Messages

1

Users / Re: Multiple Displays

« on: November 23, 2009, 05:48:09 pm »

I dont want you to think i am just talking you down, but this really would require a serious investment of hardware to do.

Gotcha.  Basically 5 smaller boxes would be better than one large box.  I guess price-wise it's not that much different.  With abundance of ebay parts new/refurb you can easily build an HD-capable FE for less than $500.

Would still make a remote problem... I guess maybe one of those programmable jobs like the harmony could be used to make macros to quickly switch the displays if wanted.  I can try it now with two of the FE I have and the core I suppose to see if it's feasible.

2

Users / Re: Multiple Displays

« on: November 03, 2009, 04:29:16 pm »

In all honesty, not a ton of money has been set aside really.

The FE I'm planning to use isn't that much different than a quality gaming machine.  I think I have about $1400 into it.

The TV (52") roughly $1700, but I don't really count that as a part of this project since I would have the TV anyways.  A $500 FE could do content for a 52" as easily as a $1200 FE would.

The 22", $149/ea Samsungs refurb off ebay.  I already had two for my home office and was going to get another pair of them.

The reason for wanting to virtualize the front ends was to avoid spending a ton of money over what I had planned   The reason for the ATI card was that it was the only one I could really find that, when doubled up, would easily support 5 monitors at very high resolutions in whatever configuration you want. 


I'll check more in to the Follow Me capability.  I suppose it could be possible to fake this into thinking things are in different rooms and swap displays that way.  Now that I look more closely at it, it looks like, if it can be manipulated this way, would be the way to go.

3

Users / Re: Multiple Displays

« on: November 02, 2009, 12:21:32 am »

I dont think you will ever see a feature like this in lmce unless you put it in yourself.
It is just so far beyond the scope of what a normal lmce user would do that you are going to have a hard time finding anyone else interested in it.

Wasn't really looking for an addition of capabilities or anything, more just the feasibility of the project.

I've looked at windows mce versions, mythbuntu and other packages, but none really offer the ease of managing multiple MD from a single location [orbiter].  From the core's point of view, 5 VM should be no different than rooms.  I'm willing to tackle the project and I think the biggest issue would be drivers for the newest ATI card, but hopefully that will still be manageable, if not solved in the near future with some beta drivers.

I guess more of what I was looking for is if anyone knows of an easy PIP-style way to swap the data going to two different media directors.  Maybe something like the blue/red/green/black buttons on the bottom of my MCE remote could be used in some form of macro or something, to decide which of the four smaller screens has focus on the big screen (really just choosing the same channel for the smaller screen of choice and having the main MD screen match that one)

4

Users / Multiple Displays

« on: October 31, 2009, 03:54:21 pm »

So in searching I've found that LinuxMCE will not do multiple displays.

For my TV room/game room, here's the setup I plan on going with.

I have a phenom II x4 965 3.4ghz oc @ 4ghz, 8mb RAM with (2) ATI 4870's running 5 displays with ati's eyefinity under windows XP 64.  Basically it turns the entire setup into a 5720x2400 display I think.  But I can split it into multiple monitor setup so I can maximize a VM in each of the five displays without a border.  I'm using 1 52" LCD and 4 (2 on each side) 22" LCD's around it.

LinuxMCE should be able to run in VM's as diskless FE (or with virtual disks, doesn't matter) under 5 (using virtualbox, vmware, etc...) and just whatever monitor XP has assigned to it right?

Then I would just assign each monitor/virtual FE to the floorplan such as:  TV ROOM - Main, TV room - Top Right, etc... effectively running 5 FE in that room.  When I need to change channels, just switch the floorplan to the correct TV, change channels and it will swap on that TV right?

I'm still wondering on an effective way to swap VM to different displays in a pinch from the remote/orbiter and how to manage sound (I guess from the main large TV only.  Imagine sports Sunday with 4 NFL games and the race on... sound is focused on the main display and pretend the race is on the top-left monitor and a crash occurs.  Anyone have ideas on switching the channels?

My initial thought on that would be to assign a remote button that LMCE doesn't recognize but XP would.  When pressed, it would give an option for which VM would be the "main" VM and when chosen, swap with whatever it's replacing.  I suppose that could be done with some kind of macro setup in XP... but I haven't tried it yet.

The reason I don't just run linux is because there's no real easy options yet such as the eyefinity setup to run 5 displays and effectively manage them, using either one large display or multiple displays.  I suppose for one large display, I have a 6th LMCE VM that I boot with where windows allocates the entire display area (all 5 monitors) to the VM.  That would be the easiest solution for that because I won't be switching between 5 VM and 1 VM on a regular basis, but switching displays from subs to main would be something pretty regular on sports days.


Any ideas on easy automatic switching displays between FE like this though?


For the core, I'm running a phenom II x4 955 (3.2ghz) with 4gb ram, 2 hauppauge 2250's, 2 1600's, 2 pvr-150 (for analog and FM radio) and 2 usb hd-pvr's, nvidia 9800gt and about 6TB of drivespace.  That pretty much covers the whole house plus recording except when I'm running 5 simultaneous displays, but one spare digital is enough for those days.  Regardless though, should be more than enough to support the above setup.  Also also have 4 other front ends in the house (3br and kitchen) that work great right now.


Currently running 0710 throughout the house, but will be upgrading some of the hardware and setting up the tv room and rebuilding everything 0810 when I do this.

5

Feature requests & roadmap / Re: Core Redundancy:What if?

« on: October 21, 2008, 11:31:09 pm »

I used half a roll of duct tape and some cardboard to replace a radiator cap that lasted 5 months before I fixed it. 

Don't shun the duct tape

6

Feature requests & roadmap / Re: Core Redundancy:What if?

« on: October 21, 2008, 11:25:38 pm »

I suppose it would be possible to have a separate DB box running mysql so you can cluster it to a raid5 filesystem and all that.  That keeps your database going no matter what.  Same with your media files.

Two identical boxes replicated could sit behind a load balancer on your network, each with backend connections to the database.  In the event of the primary box failure, the load balance could shift all traffic from that box to the backup one.

Not sure how the media directors would react to that though, unless you had some scripts to automate changing of channels on the two router boxes so they stayed in sync.  And you'd still have to reload movies, tv shows and the like in the event of a failover.

But if you were absent at the time and the primary box goes down, you could at least rest assuredly that security would only be down for a minute or two once the failover took place.  Could probably setup a reload router script that the router could trigger manually from the command line as well to ensure that a failover situation started fresh.