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agree with all of 'em.  Modern hardware == yeah!

plus...
11. Asus EEE box support (out of the box!  $300 MD's!!!)
12. Current Linux Distro (apt-get upgrade!!)

Can't wait!

In 0810 all of these issues are taken care of by the updated kernel to a large extent and other cans be corrected in the initramfs.

All the best

Andrew

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why you keep your projects in sync with the current versions of the distro you are working on.  We are not the only people in the planet to have these problems with these brand new chipsets, and the 0710 fix is to apply just enough handmade back ports to make it work.

The best idea (and the inevitable future) is riding the wave with the (K)Ubuntu crowd, keep the sun at our backs and our eyes on the horizon.  Their will be very few version-to-next upgrade issues, much easier to stay on top of, and we might even be able to drive what is included in the "extended world" package systems in the HA realm just by the fact that _we_ are using them.

Developers: Jump on now, take your time to get up to speed, and lets have some fun creating that house we had dreams about as children!

Seer

P.S. thanks alx9r for your run though of the eee box.  I'm sold!  Let's hear it for $300 25watt computers!  And another for the upcoming 204 with HDMI and Discrete Graphics card.

Stable?  Yes!  Supported, no. 

I've only touched my toe in 0710 and promptly installed 0810 to have a "development" box, and I've gotten most things working.  Some important features don't work yet, like "Manage Drives" for hard drives (works with my DVD-ROM drive), and I don't have any HA stuff at the moment.  Basically, I've been able to play around with it very well.  It's not mission critical in my house right now, so if you have a working 0710 running your house, DO NOT just upgrade on top of it.  If anything, get a new hard drive and install onto that so if it doesn't work, just unplug it and boot up your known good 0710 drive.

I'll shortly have a tuner card (if it ever comes in the mail!) so I'll be able to report on Myth at that time.

And remember, it's not called "The Bleeding Edge" for nothin'!

I agree with the kyrs and with Pnuts.  I 2nd the "Water cooler" or "Off Topic" forum as well.  It might also be a great place to put the "photos of my setup" kinda thing.  Nothing makes people want HA more than seeing other people's kick-ass house setup!

Well, we can always create a theme for Firefox that meets our needs.  Check out some other examples of what people used for a "10 foot interface"

The Nintendo Wii.  This uses very large buttons to give you a few options.  Everything else is either done from the default home page, or not given to you (you can't change fonts and some other settings)


The PS3 has this as their home page.  The use the context menu (triangle) to bring up all the options, including "Address Entry"  Included a button to "zoom" in.


The Xbox360 doesn't include a browser, but it looks like there is a popular plugin from the MCE to use their browser.  Here's a link to a bunch of screenshots for that: http://www.anpark.com/MCEBrowser_Screenshots.aspx

What do people think of the above methods of interacting with the browser on the TV?  Personally, I like the context menu for everything, with the possibility of putting the URL on the top of the screen.  Also, zoom is a must.  Finally, we need to create a TV friendly "home" page that has highly used bookmarked sites contained within large easy to click buttons.

Any other ideas?

[VaAPI]

Take a look at http://www.mythtv.org/wiki/VDPAU

It looks like if (and only if) you have a support cart (also listed on the above link) you can follow the instructions above.  It seems like MythTV and Xine will just work by the time 0810 rolls out.  Seems like MythTV 0.22 will included support, and any binary driver post-180.16 already supports it.

Anyway, it seems like for the most part us LMCE'rs don't have to worry about it much.  It'll either just work or it won't. 

As an aside, ATI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Video_Bitstream_Acceleration) and Intel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VaAPI) both have their _own_ version of GPU decoding. 

If LMCE should support anything, it should be VaAPI.  It looks like VaAPI already supports nVidia and Intel hardware decoding, and beta support for ATI.  It's designed to replace X's Xv and XvMC.  How awesome is that?  Check out more info here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VaAPI

Um, what?  From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDPAU

Software supporting VDPAU

    * MythTV (Linux)[5]
    * Xine (Linux)[6]
    * MPlayer (Linux)
    * VLC media player (Linux)[7]
    * FFmpeg (Linux)[8]
    * XBMC Media Center (Linux)[9][10][11]

Looks like all we'd need to do is use the _current_ version of the apps LMCE already uses and we are in like Flynn. 

Or am I wrong?

If your goal is the same as mine, to use it as a media front end you can take advantage of the 1.8 firmware addition of DLNA media streaming and use a Core/Hybrid to service your PS3. I built a Hybrid LinuxMCE box to service my bedroom and then compiled an SVN version of Myth with uPnP streaming and the PS3 will see it and access it.

I don't mean to needlessly repeat the above, but I've been doing this for a little while now.  I don't even have an MD (yet!) in my living room, but I've been enjoying a single place to stream all my media.  I have to admit that I did install ps3mediaserver to augment the transcoding of my mkv anime files, but I've been lovin' DLNA for quite some time now.  Granted, it doesn't have the HA stuff, but media should be taken care of using FUPPES, or MediaTomb, or ps3mediaserver.

BTW, good luck with that PPC conversion!  I hope you can make it work.

lmced makes perfect sense to me.  It's the perfect name.

It's not that "drastic" of a change.  I believe that "Launch Manager" doesn't mean "LinuxMCE daemon client" and could be confused with Launch docks.  lmced and lmced-client are exactly what I would be looking for if I came to this project from the greater Linux community.

I fully agree with Colin.  Someone might step into the forum months or years later with the same issue that was discussed and the "resolution" that was mentioned on the forum no longer works.  That new user should be able to post a "I've tried all of the above stuff and I still get $ERROR_MSG".  Also, we might have a regression when people move to 0810 and some new library version (or some other non-pluto package) creates an error that seems similar to something that has been discussed in the forum. 

The question I have is this:  What is the advantage of closing a thread?  To stop a thread from "going on and on".  Well, if someone is still posting on the thread, at least they feel that there is something worth to contribute.

Sounds wonderful.  I like the idea.

Should the "null user" be able to do anything?  Power down MD's?  Or might this be accomplished using a "guest" user if one wanted?

fearingsept: have you considered the UI2 variant, yet?

If he hasn't, I'm willing to cut my teeth on HAD trying it out.  Help me learn the database a little bit.  Can't wait to see that file 

Hey there everybody! 

I was wondering what brought everybody here to use LinuxMCE.  Do you have a friend that is using it?  Someone mention it on some other forum?  Did you buy something from one of the companies selling Pluto/LinuxMCE products?  What's your story?

Here's mine:  A few years ago I got a HDTV, which kicked my old TV to the bedroom.  I've been using my PS3's DLNA receiver to stream media from my computer, which works well, but not perfectly.  It also leaves that bedroom TV to the old semi-broken DVD player and the PS2.

Then, the wife got into searching for fansubbed anime, which often are encoded in MKV dual audio, which the PS3 doesn't like.  Then the Bluray player on the PS3 died, and I was  hurting for something I could control from my couch, maybe something I could also port over to my bedroom TV, and also take care of some other small tasks I've been wanting (like a mediawiki site for the house, a replacement for my consumer grade router, and a better Linux based DLNA server, and an easy way to jump into home automation)

I've seen the word "LinuxMCE" a few times on other forums, as I've set up asterisk phone system at an old job and on the FUPPES site.  I've always been a GNOME man, so at first I looked around for other solutions.  Finally, I also wanted to get back into programming, as my new job doesn't have any (!) and I don't want to skills to wither. 

The YouTube video pulled me in.  25 minutes of everything I can do, using all the components together, and on my favorite OS to boot!

So, what about you?!

Hmm. strange.  If we could use SVG's, then it might be simple to change the color of every button.  Look at this sample code for a round button:

Code Select Expand

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?>
<svg xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:cc="http://web.resource.org/cc/" xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#" xmlns:svg="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:sodipodi="http://sodipodi.sourceforge.net/DTD/sodipodi-0.dtd" xmlns:inkscape="http://www.inkscape.org/namespaces/inkscape" version="1.1" viewBox="0 0 50 50" width="1000" height="1000" id="svg2" sodipodi:version="0.32" inkscape:version="0.45.1" sodipodi:docname="Button-Lightblue.svg" inkscape:output_extension="org.inkscape.output.svg.inkscape" sodipodi:docbase="/home/azatoth/img">
  <metadata id="metadata24">
    <rdf:RDF>
      <cc:Work rdf:about="">
        <dc:format>image/svg+xml</dc:format>
        <dc:type rdf:resource="http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/StillImage"/>
      </cc:Work>
    </rdf:RDF>
  </metadata>
  <sodipodi:namedview inkscape:window-height="978" inkscape:window-width="1177" inkscape:pageshadow="2" inkscape:pageopacity="0.0" guidetolerance="10.0" gridtolerance="10.0" objecttolerance="10.0" borderopacity="1.0" bordercolor="#666666" pagecolor="#ffffff" id="base" inkscape:zoom="1" inkscape:cx="679.6237" inkscape:cy="984.92543" inkscape:window-x="373" inkscape:window-y="31" inkscape:current-layer="svg2"/>
  <style type="text/css" id="style4">
#P0,P1 {stroke:#000;stroke-width:.99999958}
#P0 {fill:url(#L0)}
#P1 {fill:url(#R0)}
#P2 {fill:#fff}
</style>
  <defs id="defs6">
    <linearGradient id="L0" gradientUnits="userSpaceOnUse" x1="9.94695" y1="6.3660479" x2="38.992043" y2="44.297081">
      <stop style="stop-color: rgb(136, 136, 255); stop-opacity: 1;" id="stop9" offset="0"/>
      <stop style="stop-color: rgb(16, 16, 48); stop-opacity: 1;" offset="1" id="stop11"/>
    </linearGradient>
    <radialGradient id="R0" gradientUnits="userSpaceOnUse" cx="24.933687" cy="25.066313" fx="24.933687" fy="25.066313" r="23">
      <stop style="stop-color: rgb(96, 96, 160); stop-opacity: 1;" id="stop14" offset="0"/>
      <stop style="stop-color: rgb(96, 96, 160); stop-opacity: 1;" offset="0.78571427" id="stop16"/>
      <stop style="stop-color: rgb(96, 96, 160); stop-opacity: 0;" offset="1" id="stop18"/>
    </radialGradient>
  </defs>
  <path id="P0" d="M49.634373,24.99999C 49.634373,38.530961 38.665353,49.499981 25.134382,49.499981C 11.603411,49.499981 .63439133,38.530961 .63439133,24.99999C .63439133,11.469019 11.603411,0.49999979 25.134382,0.49999979C 38.665353,0.49999979 49.634373,11.469019 49.634373,24.99999z" transform="translate(-0.134407, -1.53761e-05)" style="stroke-width: 0.25; stroke-miterlimit: 4; stroke-dasharray: none;"/>
  <path id="P1" d="M49.499981,24.99999C 49.499981,38.530961 38.530961,49.499981 24.99999,49.499981C 11.469019,49.499981 .49999979,38.530961 .49999979,24.99999C .49999979,11.469019 11.469019,0.49999979 24.99999,0.49999979C 38.530961,0.49999979 49.499981,11.469019 49.499981,24.99999z" transform="translate(-1.50294e-05, -1.53761e-05)"/>
</svg>

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Button-Lightblue.svg to see what it looks like (sorry, it's pretty big.  I just wanted a copyright free version for a sample)

This button is completely round, has a gradient and an outline, and is completely text.  The top part (metadata) is all about inkscape, the creator of this image.  The very bottom part (path) is the shape of the button.  You can see in the middle (the defs) where the gradient and fill are.  It has RGB colors in a very script-editable place.  If we used SVG's for all button backgrounds, it would be trivial to create a webamin page that included a color picker and a sample button.  Then, when you click "submit" to your color choices, it would just edit the SVG files and change the RGB values to the user selected ones.  Also, when you re-gen the oribiters, the _scalable_ vector graphics would all look pixel perfect. 

Any thoughts?  I'm going to download all the code tonight and start looking at the backend of this.  I've been wanting to dig my teeth into something as cool and meaty as LinuxMCE, and this is something that is a "small" change that could effect a bunch of the user experience.

tschak999, do you happen to know where in the code I should start looking?

EDIT: caveat:  I've only used SVG's on webpages and in a catalog I designed, never in software.  I've seen all the open source libraries that deal with SVG's, so I figure we could bolt it on.  I'll take a gander when I get home.

I'll also take the file to try to help out.  PM me where to get the file.  I can host it on my site if need-be.

Also, on the way of websites, check out http://www.lcars.org.uk/, which has "working" (flash) versions of every LCARS shows in every show.  I never realized, but every show has a slightly different color scheme.  They also have a bunch of animations for things like planets rotating, DNA sequencing, and trajectory plots from as shown on various episodes.  I don't see where you could download anything, but I'm sure you could email the creators and see what's up.

Thanks to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LCARS!!

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Seer