Jul 09 2009
MeTV is on the air!
Ok, so my first stab at a low-tech home media distribution project has met with success.
We presently have two sources of entertainment in the house (and in fact the home media server can amuse two of us at once).
UPnP – Universal Plug’n'Play – Using MediaTomb I can presently watch any videos hosted on the server from the comfort of our living room via the PS3. We’ve already discussed that one so I’ll move on to the new adddition.
MeTV (Channel 73) – A small widget converts the VGA output from our media server into a composite feed which is then modulated and inserted on channel 73. The media player has a playlist from which it randomly selects movies and television episodes when not “specifically” directed to play something we want to see.
Any TV in the house can tune into this program and it has no impact on the streamed video being viewed by the PS3 in the living room. (the video is occasionally slightly “jumpy” although I am given to understand this is a problem with Ubuntu 9.04 and hopefully will be cleared up soon).
At present movie selection for this channel can only be accomplished using remote desktop from either of the laptops, but I’m curious to see what other options are out there.
In the meantime I’ll try to get some pictures online to spice these dry entries up a bit.
But really, how much Red Dwarf can one man watch?
The only problem with having a channel that plays nothing but the movies I love
with no commercials is…
Uh, wait, what’s the problem?
It’s genius, you are Wilie Coyote Super Genius.
But do you offer service in Tejas?
You could make channel 72 “All Jilly, All the time”.
It’d be a Scooby-do marathon, with a little bit of Disney 3D in it.
Sounds like a fun project, but hows the basement coming?….:)
Gee, Piet … the next phase of this system will probably involve polling the Web for the ‘best’ movies (along carefully specified criteria), pulling down copies of those hits, adding them to the playlist and including them in the rotation … MeTV, indeed!
There’s a reason we call him the ‘Cable Guy’ – right?
You guys joke but we’re watching “Hot Fuzz” this very instant on MeTV. Prior to that was an episode of “The Office” (North American) and prior to that was an episode of Red Dwarf (honestly), it’s now the most watched channel in the house.
-GRIN-
From a logistal perspective it means Lisa can watch a movie she wants at any time up in the bedroom while I watch a different (streamed) movie from the same server in the living room (or vice versa).
I considered a third channel but we’d have to buy a new computer and a new modulator, probably easier to find an inexpensive UPnP media player at that point (then we can stream different movies to two TVs at the same time AND have the channel playing a third movie). For now we can just select a Jilly movie when we want one,
I’m going to have to figure out some sort of improved interface for selecting programming on the server, but maybe that sort of thing will fit in with further home automation experiments.
Who knows. It is pretty darn slick however, of that we can be certain.
How hard would it be to have a fm transmitter hooked up, so you could tune radios in the house to MeFm?
That would be cool.
Having your MP3s playing on a loop.