I think LMCE can be a candidate. I use this for playing the same song in all rooms, or different songs in different rooms.
All that would be required is to have a Media Director (MD) in each of the rooms you wish to have sound. These can be connected to TV's or to stereo systems. LMCE controls things through pipes. You set these up in the connection manager. In my home I have a core/hybrid in the living room or theater room. I also have a MD in the family room, and in each of the bedrooms. Now the core system, runs it all. Every other computer in the house is hooked up to a TV. To play movies/videos in the living room, it naturally uses my AV Theater receiver. In each of the other rooms, it uses the TV speakers.

Now because of the pipes I have set up, the theater room volume is controlled via the AV receiver. In each of the other rooms the sound volume is controlled by the TV speakers. This will most likely be the default setting, but by using the connection manager (example of my living room here http://dataless.jeromenet.org/lmce-stuff/connmangr.PNG my video output from the lmce is connected to the TV, the audio output from the lmce is connected to the AV Receiver.

Unlike my MD's which have both the video and audio output of the lmce connected to the TV's.

If you decide to use computer speakers or whatever for your other rooms, a pipe will need to be connected to the amplifier if you use a stereo system, however if you use PC speakers, no pipe is required. LMCE will automatically control the PC sound.

In my situation, I can fire off the same music to all MD's at once, or individually. But each room has its own volume control, so it can be adjusted locally.

I hope this helps a bit. I know LMCE can handle multi-room audio, and video, and a host of other things. Most of the individual controls can be configured with the connection manager, however, using an orbiter on any of the MD's or the main system, or your phone or laptop, you can from a single location control the volume in any room. This helps when my daughter is blasting her audio in her bedroom, and I don't want to hear it in the other parts of the house, I just call up her room on any orbiter, and turn it down myself

You will find that LMCE is the most advanced, and heck, the coolest system you will every install, and although daunting at first, can be configured quite easily.

Regards,

Seth

 
I recommend Hauppagge cards. If you have a single TV viewing need, the PVR150MCE (Usually comes with a nice remote, plug and play with LMCE) or for recording one thing while watching another, the PVR500MCE, as it has dual tuners.

Both cards are plug and play with LMCE, and will work for you out of the box. Both MCE versions of the card can be had with the MCE remote, and receiver/blaster. Again, plug and play.

Regards,

Seth

The pvr150 won't show up in the connections wizard, just the core, the tv (or other viewing device) and the cable box. Once the video and audio pipes are drawn for the cable box to the core, you should be set. The channel change script is :

Code:

/usr/pluto/bin/TuneToChannel.sh

and takes the form of :

Code:

TuneToChannel.sh <device to be controlled> <Media Room>

For an example if your cable box is device #51 and the viewing area is the first room in your rooms list (mine is the living room) is #1 then the format would be:

Code:

/usr/pluto/bin/TuneToChannel.sh 51 1

This is what you would put in mythtv-setup under channel change script.

Hope that helps, I will verify this tonight and post back if there are any changes.

Regards,

Seth

 
I am not sure of your installation requirements, but the dvd iso images are prebuilt with Kubuntu 710. The drawbacks to this type of install, is that it will wipe your entire HDD. But the benefits are a very easy, and fast install (like 20 minutes) vs. the 1-1/2 to 2hr install via the cd's.

I have done this both ways, and I prefer the DVD install over the CD install. If you are concerned about disk space, slap a 30 or 40G disk in there, and use the DVD. If not, then just use the DVD. You will find that the install is much less painless, and you can be experiencing all that is LMCE in much less time.

Just my 2 cents 

Regards,

Seth

 
On a side note, when you set up the pvr card in LMCE setup wizard, which port did you tell it the cable box as connected to?

This can be viewed by looking at providers in mythtv-setup. If you have it hooked to the composite or yellow port for video, the provider portion must be set to composite or composite:1 I had a similar experince while setting up an MD that it was using the coax jack in the provider section, a quick change to composite, resolved the issue. But to make it stick, you will have to run setup wizard again, and select the composite port, vs. the antenna port.

Just an idea as to where to look.

Regards,

Seth

 
I noticed this as well. Using UI2 w/masking, my menu's became non-responsive. I changed back to UI2 Alpha Blending, and the issue went away completely. When I get home this evening, I am going to try removing "UseEvents" "True" to "False" and see if I get the same result. My alpha blended UI works exceptionally well, however, I noticed yesterday while playing some music, that it is very hard to see the track titles and such. This is what made me switch back to UI2 Masked. But I cannot handle the delay and latency of masked. It is much smoother and cleaner transition while using UI2 Alpha.

Just my experience.

Regards,
Seth

 

Just bought an additional one myself. Always good to have an extra!!!

Regards,

Seth

 
IR Blaster Dongles are small IR led's attached to a wire to better position them in front of the device to be controlled for improved performance and accuracy. An example is on like in the link below:

http://www.smarthome.com/8170.html?src=WG1000118&gclid=CJeW9v_tppMCFRLnxgoduCm2ng

 
My TV and entertainment rack are built into my wall at home. I have a dual-headed ir blaster dongle plugged into the back of my USB-UIRT. One of the heads is in the AV rack with the satellite receiver, AV receiver, and sirius receiver. The head on the blaster is powerful enough to hit all devices. The second head of the blaster is run behind the wall into the TV recess. I have it mounted over the TV's ir sensor.

On my MD I have a mce usb receiver with a single irblaster, that one I have run to a second satellite receiver, underneath the 27" TV in the same recess of my entertainment center, its blaster is strong enough to hit both the TV and the receiver.

However, if running a 64bit version of lmce, connected to the USB-UIRT, the ir blaster dongles are not required. I have done this with beta4, for whatever reason, running 64bit LMCE allows the internal ir blaster to function on the USB-UIRT.

But that is my layout. I made my own ir blaster dongles from radio shack parts, but there are other resources on line.

Regards,

Seth

 
Good news, your mce remote/receiver will work on install. The USB-UIRT is used to control IR devices.
For example, my core, has a dish network receiver, a sirius satellite receiver, a RCA AV Dolby Digital receiver, and a 42" Big screen TV. Using the USB-UIRT to learn each one of those devices remote control (this is very simple to do through the web admin after install) once all of the codes are learned, no matter which device I use, it has all been consolidated to a single mce remote, so if I want to watch a dvd, it automatically changes the input on my AV receiver to DVD, puts the TV on the correct input, and does it all with a single button press on the mce remote.

I also use it to change the channels on my dish network receiver, and all I had to do was learn the receivers codes. LMCE knows exactly what device to control, and which inputs to use, all controlled by IR and the USB-UIRT.

This is the main feature for me of the USB-UIRT, the ability to learn and reproduce any IR code I throw at it. 

After the receiver is installed, it is automatically set up, and allows you to use your existing mce remote. This gives you the option to put your other receiver on a future media director (MD) and just carry the remote back and forth, so you have 2 places controlled by the same remote, and if you are on an MD, and you want to change a channel on the STB for cable or dish the MD sends the commands to the core, and blasts them using the USB-UIRT, so you can be in another room, and still have access to your main core devices.

Definitely a worth while purchase.

Regards,

Seth

 
Any NVIDIA 6x00 or 7x00 serires card will work great, out of the box, as far as receivers, I recommend windows mce remote/receiver bundles, i bought 2 on ebay for like $15US a piece plus shipping. I also highly recommend getting a USB-UIRT. This is by far the best purchase I made www.usbuirt.com it will learn any IR remote command, and replicate it for your system. And now with the 710 release, the ir blasters on the mce remote receivers also work well.

The USB-UIRT is about $55 US plus shipping, but well worth the price, it can really control everything in your system from within LMCE.
The MCE remotes are plug and play, as are the ir blasters. You may also wish to purchase an ir dongle or 2 for the USB-UIRT.

Get that little bit squared away, and welcome aboard. You won't regret making the change 

Regards,

Seth

 
That would make a great LMCE box, there is just one issue you my find. ATI support in Linux is inherently just bad. Upgrade that video card to an Nvidia product, and you will be ready to go.

Regards,

Seth

 
LMCE's version of MythTV still runs a mythbackend server. As long as your versions are close or exact, you should simply have to put the MythTV frontend PC on the same subnet as the core media subnet (default is 192.168.80.1) when running mythfrontend it will ask you for the masterserver backend ip address or hostname (again the default is 192.168.80.1 or dcerouter), after providing this information, you will most likely be able to connect to your content (I do this all the time from my laptop booted to kubuntu 710, and the mythv-frontend package installed) and I can view my recordings and watch TV live from the tuners.

the latest version of MythTV in LMCE is 0.20.2 fixes, so as long as the version you install is of this variant or package level, you should be able to connect up. If you for whatever reason do not wish to attach the myth frontend pc/laptop to the media subnet provided by the core, you will have to make ammendments to your LMCE firewall from the web admin to allow mythtv to talk to it, or simply disable the LMCE firewall so that the mythfrontend can connect to its address. You will also have to go into mythtv setup on the lmce core, and get the username and password for the mythtv mysql user. Otherwise you will not be able to connect to the LMCE master backend.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Seth

 
How are you controlling your system. To exit out of MythTV, you can do several things depending on how you control it.

At the very simplest level, using a a keyboard, hit F7, then using the arrow keys, navigate to the bottom option on the far left to "Off"

If using a keyboard and mouse, hit F7, and then move the cursor over to the far left and click Off.

If using a MCE remote, press the "Home" or "Microsoft symbol" button, and then use the remotes directional pad to select "Off" from the far left. Or even simpler, press the "Stop" button on the remote.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Seth

 
You could also use a terminal session either by invoking "Ctrl-Alt_F2" or by using the "Konsole" terminal in KDE, and run the following command:

Code:

dmesg | grep dvb

or

Code:

lspci -v | grep dvb

If it shows up as configured, but Sarah did not see it, it is still very possible to set it up using MythTV-Setup manually from the "Computing"  menu option on your UI, located on the far right of your screen. I had to do this with my Air2PC DVB-T OTA cards. They were set up by the kernel, but not detected by the setup wizard, and they work well on both my MD, and my core/hybrid.

Regards,

Seth