First, I want to thank everyone here for accomplishing something I have been trying to do for years!!! Being from HA industry as a technical architect I have some experience in this field.
But as feshmeat to this project, I have some thoughts and questions:
1. My ultimate HA system would be a back room server with settop boxes in every room with the ability to view/play/modify any "runtime" feature within the system. I.E. My 5 year old can go to her room, turn on her TV and play whatever movie/music/playlist she wants.
2. It would great to have Pluto incorporate UPNP A/V into the product so I can use cheap products like this for less than $200.00US (
http://www.dlink.com/products/?sec=0&pid=438 ) without having to transcode on the server. There are even better settop boxes with built in H.264 decoding (
http://www.alphanetworks.com/index.htm). All these units are Linux based and have HWare decoders built into the box. Yes, there are several open source UPNP A/V projects out there BUT they do not integrate everything for a HA solution into one product like Pluto.
3. Incorporate full support for H.264 (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264) into the project (not just within VideoLAN) so that you have great quality playback on almost ALL new devices including phones.
4. Incorporate native support for Zwave, Insteon, etc. into the system.
So, in conclusion…
I would really like to have a system like Pluto that does almost everything that uses cheap settop boxes for the interface and do the decoding and playback via hardware so as to greatly reduce overhead on the server for other tasks.
Thoughts and opinions greatly appreciated here!!!
