mobile

Manilla 2D and SideShow for Media Center

September 14th, 2008

Tonight I’ve had a bit of a geekout and got two really cool things done. Both are on my Windows Mobile. Firstly I’ve just installed Manilla 2D from XDA_Team over at XDA Developers. Its superb, it’s an amazingly good home screen for Windows mobile,

Technorati Tags: windows mobile,winmo,manilla,xda-developers,media center,sideshow

just like you get on the new Diamond devices, it look amazing, everything scrolls beautifully. The weather is a big improvement, the browser integration with Opera is great and the settings screen is good too. The best thing is the cool blue colour though.

The other thing I did was to setup the RC of the Media Center SideShow gadget. That involved putting some sideshow software onto my Windows Mobile phone too. The install was simple enough, but a gotcha was doing it using RDP, it threw a dialogue up on my sesson 0 (yes I know that Vista doesn’t really have one but its a nice way to describe it) which was on my TV. The RC is available on Connect, but I’ve not read the agreement enough to know what can be talked about at the moment…..A good night of Geeking!

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Posted in Media Center, Windows Mobile

Lovin’ the Home Server experience

August 18th, 2008

Gotta say I’m really loving the experience of Home Server. It’s got to be one one the best products MS have put out in years! It’s so simple, so well thought out. I’ve got the client “Connector” software installed on both my laptop and Media Center and both have started to do backups. And that client tells me what’s going on with a little pop up bubble.

I’m currently trying to do a MASSIVE backup over WiFi (802.11g) but it’s seriously slow, and it keeps failing. That’s my WiFi network card though I’m sure that keeps vanishing. Trouble is I don’t have a CAT5 Patch cable to speed things up!!

I’ve piled on two add-ins so far. Both from We Got Served (Fantastic resource). The first is Event Viewer – simple and useful. The second is Whiist, which lets you add web sites and customise the basic home server web site that you see when you connect remotely.

Here is said server, it’s my old Media Center, an AMD Athlon XP 2100+ with 1.25gb RAM, two disks one 160gb and one 300gb.

Technorati Tags: Windows home server,WHS,Media Center,Whiist

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Posted in Home automation, Media Center

Windows Home Server

August 16th, 2008

It’s been a long time since I had something work actually blogging about but I just had to talk about this. I’ve finally got around to setting up my old PC as a Windows Home Server, it’s taken me this long as I’ve not had a lounge to expand into.

I’m amazed at how simple it was to setup. Pop the CD in, tell it to format all the drives, enter a password and wait. When it was done I logged on and got it to do updates using Windows Update. I also setup one user for myself and I turned UPNP on on my router.

Next I setup my laptop and media center. All I had to do here was connect to \software">\\<server>\software and run the home server connector software setup. Now my machines will backup to the Home Server every night.

All I need to do now is work out how best to manage the power…

For more on Windows Home Server, check out We Got Served

Technorati Tags: Home Server,WHS,Media Center

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Posted in Home Server, Media Center

Squezebox part 1: Squeezebox Duet Installation Experience

June 10th, 2008

Technorati Tags: squeezebox,squeezecenter,mcesoftsqueeze,softsqueeze,fry’s

So time for my long awaited Squeezebox Duet review, actually make that series of posts. I first read about the Squeezebox when it was announced, and Automatedhome.co.uk also has great review.

Whilst I was in the states I picked up a Squeezebox Duet from Fry’s in Seattle, it was actually on sale on Memorial Day weekend, so it cost $349 + TAX. This thing is brilliant!

When I got it home it was a doddle setup. First off, I bought this in the US, so power needed to be sorted out. The power supplies are international and can take anything from 100 to 240v input, just a case of changing to the UK adapter.

The next thing to do was to install the SqueezeCenter 7 software on the Media Center. Again a simple process, no install glitches – but I did have to manually start the scan of my music library. About 20 minutes later it finished and had catalogued all the albums.

Next I installed softsqueeze3 on the Media Center. This is a cool bit of software that emulates a squeeze box. After configuring it with a name and pointing it at the SqueezeCenter installation, a web address on port 9000, it was able to access the media fine. So I turned on the Duet controller.

The controller picked up my Wifi network and asked me for the security setup. Then it found my SqueezeCenter server automatically, and, I was a bit surprised about this, it let me select my SoftSqueeze installation on the controller. All of a sudden my Media Center was pumping out tunes controlled by my Squeezebox Controller!!

Very cool. This thing can control any squeezebox!

So I went into the kitchen and setup a micro hifi and plugged in all the stuff for the Squeezebox Reciever. I pressed the button on the front and… the controller sprang into life and picked up the receiver, automatically configuring it! Next thing I know I’ve got some Fun Lovin Criminals bouncing out of the stereo in the Kitchen…and it sounds, GREAT!

Wondering what else this thing can do I found the ability to sync the output from the Kitchen Squeezebox Reciever with the Softsqueeze installation in the lounge! This is going to be great when we have a party.

Next I went into SqueezeCenter, which is really the heart of everything and found that I can control all the squeezeboxes through the web interface. Including being able to make changes to them. So I did, I changed the names, the Softsqueeze to “Lounge” and the Duet Reciever to “Kitchen”.

This is becoming one cool whole house audio system. Need to sort out Media Center integration though, enter MCE Softaqueeze.

How would I rate ease of installation 5 stars, Ease of use 5 stars. I love this thing.

Comming soon:

Part 2 – Overview of the Squeezbox controller

Part 3 – Looking around SqueezeCenter

Part 4 – Extensions

Part 5 – The wish list

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Posted in Cool geek stuff, How I Use..., Media Center, Technology, squeezebox

iPlayer on MCE – very promising indeed

May 16th, 2008

I picked up on this from Ian’s blog but this has got to be one of the best Media Center plug-ins in development at the moment. If you’re in the uk you’ll have heard of the BBC iPlayer, basically we have a “uniquely” funded broadcaster and they are making much of their content available for free in the UK.

Martin Millmore has created this great plug-in as the beeb have been a bit slow to react to making a Media Center interface for iPlayer, although they have made one available for wii, I must sort that out (not to self). What I love about this is that its nice and clean and installed really easily. Lots of the other hacks out there to get this working require the local iPlayer client, this plug-in doesn’t require that as it will display the stream’s that iPlayer offers.

The streams are by the way, watchable, not amazing but not bad either, I was able to watch the Madonna performance at The Big Weekend last week absolutely fine.

There is a minor niggle with the plug-in in that it needs the mouse to start the stream, not a big problem as there is software to make the Media Center remote work as a mouse.

Martin, if you read this post, then there is one improvement I’d like to see…a blue background.

Technorati Tags: media center,iplayer,streaming

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Posted in Cool geek stuff, Media Center, Technology

Freesat is comming…finally, oh and a recommendation for a FreeView aerial

May 6th, 2008

Stuff-em-up-the-hill-backwards has an interesting piece with links etc, on Freesat’s launch today in the UK.

From my point of view I can’t wait to see support for this in Media Center, there are some codec changes that need to occur for MC to be able to view the Sat channels, which I think are MPEG-4. Hopefully this will come from the Direct-TV changes being made for the US. This will give us HD TV in Media Center in the UK quite nicely.

Also over the weekend I upgraded my parents Digital Terrestrial aerial with one with a really great, and now VERY highly recommended bit of kit from Maplin. I bought this unit, Gigaboost, it gives a 16dB boost to the signal and is simply the best Freeview reception I’ve ever seen!! Installation was fairly simple, following electrocuting myself on a mains cable loose and un-terminated in the loft! It’s powered mast head amplified unit.

Technorati Tags: aeriel,freeview,maplin,satalite,freesat,mediacenter

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Posted in Cool geek stuff, Media Center, Technology

Killer Web Services

March 20th, 2008

I’ve posted in the past about what’s on my phone, what’s on my Media Center, and what my Media Center hardware is. In the same theme this post is about the killer web services that I use.

First up I should explain how I use these services, firstly I’m very mobile, typically I don’t do two days running in the same office and I’m all over the country and I travel by train…you might see frustration in my twitter or my FB status. Every day I use a personal laptop, a work laptop, my personal Hermes phone and my work BlackBerry Pearl. I need my stuff to stay in sync.

Google Reader (Greader) – this is a great online reader, I use it to aggregate all my RSS. I can access it from every device it’s totally web based and always in sync. Why don’t I use something like News Gator? Simple I can’t install it on my work laptop or BlackBerry. The items I share in Google Reader appear in my FriendFeed and my Shared items.

FaceBook – rather obviously it’s a brilliant social site. I update my status regularly and automatically with FBMCE and with FindMe and using the mobile version of the site. When I finally get a code for HelloTxt that will be brill, I’ll be able to update my twitter status too, making HelloTxt a killer app…especially with an API!

National Rail Enquiries Wap Site – Lame I know, but the wap site is the most useful thing that National Rail do.

del.icio.us – Great social bookmarking, took me a while to get into it but now I use it exclusively and can see friends and colleagues bookmarks too. Tagging makes it semantic and yes it’s part of my FriendFeed and you can find my shared bookmarks.

Google Browser Sync and Foxmarks- I use Firefox 2 for all my browsing and wherever I am, my Firefox stays in sync. I use Firefox as a portable app too. Foxmarks also keeps things in sync, but normally I use del.icio.us for bookmarks.

Wordpress – That’s where you’re reading this. I moved here from Live Spaces because it’s more flexible. I get quite a few hits from the Wordpress community, and Wordpress tags. I use the mobile version to view my stats and occasionally to post from my phones. I have two blogs, this one and one for my house renovation.

Sharp Cast – I currently use Sharp Cast to hold all my photo’s, I moved there from Picasa, it’s great ‘cos it just keeps things in sync. I think I’m going to move away though because I like idea of the Windows Live Gallery and Flikr hookups and because Flikr is much more customisable and semantic than Sharp Cast.

iGoogle – My homepage is iGoogle, I tried Live but I just prefer iGoogle. I have a number of gadgets, including my stock portfolio (not as grand as it sounds) my scheduled recordings on Media Center, my Gmail, and Google Reader. I’ve just added the FriendFeed gadget too. What I really love, and what really suits my mobility is the PDA version, here I have BBC news, stock quotes and Google Reader items all in one place.

Hotmail – Obvious to all, but using Windows Live Mobile it sync’s with my Hermes.

I think that’s about it for now, but speaking of mobility, I’m currently on a train, writing this on Windows Live Writer packaged as a portable app, writing off line, and I’ll have to setup the vast array of links later.