Hello, Over this coming summer holidays after my many hours soon to be worked i would like to set my house up almost exactly to the way it has been demonstrated in the video.
Throughout two days of investigating into this i have downloaded LinuxMCE and am awaiting the funds to put together my system.
Through the investigation and the watching of the video several times i have come to the conclusion of the minor things which will be needed if to build such a beast throughtout the house.
So far i have gather that i will be building a system with a core and 3 thin clients attached .
With in the the core i have gathered this is what i have to add please tell me if i am missing any devices which will allow me to complete my task.
CORE
- Hard drives x 5
- 1Gb of Ram.
- motherboard with onboard VGA (does it matter if its not a nvidia?)
- Does it matter if its WiFi or Lan
- Tv Card (more then one?)
- Bluetooth Dongle?
- x10 usb reciver?
Thin Clients
- Doesit matter the speed of the processor? would 1.5Ghz be enough or need more?
-Ram?
- do i just need a small Hard drive for the client so it can run LMCE?
- bluetooth are they needed for each client or just is the one needed.
-Wifi or lan?
I also have some Old Pdas which have bluetooth wifi ect on them which used to be on the cdma network here in australia, since they arnt doing anything is it easy to install them into remotes...? Also i have seen the discussion of using a Wii Remote should that just be Plug and play? or is there more messing around then it seems?
Ive search for a so called "Jukebox" as described in the video could someone point me in the right direction i would be ever most greatful.
Next on the agenda is X10 products i noticed that they used z-wave in the video im not sure if this is technology or a product but theres a mixture of responces on google. if someone could point to what products i may need eg camera's motion sensors, alarms ect...
I plan on having this set up by Jan 1st for my new years Party to show of to my friends and if this works out being successful ill be back posting tutorials screenshots what ever help i may have required back to these forums...nk
Thanks for taking the time to read this long as help file. and hopefully one day i can put it back to another noob like myself. Cheers People. And ill see you on the otherside of my computer Using LMCE 
Look foward to hearing from you.
NVIDIA cards are supported best out of the box, as they are the only cards capable of doing UI2 with alpha blending. I would suggest a motherboard with a built in 6xxx series GPU, this will work best out of the box.
As for thin clients, they do not need hard disks at all, they boot over the network. This requires that the LinuxMCE CORE be the DHCP server for the network, and that the CORE contain two network cards for a typical home NAT setup.
I see no problem with using 1.5Ghz machines for the media directors if you are viewing SD (480i) content.. If you're going HD, you're going to need a lot more muscle.
The thing that most people do not take into account in the setups I've seen yet, is the network interconnects... 100 megabit ethernet is fine for a few systems doing SD content around a house... but as you start scaling up to several video streams, and some of them become HD streams, then gigabit ethernet must be considered. I really...really....really wouldn't rely on Wifi for delivering data for more than one node... primarily because, wifi by its very nature is not switched.. it is a traditional ethernet like broadcast where everything is half duplex, subject to packet collisions ,and inefficient use of signaling resources.
TV cards can be placed anywhere... they can be either on the core, or on any of the media directors, and the system will find them and use them.
As for X-10... There is always the CM11A computer interface.. it works. I Would also recommend looking into Z-Wave as well (the current Z-Wave interface is a discontinued one, the ZCU000, but they are still around if you look a little.)..and Insteon is about to become an option thanks to PeteK's tireless work.
Bluetooth dongle... be safe..and go with a Linksys bluetooth adaptor. They work incredibly well, and don't have brain dead firmware issues that some of the Broadcom based bluetooth radios have. You need a dongle for each media director..but read the caveat below:
Bluetooth radios are often a lot stronger than the manufacturer says they are... They are not taking into account this very clever use. As such, you may have a situation where the bluetooth phone will be between overlapping bluetooth zones..and follow me will work in strange ways.
The solution to this, is to either use the manual follow-me on the floorplan, or to get a Fiire remote, and use its follow me functionality, which works 100%, you put a dongle in each room you wish to use the remote.
With that said, Bluetooth control is quite fantastic. I use it to trigger scenarios when i am away from home, and when i am in the house, it makes a convienient way to pull it out of my pocket, and trigger tv, lights etc... You just need to have a supported phone... I use a Nokia N70. Any Symbian series 60 version 1 or 2 phone will work, so try to look at phones a couple years old.... There is also support for Windows Smartphone as well (such as the Treo 700W, and a few others.)
I hope this information has been helpful. A lot of it is spread across the Wiki-web,
http://wiki.linuxmce.org/ I suggest crawling that entire site.
-Thom
