Author Topic: Linuxmce: My experience  (Read 5777 times)

tolkeinknoxy

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Linuxmce: My experience
« on: June 30, 2008, 03:38:51 pm »
Ive been followering LinuxMce for a while now and so far these are my experiences with the project:

Installation:
As long as you select recommended hardware everything goes without a hitch. Thanks to the AVwizard setting up audio and HDTV resolutions is much easier than manual ways. Kinda wish sometimes this tool appeared in standard distros. Only downside is the ATI problems, although this i believe is related to the driver from ATI itself.

Functionality:
Very good, having most devices plug and play is definatly good. Being able to use my remote straight out of the box is what i want from a media center. UI2 is also quite plesant and fancy to people. Only improvement I would particulary like is a way to turn flikr off if i don't want it. I have hundreds of my own pictures that I like appearing on the screens around the house, its just disappointing when your mum walks in and some raunchy pic from flikr shows up or a picture that dosnt display well comes on.

Javamo: Now this is a uber cool app which friends really enjoy. Being able to control the media center from a phone seems really only do-able from linuxmce. And im enjoying seeing this develop.

Event creation: this has two halves to it, on one hand i find it easy to use if i want basic things like lights down at sundown. Which is good. However say i want my outdoor lights on at sundown but want my lights inside my house to come on an hour before sun-down as the house gets dark around that time. I find i can not find easily locate such abilties in the event creation tool although im convinced people have done it.

Media final organisation: this is where i feel Linuxmce lacks behind abit. For movies this feature works very well and happy. I just click the file, search for it on amazon and volia. Only problem occurs when a film dosnt exist on amazon but does on IMDB. Like Operation Takedown. It would be useful if there was a manual feature to just type in an IMDB number (like in Mythtv) when i struggle auto-searching for a film and get it to pull down data that way.

and the biggie: TV shows.

This section provided me alot of problems. I have alot of tv-show sersis. And they are all stuctured nicely by Program name-Season-Episode. They appear in the video file window much trying to get information about a show is terrible. If i auto search on amazon it cant find (which is wernt expecting it to find individaul episodes). And trying to manually type in info is a laborious task and i have yet to be able to find a way to do it properly for the attributes. Atm i run a sql script that recursively sets some default values to seperate movies from tv shows. If there could be someway to get this part to work i would be eternally greatful. As at the moment i enter videos from a MD and i get hundreds of non-human readable file names of my shows (24 6x22) which isnt very user friendly. Then a few clicks to change the filter to movies and volia what i like to see. Just wish my tv shows could be the same. Also it might be an idea to default the video screen upon entry to Movies. As when you have TV shows there will always be many more episodes to films, which fills up lists quick and kills my Javmo :) . Alternatively TV shows could be organised in a tree like manner so i can select Stargate and it then shows the Season, Episode etc. Rather than just putting the file name in the linuxmce video tree. Obviously the reason why this isnt working at the moment is due to the way tv-shows are currently organised by the sync tool. I can set the tv-shows tag and this allows them to appear in the tv-shows filter but this is as far as it goes.

Features that would be sub zero cool- Voice control and Voice response. Now if this could be there goodbye any other media center. Think something like SARAH from In A Town Called Eureka. Although my girlfriend might be a little un-nerved by a 'Good-evening Professor Falcon, Would you like to Play a game of Chess' but i would find a chess playing house very good. :p

Raid: more of an off-topic one. But i have a raid 0 array of 3 drives. I add it to linuxmce my editing the mdadm conf file. I then add a device to linuxmce as an internal hard drive as it dosnt pick up the raid device and i specify /dev/md1 say. It then does set up the device and appear. However theres data on these drives already but sorted into the linuxmce structure. It dosnt add symlinks in for me, but if i add them manually they have a tendancy to disappear. Until i remake the sym link then rerun a media sync. Any ideas what could be causing this?

Other than that i find linuxmce a very promising project and would like to contuinue using it.
« Last Edit: June 30, 2008, 04:38:49 pm by tolkeinknoxy »

jondecker76

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Re: Linuxmce: My experience
« Reply #1 on: June 30, 2008, 04:20:20 pm »
Welcome - its good to hear a new user's experience getting things set up.

Quote
Installation:
As long as you select recommended hardware everything goes without a hitch. Thanks to the AVwizard setting up audio and HDTV resolutions is much easier than manual ways. Kinda wish sometimes this tool appeared in standard distros. Only downside is the ATI problems, although this i believe is related to the driver from ATI itself.
Yes, installation only has a very few quirks at this time. If you search around, you'll pretty much find that NVidia will be your only suggestion for video cards. This may change as ATI's open-source drivers develop, and VIA's open-source drivers improve.


Quote
Functionality:
Very good, having most devices plug and play is definatly good. Being able to use my remote straight out of the box is what i want from a media center. UI2 is also quite plesant and fancy to people. Only improvement I would particulary like is a way to turn flikr off if i don't want it. I have hundreds of my own pictures that I like appearing on the screens around the house, its just disappointing when your mum walks in and some raunchy pic from flikr shows up or a picture that dosnt display well comes on.
You can turn off flikr and use your own photos (if you're using 0710 that is). Just log into the web admin (192.168.80.1 in your web broswer) and there will be a section under Files & Media. You can disable flickr, and tag which of your own photos to use in the rotation.

Quote
Event creation: this has two halves to it, on one hand i find it easy to use if i want basic things like lights down at sundown. Which is good. However say i want some lights down at sundown say my outdoor lights. But want my lights inside my house to come on an hour before sun-down as the house gets dark around that time i find i can not find such abilties in the event creation tool although im convinced people have done it.

Events/Scenarios/Responses to Events are a source of confusion until you get some experience using them. Scenarios are groups of commands and appear as buttons on your orbiters.
Events are fired upon something happening (criteria), and responses to events are the commands (a command group) that execute if the criteria evaluates to true.
With that said, you have a few ways to create events... For your example, in the web admin just go to Timed Events, create a new timed event with the time you desire (in 24 hour format such as 21:00 for 9 o' clock etc.), and use the lighting wizard to select which commands to send to which lights.
Also, if you want more control (criteria for your events) go to Advanced->Configuration->Events and here you can do pretty much anything you want.

Quote
Media final organisation: this is where i feel Linuxmce lacks behind abit. For movies this feature works very well and happy. I just click the file search for it on amazon and volia. Only problem occurs when a film dosnt exist on amazon but does on IMDB. Would be useful if there was a manual feature to just type in an IMDB number (like in Mythtv) when i struggle auto-searching for a film and get it to pull down data that way.
I felt this way also about media organization when I first started, and I know a lot of other people did too when they first started out. But as you use it more, you will see the power in it and why it is the way it is. When I want to watch a movie, i just hit the Video scenario on my orbiter.. I don't have to browse through paths etc, my video collection is just there, whether it is stored on my RAID array on the core, a NAS in the closet, or some other samba share I have running or even a dic in a disc drive on one of the media directors. However, you can choose a path navigation on the orbiters (under options) to display by filename - here, directory structure is preserved. I do think you will have better luck though working with LMCE's way. Learn how to tag your media with attributes (performers, genres, you name it) in the web admin. This gives incredible searching power. For instance, if I'm watching "The Terminator" - I can choose to see a list of actors (performers) of that movie, select one, and have a list of all of my movies for that actor delivered to me.
There are 2 ways to tag your media from the web admin.. You can use Files & Media -> Coverart to assign coverarts and attributes from amazon.com. Another way is almost a hidden gem. Under Files&Media -> Media Files Sync, you can do much more than just sync your database. Use it to browse your files one at a time and edit their tags directly(even though you are in Media Files Sync, you don't need to sync)... You can even download Amazon.com coverarts and attributes from here. It is my perferred method for managing my media collection as it gives you full control of all of the attributes you may want to set.

Same goes for your TV shows. You can even give them a separate media subtype and make a button just for TV shows on your orbiter. Also, keep in mind that what the orbiter displays for each file is defaultly the Title attribute of each file. THat is a good place to start if you have any cryptic filename.
Just take some time and learn to tag your media, I think you'll see things a bit differently once you get the hang of it.

Quote
Features that would be sub zero cool- Voice control and Voice response. Now if this could be there goodbye any other media center. Think something like SARAH from In A Town Called Eureka. Although my girlfriend might be a little un-nerved by a 'Good-evening Professor Falcon, Would you like to Play a game of Chess' but i would find a chess playing house very good. :p
Its been talked about... There is even some source code in svn. I'm sure that some day it will be a reality.


Quote
Raid: more of an off-topic one. But i have a raid 0 array of 3 drives. I add it to linuxmce my editing the mdadm conf file. I then add a device to linuxmce as an internal hard drive as it dosnt pick up the raid device and i specify /dev/md1 say. It then does set up the device and appear. However theres data on these drives already but sorted into the linuxmce structure. It dosnt add symlinks in for me, but if i add them manually they have a tendancy to disappear. Until i remake the sym link then rerun a media sync. Any ideas what could be causing this?
You will find that LMCE does some things on its own (automatic scenario generation, rewriting custom xorg.conf files, symlinks etc.). This is needed so that the system just works for people with little or no technical skill. Of course the downside is that for advanced tinkerers, it has this side effect. You can always change the source to your liking and get rid of these if you had to however.
Also, LMCE does have a built in RAID system. In the web admin, go to Advanced->Configuration->Raid. The system is a little crude, but makes it very easy as well. I have also found that if you create a RAID array through LMCE's admin, you must be patient! It does not do a good job of alerting the user to the status of the array, so if you add one and it is verifying integrity, you would not know and probably figure that it just didn't work.. But if you are patient and check back the next day, it would be there and all would be well. So thats the last thing to learn, patience - sounds rediculous, but there have been countless times that I swear something wasn't working, but i gave it enough time and chilled out and all was fine

Thanks for sharing your experience, good luck with your setup
« Last Edit: June 30, 2008, 04:23:48 pm by jondecker76 »

Raul102801

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Re: Linuxmce: My experience
« Reply #2 on: July 14, 2008, 10:52:57 pm »
Is there any good documents on Media Tagging? I am also a little frustrated if I can't find something on amazon.com and I do have cover art of my own and can't use it 'cuz I don't know how. Also I am yet to find out how to categorize by type. For instance, I saved some music videos in the Audio folder using file sharing, the videos automatically show under movies but I would like to go a little further and assign them to the music video category.
Any ideas anyone?

skeptic

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Re: Linuxmce: My experience
« Reply #3 on: July 14, 2008, 11:51:02 pm »
A couple things I'd like to see that I THINK may be in the process of being worked on now.  First, an easy way to play music.  Honestly, I'm not really sure what I want but currently all my music is just one big list.  Maybe I'm missing something, but if I could tag currently playing music by genre and give it a rating that would be cool.  Multiple genres would be better, ie 80's and pop and "morning alarm" and workout....  I could do this with multiple lists as well I'm sure.

As I understand it, there is or at least was a UI editor, but I read it's not the easiest thing to use.  I started with UI2 + blending, but depending on the background picture it can be hard to read so I turned off blending.  After setting up a MD in the bedroom I chose UI1 because the extra remote I have is actually one of those cheap-os that acts like a keyboard/mouse and UI1 works much better using arrow keys and keypad (basically what this remote is).  The wife saw it and likes it much better so I'll be changing the main TV to UI1.  Meh.  Having various UI options and being able to choose between using a remote or a keyboard (numbers, arrows, enter key) as primary control would be great.  I like using the remote much better, but for $15 you can get a keyboard type usb remote+receiver off ebay and I can live with a pop-up screen for controlling the movie (UI1 only as far as I know).  UI2 is slick, but for the WAF having a MythTV or Tivo type UI with all the LMCE menu items would be better. 

Video tagging could use a bit of work, being able to add an IMDB number etc., but overall I'd say it's far better than MythTV's way. 

I'm not trying to rag on LMCE, I think it's great, I'm just throwing out ideas to make it even better.  If I had the time and skills I'd help with the project but I just don't. 

tschak909

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Re: Linuxmce: My experience
« Reply #4 on: July 15, 2008, 03:47:38 am »
I invite anyone who is interesed in doing UI work, to please view my HADesigner and Skins screencasts series:

http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=5059.0
http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=5732.0

-Thom


skeptic

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Re: Linuxmce: My experience
« Reply #5 on: July 15, 2008, 04:18:52 pm »
I invite anyone who is interesed in doing UI work, to please view my HADesigner and Skins screencasts series:

http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=5059.0
http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=5732.0

-Thom


Is this using the old UI designer that I believe a dev said not to bother with, or is this a new thing?  I haven't watched the vids yet, but the minimo screen shot looks looks like the kind of UI that I'd use (for the wife acceptance factor).

tschak909

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Re: Linuxmce: My experience
« Reply #6 on: July 15, 2008, 04:22:57 pm »
the "old" designer is the only one we have. we need to use it until we make something better.

Thanks very much for the comment. :)

-Thom

skeptic

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Re: Linuxmce: My experience
« Reply #7 on: July 15, 2008, 05:44:31 pm »
the "old" designer is the only one we have. we need to use it until we make something better.

Thanks very much for the comment. :)

-Thom

I think with your tutorials and the old designer we will have what we need for some new user created skins.  I'm watching the vids now.  Not sure if/when I'll be able to make a new skin, I don't really have a Windoze box to install it on nor do I really know what I want to do, but I may try figure something out. 

Let me ask a couple questions that may or may not be answered elsewhere or further along in the video..  Can you use animated gifs or some other method to animate the backgrounds/buttons?  Can you have a main menu with completely static buttons that take you to a sub menu with all the dynamic options?  For example, the main menu just has buttons for Lights, Media, Climate, etc. and selecting Media would bring up another menu screen with TV, Video, Music etc.  I know this kinda gets away from the current LMCE idea of having everything on-hand and easy to get to with very little effort, but going back to the WAF she would really prefer a more "Tivo" like menu system.  Those of us with wives/girlfriends (or husbands/boyfriends) know that keeping the SO happy means we get to keep playing and adding to the system. 

tschak909

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Re: Linuxmce: My experience
« Reply #8 on: July 15, 2008, 06:05:53 pm »
Yes to both questions.

Animations are handled with MNG files, and any designobjs that you need animated, must have the [ ] Animate checkbox enabled.

however, due to the way Orbiter works, this introduces some interesting side effects:

* All images are pre-rendered. This means, that all the frames of the respective animation must be rendered and flattened. If you do animation that crosses or is near by things like "buttons" etc that have their own independent states, you will notice odd animation artifacting, as states are replaced. OrbiterGen can not anticipate every single state of multiple intersecting designobjs with different states. In fact, it doesn't at all.

* orbiter generation time increases signficantly, as again, graphics for every single frame have to be factored and rendered.

Two basic points, for any skins that are intended for public use:

However you do it, is up to you. Please do it in its own skin, and do not modify Basic at all.

Also, I don't give a damn if you do not have all the devices for all the device variation UIs. I will not accept skins into sqlCVS that do not address all the variations of a UI.

-Thom

skeptic

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Re: Linuxmce: My experience
« Reply #9 on: July 15, 2008, 06:43:30 pm »
Yes to both questions.

Animations are handled with MNG files, and any designobjs that you need animated, must have the [ ] Animate checkbox enabled.

however, due to the way Orbiter works, this introduces some interesting side effects:

* All images are pre-rendered. This means, that all the frames of the respective animation must be rendered and flattened. If you do animation that crosses or is near by things like "buttons" etc that have their own independent states, you will notice odd animation artifacting, as states are replaced. OrbiterGen can not anticipate every single state of multiple intersecting designobjs with different states. In fact, it doesn't at all.
How does this affect animated backgrounds?  If you've ever used Tivo, it has a sort of smoke or mist looking animated background.  Not that I want to try to duplicate the Tivo interface, but the non-distractive animated background does add a nice touch.
Quote

* orbiter generation time increases signficantly, as again, graphics for every single frame have to be factored and rendered.

Two basic points, for any skins that are intended for public use:

However you do it, is up to you. Please do it in its own skin, and do not modify Basic at all.

Also, I don't give a damn if you do not have all the devices for all the device variation UIs. I will not accept skins into sqlCVS that do not address all the variations of a UI.

-Thom

Very good rules. 

tschak909

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Re: Linuxmce: My experience
« Reply #10 on: July 15, 2008, 06:52:33 pm »
in short, you'll need to be very clever about animated backgrounds, and buttons. Lots of experimentation will need to be done. it will not be smooth, so you'll need to factor that in. Keep in mind, this was designed to work on both high power and low power devices alike.

-Thom