MediaCenter: March 2008 Archives

Around the TV there are normally a number of external devices like a DVD player, a cassette VCR a Dolby amplifier with the speakers. But there are also a number of different media like VHS cassette, DVD discs.
In the same place which, in my case, is the living room there's also a stereo player and a number of audio CDs.
In addition, when I want to watch a video from the computer I have to burn a CD and play it on the DVD player, even worse, when I want to watch a video from the Internet I have to move to the PC place sadly leaving the sofa!

Four months ago, in November, I started to think that this was unacceptable: I had to find a solution for this!

So I decided to build up a PC for my living room that would replace all those devices and play all my media from the same sofa ...ehm..from the same interface: the TV!

So, today I'll talk a little bit about what I did in the last months for this new project.

First of all I had to find a suitable PC. After tons of searches I was convinced that one of the requirement was to reduce as much as possible the noise of the PC.

So I took into consideration some mini-ITX fanless systems but, lately I decided that they had not enough CPU power to fit my needs. Infact they are actually able to play a video stream but they need an HW engine to encode a video from, for example, the TV channels.

I decided that the barebone PC from Shuttle were good enough for my purposes: they are compact, fully equipped with good CPUs, they have 2 slots for expansions and, on top of all, the CPU fan is not on the CPU itself but there are 4 heat pipes that bring the heat to the back of the cabinet on a big fan. The size of the fan is to reduce the rpm that it needs to cool down the CPU reducing the overall noise of the PC itself.

So I got through Ebay a Shuttle PC with a Celeron 2.8 MhZ processor for about €170 euro. The problem was that the one that I got through the only successfully bid was without video out connector... no problem, I had another video card with a good video out. The base platform was done!

The second step was to get a TV tuner card. After some other searches, I choose the Hauppauge WinTV HVR-3000 that is a combo card able to receive analog TV, digital terrestrial TV (DVB-T), satellite (DVB-S) and FM radio and have also a video-in: in just one slot I could have all the signals I wanted! Wow!

So I put up all together and......and started struggling to find the right MediaCenter software!

I have to confess that this was the most tricky and annoying part because none of the solutions I tried was fully satisfying my requirements.

My first choice was LinuxMCE 0704, because, of course I thought that for something that has to work like an "appliance" there's nothing better than Linux (to be really honest I think like this also for other purposes). I was really interested in it because it has tons of functionalities including the "follow me", the remote control distributed as application for smartphones and the possibility to do home automation through X10 controlled devices, wow!

Unfortunately I discovered that my TV tuner card was not fully supported under Linux, so I had to switch to a Micro$oft based MCE. In addition I didn't like the way LinuxMCE is structured because it looks like a "collage" of too many different software. The TV part is done by MythTV and I didn't like also the switching beetween the LinuxMCE standard interface and the MythTV interface. Last but not least I tried a lot of different video card configuration (in order to have the best tv-out signal) and, each time I made changes it took 10 minutes to re-render all the GUI.

Second try was the (yes I confess I tried it!) Microsoft Windows XP Mediacenter Edition 2005 and, just from the name length, you can understand how big, long, fat and heavy it could be. There is no easy or decent way to extend its functionalities and, in addition, it is so stupid that can't access a video on a network share unless it is mounted by the user "system", the only way to accomplish this was to schedule a batch script for the network share mount. Definitively useless (at least for my purposes :o).

Finally, I discovered MediaPortal! It is opensource, it is fast, well working and looking, it was supporting quite all the functions that I wanted and, for those features that were missing, there's a good community of users developing new plugins with new functionalities, wow! You can see a screenshot of how it looks like today in the head of this post.

There was just one function that I wanted but it was not supported, or, to be precise, I was not able to find at the first time the right plugin. The function was the integration with Skype.

So, also because I wanted to see how I could expand it, I started to code the MySkype plugin! (you can find it also at this link) I had to confess that it was the first time that I used the C# and I found it very funny! It is a very easy and fast way to code up application with very few lines of code. I enjoyed so much that I was able to go from the absolute MediaPortal and C# ignorance to the completion of the plugin in just a week! Yes, it was the Christmas week so I had some days off from work :o)

Lately I discovered that there was also another great Skype plugin from TesterBoy, Skype4MP. Infact I was contacted by its author that rightly asked me why I felt the need to create another Skype plugin. Unfortunately, at the time I started to code, the good version of the Skype4MP plugin was "hidden" in the forum messages, there was just an old and bad version of this plugin on the MediaPortal website, so I thought that it was more easy to start a new one than to understand a non-working one.

Now, I can say that I'm quite satisfied with my MediaCenter powered by MediaPortal. Basically I'm waiting two major enhancements. The firs one is the release of video functionalities in the Skype API, because actually it is not possible to extract the video from Skype by the APIs so the MediaCenter plugin is able to place voice only calls. The second enhancement will be the release of MediaPortal II which has a definitively great looking interface!

As you can see from the picture, I still have the VCR and DVD player in place. Basically I still need the DVD player to amplify the 5+1 signal from the MediaCenter to the speaker and I still need to add a big hard disk where to save all the content that I still have on the VHS, CDs and DVDs. I think it will take time for me to find a way to amplify the Dolby signal but surely I'll go faster for the second issue: I already ordered a big NAS where to store all my media! This will be the topic of one of the next post!

Stay tuned!