Messages

4441

Users / Re: HDMI Streaming

« on: September 24, 2007, 10:11:21 pm »

Hello,
I'm really new to this whole topic.
I from Ireland and we don't really have any systems like this here yet.
No TiVo to get people thinking!

I've read around a lot on this topic and I have a question that may be answered some where but I just can't seam to find it.

If you have a HD supply coming into your CORE box how do you network that quality around your house?

My understanding is that normal networking is used to stream media to another room, does this mean that you just use your 10/100 ethernet? If so you lose HD quality?

Or could you stream HDMI over something link 1 Gig LAN?

Thank you,
Derry

You could certainly stream HD content around your network and 100Mbit LAN would handle 3+ of those quite easily... of fcourse you'd need to have the server horse power too.

4442

Developers / Re: LTSP and LMCE

« on: September 24, 2007, 04:18:49 pm »

HI Pros,

I am a bit confused about the details of relationship between MD and core. I know MD use PXE boot to get an image off Core and run indepently.

Is this just an application of LTSP? or it's different? what would be the difference? The LTSP also boots a thin-client pc off server with an image and try to log-in to server with user's own account. All the apps work are computed on the core.

Your feedback is appreciated.

thanks
peng

PXE booting just effectively allows the remote MD to boot up using the Core/Hybrid as its boot partition. The MD does not need a local HD at all. Most of our MD just have processor/RAM and an optical drive. This gives them a low energy footprint, means they can be fanless if required. All processing is done locally at the MD.

4443

Developers / Re: Fiire remote shown in demo

« on: September 24, 2007, 04:09:03 pm »

Is there not enough granularity in the reported signal strength to compare? Are you saying that follow me doesn't work in any way on LMCE? This was one of the things I was most interested in!

Follow-me works in a number of different ways... the simplest does not require any fancy hardware beyond a Core/Hybrid and a 2nd MD. Start some media playing at the Core/Hybrid, click home and then select the media flloor plan. Now click the the big 'F' button and it will turn red. Now you have a number of options... you could change the room that you are controlling to the room that your 2nd MD is in... and the Media you had playing at your Core/Hybrid will start playing there! Change the room that you are controlling back to the Room that your Core/Hybrid is in again... and the Media will jump back to the Core/Hybrid again and continue playing. You can also do a similar trick from the Media Floor plan... if you have a floor plan graphic added. Again get the Media playing at the MD you are sitting at and then get the Media Floor plan up on screen (make sure follow-me is on in the Media Floor plan). Now move the highlight over to the MD that you want to move the media to and click once... next move the highlight to the Media playing list on the Media Floor plan (it will be the name of the media you chose to play). Click this media once... magically the media with 'move' to the MD you chose to move it to... and continue playing where it left off!

Now with a Bluetooth enabled phone the idea is to make this totally transparent... just turn on follow-me on the phone and move from the room your in to another room with an MD with a bluetooth dongle attached... and magically when the MD your moving towards can sense your bluetooth signal it will make the media move across to it. The problem is that Bluetooth signal are too powerful and lmce can't determine which MD you are closer to reliably. If it worked well this would be great because almost everyone owns a mobile and almost all of them have bluetooth (at least here in Europe thats the case). But it does not work reliably at all... believe me we have tried for a long time to make this work... it just doesn't (enough of the time).

The Fiire remote does work... 100% of the time (or pretty close to 100%). Just add a Fiire dongle to all your MD's... then press 'follow-me' on the Fiire remote before you leave a room (to tell the system when you want pickup from in your media playback) then walk to the other room and press 'follow-me' again and the Media will pickup from the point where you pressed 'follow-me' in the previous room. This works so well you have to see it to understand how impressive it is... because it is damn impressive!

4444

Users / Re: Face Recognition Features

« on: September 24, 2007, 03:37:25 pm »

sounds interesting, what does it do/how would it work?

There would be loads of uses for face recognition if it were reliable enough. Walk into a room... the MD recognises its you and sets the lighting and other settings to your liking, Follow-me using face recognition would be cool... just walk from rrom to room and the system would instantly recognise you and your media/lighting etc would magically follow you. Security applications are many.... recognise who is at the door. Log unrecognised faces and then indentify them as suspicious... have the system alert you if that person re-appears etc etc...

Now the downside is that I have yet to see anything approaching this capability even at airpport security checks... its just not that reliable and is fooled by smal variations in lighting, facial hair and simply make-up.

But it would be great if somewhere out there we could find something that delivered for real :-)

4445

Users / Re: Low Audio Volume on VIA Chipset

« on: September 24, 2007, 03:30:13 pm »

Hi

I have an Asus Pundit P2-AE2 Mini barebones system which Im using as a network boot media director.
It has the following chipsets

North Bridge: VIA K8M800
South Bridge: VIA VT8237R

Audio is a ADI AD 1888
6 Channel Codec

I have everything working great on this except for the audio is very quiet. No matter what I set in the mixer in kd the audio is very low. I have to turn my reciever upto full to be able to hear anything. When I switch to another input on the reciever the volume is deafening.
Any help on how to sort out this volume issue would be appreciated.

Regards

You could run the AVwizard again and make sure that the default volume is set correctly there (check if the audio volume is ok in the Wizard). We have similar hardware to you here and I can say that we have noticed this problem.

4446

Users / Re: Automatic thumbnails

« on: September 22, 2007, 09:08:27 am »

Then I shall implement the feature.

Thanks,

Stuart

I guess this would need to be integrated into UpdateMedia (which is C++) or possibly into the wrapper scripts around it. If this approach was taken then new mpg content would automatically get 'thumbnailed' shortly after it was added.

4447

Users / Re: Transcoding

« on: September 22, 2007, 08:47:32 am »

Hi,

I like to copy DVDs to my hard drive.  They take up a whole lotta space, however.  When copying a DVD to my hard drive, I would like to transcode to MPEG-4.  Does LinuxMCE contain a mechanism for doing this (automatically, or through manual prompting)?

Thanks,

Stuart

No it doesn't at present... but HandBrake might be a way forward. Look here http://handbrake.m0k.org/

The cli version (the only option currently if you not running Windows or Mac OSX) would look to be a good fit as it could be easily scripted to do the conversion ('easy' is a relative term here as HandBrake is a complex/powerful tool). I have not tried this I has to be said... but it looks 'doable' ;-)

4448

Users / Re: Face Recognition Features

« on: September 22, 2007, 07:18:17 am »

Is anyone know whether we can integrate the Face Recognition Software into LinuxMCE?

I'm sure its possible... give it a try ;-)

4449

Users / Re: Automatic thumbnails

« on: September 22, 2007, 07:16:17 am »

Say I install LinuxMCE, and I import a bunt-load of previously-acquired video files.  I want thumbnails for those files, so my media list can look pretty.  Is there a mechanism for automatically generating these thumbnails?

Thanks,

Stuart

If you mean "is there a mechanism to scan through the first few frames of each video file and use one of those frames as the thumbnail" then the answers is no I'm afraid. Its a good idea that was discussed a while back over in the Pluto forums but its never been implemented.

4450

Installation issues / Re: Problem with DVD playback

« on: September 21, 2007, 11:02:22 pm »

DVD Css is installed from the add software menu inside linux MCE, and I've since tried it with an amp. There's sound, but no picture.

After disc insertion, everything goes as expected. Linux MCE recognises that there's been a disk inserted, and the dvd begins to play as expected, although it doesn't play any of video for the intro scenes to the DVD's menu, but it does play the sound to them.
You then get your normal menu options, this time with sound and video. Pressing play starts the dvd running, but you only get sound and a black screen.

It sounds to me like it might be region related as you say the menu options and trailers etc play... but no the main part of the DVD. Have you tried several different discs from different regions? If video plays at all then it cant be driver related.

4451

Installation issues / Re: Problem with DVD playback

« on: September 20, 2007, 09:45:35 pm »

Hi All. I've recently installed Linux MCE, and have had various problems, but the most recent is DVD playback. With the help of a more Linux savvy friend, we discovered we had to install a few things to get dvd's to work, and they work just fine from the kubuntu desktop. However when in linux mce, I can only get as far as the menus, which take ages to load up in the first place. After hitting play movie, all I get is a black screen. The dvd drive seems to be reading the disk as I can hear it spinning, and the read light is going on and off, but other than that I have nothing. I must admit I haven't connected to an amp yet, so I'm unsure whether audio is playing.
Does anybody have any idea what might be the problem?

Thanks in advance

John

Hi John,

First off have you added DVDcss from The Orbiters lmce menu -> 'Add Software' screen?

Secondly if you insert a DVD into the drive do you get a 'Disc Inserted' message on screen? If yes does the disc briefly play then display the   DVD on screen remote screen?

Andrew

4452

Developers / Re: Nokia 770 Orbiter

« on: September 19, 2007, 02:04:46 pm »

Thats strange. We don't see that problem here as far as I know with our 770. The WiFi seems rock solid as far as we can tell. We don't have an 800 here yet to compare with though.

That's true. But I have a lot of cases when connection manager shows hight level of WiFi signal but device cannot be even pinged (no orbiter application run on it at that time). I already reported that problem in the Maemo mail list. One of possibility of that problem can be WLAN Power Save Mode which is used on Nokia770. Some AP cannot work with that mode correctly. Anyway, I'm digging that problem and I hope together with Maemo guru we'll find solution.

OK... sounds good. We'll keep monitoring the 770 as we use it  in demo's / testing and see if we notice any moments where the Orbiter app has any connectivity issues.

One thing we have noticed is that in the Media Floor plan if we have several MD's playing media the MD icon's on the Floorplan do not get coloured correctly. They always stay black instead of the colour of the Media they are playing. The Media list does have the correct colour by the way. Just thought I'd mention this... its a minor thing but it would be good to get a fix foe this.

4453

Developers / Re: Nokia 770 Orbiter

« on: September 19, 2007, 11:56:21 am »

The problem with crashing of Orbiter is related with loosing of WiFi connection. I don't understand why it happens. But sometimes I cannot even ping my 770 which is one meter from access point. After one-two minutes it appear in the ping. I didn't face with that problem on N800. So, I suspect that something wrong with WiFi implementation on Nokia770. I have to dig Maemo mail list to solve that.

Thats strange. We don't see that problem here as far as I know with our 770. The WiFi seems rock solid as far as we can tell. We don't have an 800 here yet to compare with though.

4454

Installation issues / Re: After installation, while orbit is configuring, experiencing problem with op

« on: September 18, 2007, 03:07:29 pm »

Am I right to assume orbit is the UI?  I chose opengl, and the opengl with transparency.  Both didn't work.  It says my video driver is i810, intel.  I'm using intel 945G chipset, which has intel GMA950 built-in.  Can anyone confirm if the 2 better choices for UI is working?  Do I need to change anything regarding video driver to achieve transparency? 

My Intel 945G chipset also uses ADI AD1988B Azalia 8 Channel sound card.  Can anyone confirm if I havd Dolby Digital, Dolby Prologic II?  I haven't finished setting up yet, but am excited as hell. 

The i945 chipset with a GMA950 graphics chip will only support UI1 I'm afraid.

4455

Users / Re: custom media locations...?

« on: September 17, 2007, 05:48:24 pm »

I found why auto discovery did not pick it up...
When i did the partition for kubuntu, i told it to mount the media on /MediaSVR
last night I plugged in another hardrive, and auto discovery found it. Seems like auto discovery will only work if it is not mounted to a folder yet.

Oh really? What a surprise... 

Be patient with them... they'll get there in the end ;-)