Naylia's XLobbyMC Skin - Updated 1 JANUARY 2006 www

[Alwayslearnin]

Always,

I think you may almost be making things harder on yourself.

The Hauppauge MVP is a small box that you can connect to any tv in your house. It can access the files on a server computer for display on a tv. It includes a remote. Using matt's software the MVP will act as a SageTV client.

SageTV is running on your server recording tv and doing it's thing. XLobbyMC was built with the idea of minimizing the role of SageTV for everything except PVR capability and letting you have the flexibility of XLobby to handle the other things...like dvds, music, photos, radio, games and such since Sage is restrivictive in how things work while in XLobby you can modify everything exactly the way you want it.

I understand that, I think, but if I have to have a seperate PC client to actually use xlobbymc, then I still need to purchase additional pcs or handheld pcs or ce type devices and for me WAF is hugely based on the fewer pieces of technology that has to be touched, the better.

[Naylia]

well instead of working backwards from what i think you're trying to do, why don't you lay out what you're thinking of doing and some of us here can help you figure out what hardware you might want where to do those things, also if you already have anything you want to use or incorporate that would help

generally what do you want to do, and where do you want to do it

for instance myself:
i watch tv, dvds, listen to music and play games in my family room connected to a 5.1 home theater system
-for this i built a home theater pc that looks like my stereo equipment and has many hard drives for storage of music, movies, and recorded tv

i want to have music on my back porch
-this will probably be solved with wireless speakers connected to the home theater since i rent an apartment and can't run wires or mount outdoor speakers

i want to watch recorded tv and my movie collection in the bedroom
-this will probably be solved via a Hauppauge MediaMVP and i'll have to run a network cable to the bedroom to do it. it will access the files stored on my home theater pc

[Alwayslearnin]

Okay, fair enough.

I am currently building a house, and I am pre-wiring the best I can.

For movies (DVDs), tv (live and recorded), music (CDs, MP3, Musicmatch), I have two "home theaters" (two families - one house), a kid area, 3 bedrooms and a study.

For music only I have a dining room, kitchen/breakfast, back porch, and barn (strange - Texan).

In one of my theaters, I am building an HTPC server to record tv, music, and movies. My plan was to distribute this data to the above areas via the hauppage media mvp and other sound equipment (whole house audio). But I was hoping to be able to see what is happening on the television monitor and issue commands through something like Girder to control what is happening in each zone.

Each zone will have speakers, volume control and 2 sets of 2+2 structured wiring. Most of the wire will terminate in the central wiring closet, but half of the speaker wires will homerun to the second home theater for amplification and control.

I think I'm getting into too much detail, but please start asking clarifying questions, and we can go from there.

Alwayslearnin'

[Alwayslearnin]

hmmm, that didn't work as well as I had hoped.

[Naylia]

ok..well to be honest i would recommend joining up at htpcnews.com and posting this there...you'll get a better cross section of products recommended for a solution since it's a broad community

but here's some ideas from me

HT1: has a full htpc with xlobby and sage, it has multiple sound cards or one sound card operated as multiple two channel cards (there's a thread somewhere around here about doing that), it is connected to a receiver locally for ht use and to a whole house sound system as many two channel sources

HT2: is wired off of HT1, sounds like you alread had an idea for that

Rooms w/ a tv: use MediaMVPs connected to SageTV on your htpc to watch tv/movies

All your rooms are wired into your whole house audio system, which could be controlled by a wifi-PDA running an xlobby client, or by any pc around the house with xlobby client running on it. This would control music in all the different zones and your home theater 1/2 (dvd music pvr).

Your other TVs would be controlled via the MediaMVP remote.

This solves control issues from HT2, allows you to control music even while walking around but requires a separate in room remote when you want to recorded tv or a movie on an MVP.

[Alwayslearnin]

ok..well to be honest i would recommend joining up at htpcnews.com and posting this there...you'll get a better cross section of products recommended for a solution since it's a broad community

but here's some ideas from me

HT1: has a full htpc with xlobby and sage, it has multiple sound cards or one sound card operated as multiple two channel cards (there's a thread somewhere around here about doing that), it is connected to a receiver locally for ht use and to a whole house sound system as many two channel sources

HT2: is wired off of HT1, sounds like you alread had an idea for that

Rooms w/ a tv: use MediaMVPs connected to SageTV on your htpc to watch tv/movies

All your rooms are wired into your whole house audio system, which could be controlled by a wifi-PDA running an xlobby client, or by any pc around the house with xlobby client running on it. This would control music in all the different zones and your home theater 1/2 (dvd music pvr).

Your other TVs would be controlled via the MediaMVP remote.

This solves control issues from HT2, allows you to control music even while walking around but requires a separate in room remote when you want to recorded tv or a movie on an MVP.

I have posted over there as well. It seems what I'm trying to do is not as common as I would think it is. I appreciate the response! Your suggestion is pretty close to what I had thought to do as well.

[Naylia]

Is anyone here using Sage 3.x yet? I'm contemplating upgrading the skin to support both the old theme and the new theme sometime this month and was wondering if anyone has upgraded yet.

[briands]

Is anyone here using Sage 3.x yet? I'm contemplating upgrading the skin to support both the old theme and the new theme sometime this month and was wondering if anyone has upgraded yet.

I've really got the itch... but my wife spent month cussing me for the constant updates during the 2.2 beta run, so I am holing out for the release of 3.0... or maybe the follow up release...

[Naylia]

I'm also tempted but am thinking that I'll wait for the finalized version.

[briands]

I have finally got this up and running and have a few requests...

1) spider for Movies
2) Internet radio - not that I use it alot, but I think I might if it were incorporated.

and the off the wall one
3) Haley's Stuff button on the front page for my 2 year old ... I'm pretty sure I'll have to add this one myself. Ideally it would go to a page that would have both DVDs and Sage files and play them within XLobby. Since she watches the shows repeatedly, it is not so important that Sage be used for this. Ideally, I could set up a seperate easy remote that from the menu would only go to her page. Hmmm... I wonder if anyone else has done something like this.

[briands]

I was tinkering with this over the weekend and found a couple bugs.

With music playing, if you select a movie and select play, the music continues to play as well. Might be cool for Wizard of Oz / Pink floyd, but generally not a desirable behavior.

There was another one on the Radio page where navigating with the right arrow key would start playing the music playlist. I'll get this one better documneted this evening.

[Naylia]

briands, thanks for taking note of the bugs and posting....i haven't had much time to post an updated version


somone else noticed that the issue with the radio section is because it has an "Enter" event attached to it, try removing that and see if it cleans up the radio playin issue

EDIT oh...yeah that makes sense, i'll keep that in mind if I get a chance to update it....just go into your event manager...browse to the movies/play event and add a stop music action to the event

[briands]

Are you still waiting for Sage 3?

[Naylia]

I tried it out last night, and I'm not happy with how firewire worked. There's a lot of potential there with direct support for TS but seems to still have some bugs. Also, I thought the skin looked different in V3 but I was wrong so there's no graphical update. However I do have a few things I think I'm gonna look at this week or next.

[Naylia]

Good news is Sage V3 seems to handle focus give and take much better Just working out some bugs and I'll post a bug fix version!