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« on: July 06, 2007, 01:53:08 am »
Hello everybody. I just heard about LMCE recently, and I just want to make sure that I'm understanding both the purpose and function of it.
First off, it is designed to *be* the house, in some respects. It is capable of multiple inputs from such things as security cameras, motion detectors, light control, etc. Essentially, if somebody can contrive a way for LMCE to understand input, LMCE can control it.
Secondly, LMCE is user-, house- and media-centric. If I move around in the house, so long as a LMCE front is configured in that room, my session will follow me (is this with tracking devices, or do I need to authenticate at each front-end?). By house-centric, I mean that LMCE is designed to know everything about your house, from lighting, to location, and everything between. This way, LMCE can deliver the best media and control environment for the user. And media-centric because it organizes and displays all your data in a friendly, intuative way.
So that is the purpose of LMCE, to my understanding. The function is something I'm not entirely clear on yet.
From what I can gather, LMCE is capable of learning about a multitude of input/output devices (or rather, it will be capable of a wide variety; right now the device set is limited). My concern is with the integration. For instance, let's say that I want to completly wire LMCE into my house, from top to bottom. Everything will be controlled by a very capable media distribution system. What kind of options do I have for that? Things I am interested in are typically found in a "Smart Home": full lighting control, music, video, news, food and drink, inventory of consumables. If there is a sensor available to give me telemetry on those variables, could LMCE hypothetically be set up to control them, or at least facilitate control?
Another situation, similar to above, is if I decide to network only my bedrooms and living room, but then decide to add a kitchen sometime later. How easy will this be when I'm not using the initial setup?
I obviously don't have all my eggs in one basket, so to speak. I keep some of my media on a local fileserver, but the majority of it is available on DVD. For the media that is available on my network fileserver (music, movies, TV shows, pictures), will that be accessable throughout the LMCE network? From what I gather, this would be possible, due to the core/frontend environment LMCE uses.
My last hypothetical concern is that of distribution. If I were to use LMCE to run media services in an entire organization, with around 200 computers in the building, it wouldn't be reasonable to expect one LMCE server to provide or administrate content, let alone house services, to that many frontends. Would having multiple cores, say 5, with media content available on a SAN, be an option? I suppose another topic of distribution would be having two locations, be they in the same city or opposite ends of the Earth. Can LMCE communicate with external cores, if it has the ability to communicate with other cores to begin with, and co-ordinate local and non-local content and management? The core(s) in location A would obviously control the security at location A, and B would do the same, but can both locations dynamically send/recieve/share content, if the network infastructure were set up properly?
I thank you for taking the time to read through my thouroughly hypothetical questions. I really like what LMCE can do, and it hasn't even matured yet. It will be exciting to watch the functionality and features to grow over time!
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