About a month ago my wife and I bought bought our first TV after two years with out having anything at all. I know, i know. You're thinking a guy who hasn't had a TV in two years shouldn't be blogging about video and home autmation what could he know.  well, a lot actually. This has all been part of a plan to redo our basement and set it all up properly. We plan on having two screens. One in our living area and another in a work out room. all equipment will have a central home run or what some people call a head end. This head end will control all speakers, tv's and anything else in the house.

So getting back to the IR bugs and how they annoyed me. The last thing i wanted to do was running another IR so I could put this bug on my nice looking TV. All I wanted to do was run a couple of HDMI cables and cat5. Nothing else. So as I started investigating into a better solution to the IR problem I came across a technology called HDMI-CEC.

What HDMI-CEC does is lets all your devices be controlled by each other if they are all connected via an HDMI cable. There are some problems though. Not all HDMI devices have the feature and not all talk nicely to each other. But for those that do have it. I have stumbled upon a cool Google code project that lets you control CEC commands from an Arduino device. All you would have to do is add a zigbee module. Program it up. Create a Control4 driver and your done. Control any device in your house through an HDMI cable.

I'll post more here when I have my own working module actually working.

< CEC Arduino />

XBMC Media Manager

So this project has been the one I've actually worked on the most. It's something that I believe will be most beneficial to myself and others. I've been doing a lot of research into how XBMC's database schema works. I've created a way to take a file location and convert it into a CRC hash and use that to load the thumbnail image. I've also wired up a good portion of the program using the MATE framework and also using the SQL Extension for mate. Overall the progress has been good and steady. I haven't been able to wire frame as much as I would like but I feel that I have a good handle on the user interface and the experience the user will have. I hope to have something released by the end of this year or early next.

This has actually been a lot of fun (I love playing around with video). I researched a lot of solutions. First I started off with what Adobe had to offer. Which seemed rather restrictive. The best way to get video into the FMS is to use an application called the Flash Media Encoder that only runs in windows. The HDHR has direct show filters which is required to capture in FME. But it seems as though the filter isn't recognized. But maybe in the future someone can figure out how to make a direct show filter that is recognized as a capture device.

After researching FMS for a while i searched through a bunch of other open source solutions. The one that I found to work best and what I will end up using is Xuggler + RED5. Xuggler lets you capture video and transcode it using ffmpeg. The only hard part is trying to get it to capture from a UDP or RTS stream. Both should be doable but we'll have to wait and see. I'm not sure when I'll be done with this project but I'm sure it'll be a great one. Who wouldn't want a way to watch their own tv shows over the internet? Almost like a slingbox.

In my never-ending attempt to rid myself of a relentless cell phone service that I hardly ever use. I decided to work on another AIR Application a few months back. The concept was to make an application that would easily bridge Google Voice and the free Gizmo5 service to allow you to make and take phone calls from your PC.

I did a bit of research into the web API's for both companies and was going to give it a shot and see what I could create in an attempt to figure out how I could rid of my blaster iPhone for once and for all. But now that Google has acquired Gizmo5 that may all have changed and I hope for the better. I guess we will see. But even despite of this I'm still working on this application when I have time so stay tuned for more.

This little project I've been playing around with is trying to get my HDHomeRun (HDHR) to rebroadcast its live feed to flash. I've been investigating technologies like Red5, C++ RTMP Server and Flash Media Server. With anything that requires multiple pieces of different technologies. The hard part is integrating these different pieces together. Luckily the HDHR is open source. So that provides a lot of avenues for development. The only hard part is trying to get the MPEG-TS from the HDHR and convert it on the fly to something flash can use.

So far I haven't been able to get any of the solutions to work. but as soon as I do I'll post something here.

So as an alternative i started looking into how XMBC and PLEX both organize and manage their thumbnails and have decided to try and make a simple application in Adobe Air to do this. Right now I'm still in the planning stages. So i'll post more details back here as i make progress.