New to Xlobby, the unual hopefully not lame questions...

[firmware]

Hi All,

Just to say hello and ask a couple of probably obvious questions, I have been browsing the forums, but you no doubt apprecaite how convoluted these things can be.

First off I am a UK based refugee from myHTPC, no bad comment to make, just hasn't moved on to meet my needs and was teaching myself enough ASP and HTML to write my own front end into homeseer when I came across Xlobby.

So here are my needs / questions, please comment, bait, disparage or flame as you feel necassary!

I have a PC dedicated as a media server, which has 360 Gig of space dedicated to, (though not full!!) music in .wma, films in DivX .avi and my photo archive.

The media hardware is a ATI AIW 9000 and a Creative Audigy 2 internal card.

This PC lives in the garage, and has connection to multiple TFT's in my rooms walls via a SVGA 1 to 8 signal splitter.

It is intended that these will have acoustic wave touch screen glass over them eventually, but right now, I have a remote wonder.

Presently two of the stereo pairs from the PC go to wall mounted monoblock amps which in turn feed marine speakers in the kitchen and bathroom ceiling.

A third stereo feed goes to the living room media center, which will have a 5.1 amp, for music and local DVD.

A fourth stereo pair runs to the bedroom but is not yet utilized.

I run Homeseer on this PC to a cabinet of X10 devices for lighting and some other control.

So here are the things I am looking for, and seem to be hot or warm topics.

1. Multizone audio from a single audigy card, for WMA, seems that some people have had problems with this, has it been confirmed that WMA just will not go multizone across a single card? All WMA was ripped on my machine from my own disks, with protection turned off.

2. DivX playback, not too worried about multizone in this case.

3. TV support from AIW card, nothing fancy, I only have the direct feed from my sky plus box, so I don't need PC based PVR at the moment, just sound and vision.

4. Two way intergration into Homeseer, control and on screen update- This really is a big need, and the main reason I have given up on myHTPC.

5. Simple interface for remote wonder that allows simple navigation and selection, which SWMBO will have the patience to deal with.


6. Everyone talks about client PDA's, but I get the feeling they are all pocket PC's. I am a palm C user, so I have wifi into my network, via the palm based browser, can I access Xlobby like this, or do I need a client app on the palm, and does one exist? This isn't such a huge need, and I may even change to a Microslut PDA next time, but that would not be for a while, as this one must earn its keep.

Thanks for your patience, it never ceases to amaze me how much these communities and the originatíng martyrs manage to achieve, keep up the good work!!!

[rhinoman]

1. I'm not familiar with your audigy card, but does it allow you to set which pair of outputs are used in winamp/preferences/output/waveout or directsound. If you can you will get true multizone, otherwise you will only gget the same feed to each room.

and

4. Homeseer seems to have come up a few times lately but theres no support yet.

5. Try out some of the skins, some have been designed with remote control in mind.

6. Its PPC only for xlobby at the moment, ideally running 2003 although it does run on the older versions, it just doesn't look very nice, whether or not the client could be adaptyed for palm i dont really know, but xlobby needs .net to run so unless that is available for the palm (unlikly), you'll be out of luck

[hjackson]

I'm the one who had problems with multizone audio and wma files. I had to convert all the files to mp3 to get multizone to work. I had also ripped my music files from my own CDs onto my own computer, though I don't think I had actually turned off protection...

"5. Simple interface for remote wonder that allows simple navigation and selection, which SWMBO will have the patience to deal with."

I am having problems using arrow keys to fully navigate my modified screens. I recently posted some hep for this and will get back to you when I have it solved. Ofcourse with the remote wonder you have full mouse control but I would want to have arrow key function to to allow freedom to use different types of non-mouse control remotes.

hjackson

[firmware]

Hi All,

Thanks for the replys.

Having to travel a lot at the moment, so only having a chance to try things out on the weekends.

So here is comment on the replies and where I have got to.

1. Multizone audio.

based on this thread

http://www.xlobby.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1326

installed the kxproject drivers for the audio card.
Now I have at least achieved an equal feed to the rear and front pairs, so that they sound great, before, no matter what I did, I was only get a surround mix to the real pairs.

Initially tried setting the winamp zones, but had no immeadiate luck, is now for further investigation.

I find it hard to think of a scenario that would prevent unprotected wma from playing multizone, but I will get mp3 working first and then just hope!

2. Divx with zoomplayer appears to work straight out of the box, though I am having trouble where I had multiple .avis in one folder, to represent entire TV series and I can only choose one episode, but that is probably the skin I am using.

3. I am more and more annoyed with my AIW, the picture quality is crappy, I have even installed a signal booster on the sky plus feed, but no change, still mono sound.
Now I have the kxproject drivers installed I have no sound at all in the AIW media center TV application, and no sound parameter to change in the options, this is the only software I have ever seen that completely hides options it isnt happy about, so you cannot even see they have gone wrong, this is the same behaviour people get when the tuner settings completely disappear when there are driver issues. Will reinstall the entire application in the short term and buy a pinnacle card in the near future and throw this one out!

4. On the homeseet front I want to see if anyone can collaborate, it will take me a while to work out what it is I have to learn, seeing as xlobby is .net xml based, and I was previously looking into SSI and ASP. Main questions I have at the moment, is how difficult is it to trigger xlobby to reformat a page when a file changes on the drive, which I can easily make homeseer populate every time a local status changes.

5. Using the Visual skin from the skins section, this gives good interaction with a up down left right select strategy, and the once you have worked out a few of the behavioural characteristics the girlfriend is happy enough.

The high visibility into my music collection that this skin gives me, shows just how much WMP9 has destroyed parts of my collection, by moving and loosing files!


6. My Palm PDA is starting to misbehave itself as if by magic, continually rebooting on startup, need to investigate this, or I might be upgrading sooner raver than later

Will continue to update this thread, if anyone can help me on my journey, please do.

[antipasto]

Some Things to know about the KX driver... from some hap-hazard digging:

1. The audio outputs are something like 1/2 and 3/4 and 5/6, etc ... Use 5/6 for your main channel and one of the others (3/4?) for your second zone. Look into the KX Project Docs for the details about those outputs. You can also rewire them entirely in the DSP (if you come up will cool tricks, post 'em!) I've managed to add a +30db gain to the output for the chronically quiet movies.

2. The AC97 implementation is seperated in the Mixer. You have to select which input on the chip that you're getting your audio feed from your AIW. Select "line in" or something like that and then set your levels there on the ac97 part of the mixer. You'll have to then make sure that the main mixer has AC97 all the way up (er... to 0, not 6, unless you're having gain problems).

Hope that helps,

anti

[firmware]

thanks for the comment, I have seen the channel selection capability, was hoping it would be a simple choice of selecting the pair I want for each zone, but I have only had the most cursory glance into that right now.

The AIW TV software just seems to think that there is no such thing as sound now, there are no options and no controls relating to it!

That is why I am hoping a clean installation of that suite will resolve the issues.

It is so frustrating to be away from home again, when I cannot play with this stuff!

[antipasto]

yeah you'll definately have that! I had to disable AIW's audio to get cakewalk to work at ALL with ANY sound drivers... anyway... best of luck, and yes, there is nothing like a clean install of the AIW drivers.

[rhinoman]

For sky+ into a pc the best solution for not much money is a flyvideo2000 capture card, £25 from pc world oo cpature svideo and dscaler to do its stuff before it gets on your display, what display are you using?

[firmware]

Hi RhinoMan

The displays are Dell 17 inch TFTs stuck in the walls.

The problem is that I dont have Svideo down from where the sky plus box is to where the media server is.

I do have a run of coax, and a pair of speaker wires so I´suppose I could take the composite off the scart and run that down via the coax, and take the left and right audios, what is annoying is that if the picture on my TV upstairs is great, then why isnt the picture on my Computer from the modulated signal, they both take their pictures in this way, and yes I have tried swapping the cable runs to check for bad contacts etc.

[rhinoman]

have you tried any other capture cards other than the ati one? I've not heard very much good said about them. The rf modulated signal will never be as good as even a composite feed, let alone svideo but dscaler is definitly worth a try with a compatible card, it allows the incoming interlaced signal to be ouput in a progressive way to suit your monitors. The reason the tv picture is ok is because it is designed to take an interlaced feed.

[firmware]

I have not tried another type of card in there yet.

I appreciate I am using what is probably the worst bearer possible!

The type of noise I am seeing and the failure to get stereo sound does not lead me to think that my issue is with the interlacing, more that the fine tune is not quite right, and I can see no way to adjust it either.

Basically I think I will ditch the AIW and look at was other options are about, it would of been nice, but it is not to be!

[rhinoman]

You dont get stereo sound out of a sky box via a rf socket, you have to use the scart and/or phonos.

[firmware]

Thankyou for that clarification, at least I can relax on that point!

Stupidly I had assumed it would encode this in Nicam, though this is not an area I have much knowledge in.

It still sounds awfully crackly and has various problems that I can only describe as some form of artifacting.

I will have to do a screen grab of the tuner output, and then someone can tell me if this is as good as it gets, or if I do have something else wrong.