Moral-Flexibility.Net

Ok, so I promised pictures but I’m sure you guys have seen enough of the “Stuff screwed to a board” pictures so heres a diagram of the television distribution system presently installed in my home.

It’s important to note that I am not using all of it. The SATV integration features are for future expansion as is the run for the cable modem that I do not have.

At this point however I don’t think there is a whole lot else I need do to call this one complete.

Thoughts? Did I forget something?

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.

It didn’t work at all the last time I tried.

This time I mostly followed some online directions for installing a bare-bones Ubuntu media server running MediaTomb and modified things only slightly to get a result that more closely matched my requirements.

It worked (the third time I tried actually).

I celebrated my success by watching Without a Clue streamed to my PS3 directly from the new media server I had just finished configuring (plus I had time to kill while copying everything over - who knew 100gig took a while to copy).

Instructions are saved for posterity below the cut (more for my reference than yours).

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The most recent upgrade of my surveillance system was a surplused DVR unit which has rendered my home-built DVR largely superfluous, I’ve been considering using it as the basis for a home media distribution system but have been having some issues figuring out how I’ll be organizing this.

I’ve decided that I will install Mediatomb on the computer (once we’ve covered a period of time running both DVR systems to make sure the new one is reliable) allowing for streaming video for UPnP devices on our home network, but for the televisions NOT equipped with UPnP I’ll be adding a cludge to allow us to access a library of movies and music from any TV in the house.

The plan is to make use of remote desktop features of Ubuntu, playing movies or music on the “server” will allow me to pipe the monitor (and audio) feed along another custom channel (like our surveillance system feed) and thus any TV in the house can whatever media is selected.

Truly MeTV. It won’t be as user friendly as I would like and will rely heavily on laptops/desktops to get the movie/music started, but once it’s rolling it should be easy enough to enjoy, no?

Someone have a better idea? I’m all ears.