The Media Center Blog

XBMC Frodo - Aeon MQ4 Skin– Part4 Everything else

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:09:00 +0000

In part one of this series we looked at the Music Library in part two the Movie library and in part three the TV Show library, in part four I will be looking at all the other areas of the user interface not previously covered.

Pictures

Pictures in XBMC is not a “Pictures Library”" like in Windows Media Center, its basically a folder and file view type of deal in XBMC, so you cannot filter on tags and years etc. I believe there is a 3rd party Picture Library add-on for XBMC but I have not looked at that yet.

Pictures main menu

Pictures source folder which is on my WHS server.

Picture Folders in the PhotoShow view

Picture Folders in the PhotoShow view

Individual Picture image files in the Photoshow view

Picture folders in List view

Picture folders in Wall view

You can play a picture slide show, I like to use picture slideshows whist listening to music playing. There are two options SlideShow and R.SlideShow, presuming R is for random.

Overall the pictures area of XBMC is not as good as Windows Media Center and I particularly miss the MCE photo screen saver, I have not found an XBMC screen saver add-on that can do the same?

This is the Windows MCE photo screen saver

Weather

I always liked having the MCE Heatwave add-on installed when it worked! in XBMC weather is native and is part of XBMC which is nice.

Weather main menu

Weather sub-menu

If you press down on the remote control you can access the sub-menus from any of the main menu items.

The weather sub-menu options are:
36 Hours / Weekend / 4 Days / 7 Days / Alerts / Settings

In the settings you can add more than one location for weather, although I did find it a little tricky then switching between the two locations.

This screen shot shows the 7 days option

If you select the main menu item for Weather you will enter the Weather UI proper. Here you can see there is a menu on the left and that Weekend is the currently selected item.

If you select the Maps item it brings up a satellite map.

Overall I really like the in-built Weather part of XBMC.

Concerts / Music Videos

Concerts main menu item

I haven’t spent a great deal of time using the Concerts area, when I initially set it up to point to my music videos stored on the WHS, I used the Last.FM Music Video XBMC scraper which did a decent enough job of adding the music videos in to the Concerts library. However since then that scraper has stopped working and now the only scraper available is theaudiodb.com/ which wasn’t as good at detecting things.
I believe and don’t quote me on this that your individual music video files should be named like:

artistname – songname.avi or .mov or whatever.

I also have two actual music concerts on DVD VIDEO_TS rips

As you can see in this screenshot not every music video got a poster / cover and some are just showing a thumbnail from the video file, for example the one in the bottom left hand corner has no cover image.

Cat Stevens – Majikat Concert - DVD rip

Elvis Presley – Aloha from Hawaii Concert – DVD rip

I am not totally sure if this Concerts area of XBMC is meant only for full concerts or individual music video files you have downloaded from the Internet? I need to spend more time using this area really to be more certain about it.

YouTube XBMC add-on

The YouTube area is an add-on and not a native part of XBMC.

I would say its functional but not as good as my previous Youtube integration with Windows Media Center.
You can login with your YouTube account to then link in your Playlists, Favourites and History etc.

Explore Youtube

Youtube Categories

Youtube videos in List view

You are able to search via the on screen keyboard

As I said the YouTube add-on is functional if nothing else. It has broken once in the time I have been using it, due to site changes made by Youtube on their site and the XBMC add-on developers were quick to release an update, most XBMC add-ons are updated automatically so the newly fixed update was just installed on to all my HTPCs when it was released so I never had to do anything!

Security Cameras

This was just a quick and dirty integration I did to get my two IP security camera streams in to XBMC using .strm files. I am still looking for a better solution / add-on for security camera integration with XBMC. I just wish Embedded Automation would get their act together and write an mControl XBMC add-on !

Summary

Well that’s it folks. I will probably cover Live TV integration next, but I need some funds for a new BlackGold TV Tuner card first before I get around to that. I will be using DVBLogic’s DVBLink software on the WHS server and their XBMC Live TV add-on.

XBMC Frodo - Aeon MQ4 Skin– Part3 TV Show Library

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:11:00 +0000

In part one of this series we looked at the Music Library and in part two the Movie library, today I am going to look at the TV Show library.

Before we start I need to point out that XBMC does not properly support TV Series that are DVD VIDEO_TS rips or Blu-ray rips, to read more about these limitations see here.

Therefore you can assume that TV Series from DVD and Blu-ray discs should be ripped and then the episodes re-encoded in to individual video files such as .AVI or .MKV using a program such as Handbrake. Once I have figured out how to do this and automate it, I will probably do a blog post about the process.

For now we will assume that our TV Series episodes are already in individual video files and in the correct folder structure with the correct naming conventions, I currently use a program called TheRenamer to speed up the renaming of the files in to a format like: nameofTVseries – S01E01 – episodename.avi

In this screen shot you can see an example of a correct folder and file structure.

The default meta-data scraper for TV Shows in XBMC is TheTVDB your video files episode order should match the same order as in TheTVDB database, if your migrating from Windows Media Center / MyMoves.dk that also uses TheTVDB so you should already be good to go!

When I added my sources under TV Shows – Files in XBMC I assigned the content for my TV Shared folders to be: Folder Contains "TV Shows" and to use TheTVDB scraper as you can see in this screen shot. If your TV folder and file structure is correct you shouldn’t have any issues importing your content in to the XBMC TV Show library.

TV Shows – Main Menu

I have turned on rotating TV Show fanart images for the TV Show main menu, so that background image changes to the various different fanarts for the TV Shows in my collection.
Again we have a partially watched feature and you can see the last episode I was watching but didn’t finish and there is an option to Continue Watching. This partially watched feature and be turned off and disabled if desired.

Like with the Music and Movies if I push up on to the top menu, there is a View Modes, this screen shot is showing recently added episodes. You can also change the View Mode to Random and In Progress.

TV Show Library Views

Now I have all the extra artwork setup for TV Shows my new favourite view is this one which is Poster. You can see that the rating of TV PG is displayed along with the channel logo in this case The History Channel. The Year, Genre, Directed By and I believe the IMDB rating can also be displayed in the bottom left. The number of episodes and the TV Show title are shown at the bottom in the middle, next to that is a synopsis and next to that in the bottom right are the extra artwork images obtained by the XBMC Artwork Downloader add-on.

Here is another TV Show in the same Poster view

When I select a TV Show its takes me to a screen that looks like this, I prefer the Panel View for Seasons. You can see there is a cover image / poster for each Season and also for All Seasons and Specials. When highlighting a Season a season image and synopsis are shown on the left hand side.

If I then select a season I am taken to the Episodes View. In this case I prefer a list view for episodes.
Each episode has its own image and synopsis. The ticks you can see next to each episode means I have already watched them. As I have setup on my WHS server, a central MySQL database for use with XBMC and multiple HTPC’s around the house, this watched or unwatched status is shown in every room!

Episode 1:

Episode 12:

If I press Info on the remote control whilst on an episode that episodes Information page is then displayed. Here you can see we get a bit more information and some actors images are shown.

If I start to playback the episode and whilst its playing if I press Info on the remote again, it looks like the screen shot below. Not sure what they call it? Information overlay perhaps, but you get the Plot of the episode, who’s starring in the episode. We also can see along the bottom the various Media Info icons, one nice feature about XBMC with this skin is the “Current Time” and “Ends At” you can see in the bottom right corner, along with the extra artwork images above that.

TV Show Library – Other views

TV Show – Showcase View

TV Show - Showcase View with drop down panel

TV Show – 3D Wall View

TV Show – Wall View

TV Show – List View

TV Show – Banner Info View

TV Show – Banner Info View with drop down panel

TV Show – Banner View

TV Show – Panel Logo View

TV Show – Panel Landscape View

TV Show – Panel View

TV Show – ShowArt View

TV Show – ShowArt View with drop down panel

TV Show – Landscape View

TV Show – Landscape View with drop down panel

Summary

Wow as you can see you are spoilt for choice with the number of gorgeous looking views to choose from! I don’t have a large TV Show collection but the Artwork Downloader add-on did a good job of obtaining the extra artwork images and most were available for the TV Shows in my collection. I think the TV Show library in XBMC with the Aeon MQ4 skin is fantastic, the main issue when migrating from MCE / MyMovies.dk is that XBMC does not properly support TV Shows from discs rips and it is expected that your episodes are to be in individual video files. Hopefully an automated solution using Handbrake will be the answer to this but I need to investigate.

Overall I am very pleased with how the TV Show library ended up looking and how it functions. Next in Part four I will be looking at all the other areas of the user interface not covered so far, like Pictures, Weather, Concerts and the YouTube add-on.
Things for the future? I will be eventually looking at Live TV integration within XBMC and setup for an automated downloading system for new Movie and TV Show content.

My Movies.dk keep it or ditch it ???

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 17:58:00 +0000

This is a follow up post to my Part 2 in the XBMC Frodo / Aeon MQ4 Skin series.

As I stated in part 2 I am currently using My Movies.dk metadata for movies for use with XBMC. There is an option in either the Collection Management program or in the settings in the WHS version of My Movies to enable metadata file creation for XBMC, if enabled My Movies will then create a .nfo and .tbn files in each movies folder. XBMC can read these files and import the metadata provided by My Movies. I’ve been using this feature in conjunction with the My Movies scraper add-on for XBMC.

Now I always knew this day would come when I would have to make a decision if to keep My Movies database on the back-end server or if to ditch it. Today is that day I feel!

With the help of my new friend Samu-rai on the XBMC forums I have compared the data displayed for movies by My Movies metadata and the XBMC scraper called “Universal Movie Scraper” and the results are clear as to who the winner is and its not My Movies.

I’ve been a long time user and supporter of the My Movies.dk system and the team there. I don’t think I could have used Windows Media Center to the extent I did if it were not for My Movies.

Some reasons why I still like My Movies:

The My Movies system works well for disc titles, i.e. movies that have been released already on DVD or Blu-ray disc, its not so good for metadata for films that are still in the cinema e.g. pirate movies but that’s a good thing right.

The TV Series support for DVD disc rips is excellent and MCE can directly play episodes, XBMC cannot do this yet! I wrote a whole thing about the limitations of TV Series on DVD rips in XBMC here

My Movies does other good things like the personal Online Collection website and the iOS / Android app. They are planning on updating the remote control on the mobile apps to be able to control XBMC as well as MCE.

I still like using the Collection Management software for managing my titles but if I move to a XBMC scraper that kinda becomes somewhat redundant.

My Movies is also IMHO still the best automatic disc ripping / downloader of metadata, you need AnyDVD HD in the back ground and My Movies ripper does the rest. I haven't seen any solutions for a fully automated disc ripping service in XBMC.

The My Movies development team I believe do have plans to revamp their entire XBMC integration but this is not the highest priority for them which we understand as they don’t make money on XBMC client users so much if any.

They are already working on updating the XBMC metadata integration that is including in the MAC OSX version of Collection Management so that is a good thing, it just needs updating for WHS and Windows Server but I am not sure I can wait.

My Movies metadata for Bolt

Universal Movie Scraper for Bolt

My Movies metadata for Madagascar 2

Universal Movie Scraper for Madagascar 2

My Movies metadata for Nemo
Universal Movie Scraper for Nemo

I am going to have to sleep on this one, but I am thinking I will delete all the My Movies .nfo and .tbn files and rebuild my XBMC Movie Library using the XBMC Universal Movie Scraper instead.

Which unfortunately makes the My Movies.dk system for me pretty much not required any more as I have no MCE HTPCs now in the house! I may keep it on the server for Disc ripping though.

XBMC Frodo - Aeon MQ4 Skin– Part2 Movie Library

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 12:36:00 +0000

In part one I looked at the music library, today we will be taking a look at the Movie library in XBMC / Aeon MQ4 Skin.

The screen shot below shows the default movie background image with the Darkness theme. You can see the movie titled “Drive”, this was the last movie I was watching and the playback progress was only 20% watched. You can use the up directional button on the remote control and select Continue Watching, to quickly continue playback of that movie.

Movies Main Menu

I have now turned on rotating movie fanart images for the movies main menu.

To do this use the Artwork Organizer add-on to copy your artwork from the individual movie folders on your server to a local folder on the HTPC.

You then select the Customisations option from the bottom menu.

Select the Movie menu heading and then select Change Backdrop Multiple Images

Browse to the local folder on the HTPC that the Artwork Organizer add-on created for Movie Fanart

On my Linux Ubuntu system this path was: /home/xbmc/.xbmc/userdata/addon_data/script.artworkorganizer/MovieFanart

Note: You may also need to select the option in the XBMC settings to see hidden files and folders, before you can browse to this hidden location.

The top menu with the View Modes works like it did with the music library, so you can change the View Modes to: In Progress, Random, Recently Added

I didn’t mention this in part one and probably should have done, but each main menu heading has a submenu, to access this submenu you simply press the down directional button on the remote control.
You can then select things like Genres, Recently Added, Titles, Search, Update Library and more as I have hidden a bunch of submenu items in the customisations.

That’s the other great thing about this skin you can customise all the menus and the look and feel of the whole menu system, no more messing about with the now buggy Media Center Studio and battling with Microsoft to edit system .dll files that get reset.

Movie Library Views

Wall view - with Media Case turned on.

Wall view – with Media Case turned off.

As I have migrated from a Windows MCE / My Movies.dk system I already had a folder.jpg (Movie cover) and a fanart.jpg (Background image) for each of my movies. The covers you can see being displayed in these screen shots, are my folder.jpg images from the My Movies.dk system as are the fanart images.

Now I imagine if you were starting from scratch with no existing artwork for your movies then it would be the “The Movie Database” aka themoviedb.org inbuilt scraper in XBMC, that would get you the basic artwork such as covers and a single fanart image for each movie.

There is also an add-on available for XBMC called Artwork Downloader and this is used to get extra fanart for movies and TV Shows, but can also be used to obtain posters, now poster.jpg files are movie covers same as folder.jpg, however posters take priority over folder.jpg. So if like me you wanted to have your existing movie covers be displayed in the XBMC movie library, then I had to ensure that in the Artwork Downloader add-on I did not select posters to be downloaded.

Just for the record I am currently using the My Movies.dk scraper add-on in XBMC and also have the My Movies software on the WHS server, set to create metadata .nfo .tbn files for movies / XBMC. This may change and I may end up ditching My Movies.dk on the back-end altogether! Unless they update the XBMC integration sooner rather than later.

Movie Title Information

Like with the Album and Artist Information screens I showed in part one, we also have Movie Information, this information is usually handled I believe by the inbuilt “The Movie Database” scraper.

You can see in the screen shot below I have some extra artwork being displayed on the right hand side, a logo and a clearart image. I haven’t worked out yet exactly where the actor pictures come from?
The synopsis text is currently coming from the .nfo files that the My Movies.dk system creates.

Movie Views continued

Movies View - 3D Wall

Cant wait to see this on a home cinema screen!

Movies View - Poster

In this screen shot you will notice I have changed the original Blu-ray cover image from MyMovies.dk to a poster cover image. Also there is a Trailer Available option, most movies scanned in to the XBMC system using the Universal Movie Scraper, then have an option to play a trailer for that movie title.

Movies View - Large List

Movies View – Panel

Movies View – Banner

Displays the banner.jpg files, looks good but missing banner artwork lets it down

Movies View – Panel Logo

Displays the logo.png files, again looks good but missing logos let it down

Movie View – ShowArt

Displays the clearart.png files

Movie Information Panel appears in from the top down

Movie View – Landscape

Displays the landscape.jpg files if available if not it displays the movie covers

Movie View – ShowCase with Extra Thumbnail Style

Movie Genres

Custom genre icons and backgrounds added to the skin setup

New Movie Trailers

For new movie trailers for movie titles that are not currently in your collection, there are two Trailers add-ons which I looked at, one called "The Trailers" and the other called "Apple iTunes Trailers" both add-ons are very similar and I believe they both play trailers from Apple.
Both streamed the trailers from the Internet well, however both have some issues with the Aeon MQ4 skin, if extra fanart is enabled in the skin for movies, then when the trailers add-ons are launched I get a Script Failed addon.py message. Turning off extra fanart makes this error go away but then you lose extra fanart background images for your movies in the library.
Also with both Trailer add-ons I was unable to setup the download options to download the trailers to a network share, they would download to a local path on the HTPC however.

I am currently using "The Trailers" add-on as that one shows a synopsis for each movie trailer the other add-on did not do this. I set it up so trailers are accessed from the Movies submenu as you can see in the screen shot below.

Movie Trailers in Poster view

Artwork Downloader add-on

As I already said, I used the Artwork Downloader add-on to try and get the extra artwork for my Movies and TV Shows, you simply tell it what types of artwork you would like it to download and then from the movie library push up on to the top menu, go to the Add-ons pull down menu and select Auto Mode. It took about 4 hours on my system to complete the artwork download, so you may want to run it over night. If you would like to see the thread I started asking questions about the Artwork Downloader add-on its here.

One important setting is in the Advanced area, you need to enable USE LOCAL FILES so that the artwork image files will be stored in each movies / TV shows folder on your server. Set this before you start Auto Mode.

Summary

The Movie Library in the Aeon MQ4 skin looks stunning, there are plenty of views to choose from and you will probably never use all of them, the extra artwork looks amazing but missing artwork really spoils the look of it all. There seems to be allot of missing artwork for the movies in my collection, so for now I think I will stick with the more basic views like Wall, hopefully in the future more artwork on the fanart.tv website will become available.

Overall I am very impressed with this skin and the artwork add-ons that support it. The developers in the XBMC community certainly do a great job and as you can see in these screen shots the results really show!

www.phaze1digital.com

XBMC Frodo - Aeon MQ4 Skin– Part1 Music Library

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 13:17:00 +0000

Today I am going to be looking at the Aeon MQ4 Skin with the Darkness theme on XBMC Frodo Version 12.1 running on Linux Ubuntu 12.10 Minimal with 3.8.6 kernel.

I’ve been working on XBMC / Ubuntu for the last 3 months and I am nearly done now, except for Live TV which will be my next project. The hardest thing about Windows Media Center was getting the Video Codec setup correctly, the hardest thing about XBMC in my opinion apart from having to learn some Linux is the Artwork. The Aeon series of skins have for some time been my favourites and Aeon MQ4 is simply stunning, its very graphical when compared to MCE and requires allot more artwork other than covers and fanart.

Still sat on the fence about Windows MCE or if to migrate to XBMC? Maybe this series of blog posts might convince you to switch.

MUSIC – Main Menu

The screen shot below, is the standard background image with the Darkness theme for the Music menu, however you can change this to rotating fanart images from your music collection, so random pictures of your artists will be displayed in the background when you are on this menu. You can do the same for the Movies and TV Shows menus and have rotating fanart of your Movies and TV Shows.

I used the add-on Artwork Organizer which is a script that copies all your artwork images from your file server, in to a series of local folders, you then change a setting in the skin customisation and point it to one of these local folders containing all the fanart etc.

Rotating or changing fanart background images of music artists, whilst on the music main menu.

Elvis

Cheryl Cole

U2

If you use the Up Directional button on the remote control you can push up to a top menu, here you can select different View Modes for both Albums and Tracks.
“In Progress” which appears to then display along the top menu, 10 albums I have been playing.

“Recently Added” – Shows the last 10 albums or tracks added to my music library.

"Random” – Shows random 10 albums or tracks depending on the View Mode you have selected.

In this screen shot I have started playing the album Bob Marley & the Wailers Live!

When playing an album the random fanart background images become no longer random and will now only show fanart images of Bob Marley & the Wailers.

However if playing a compilation album with various artists then you will continue to see random artist fanart being displayed.

After a period of inactivity with the remote control, you can see the main menu is replaced with the track times. Use the directional buttons on the remote and the main menu headings come back again.

Music Playing – Full Screen

Here you can see what the full screen looks like, I have opted to display both background fanart and a music visualization.

Artwork

This series of blog posts are not intended as step by step setup guides as it has taken me weeks to work out all the artwork in XBMC / Aeon MQ4 and there is simply too much to cover in a reasonably amount of time when writing about the subject. However these posts are intended as a basic overview and will hopefully give new users migrating from MCE like me, a basic understanding of what artwork add-ons are required and what they do.

Here you can see an album playing that had no cdart and you just get a blank spinning CD disc. Also there is no artist logo so it just displays a music note.

Music Library – Album Views

Music Albums - Wall view

My default view as it looks like Windows Media Center

Music Albums - 3D Wall – A beautiful view but on large collections I find it a little time consuming to find what you are looking for as you can only view / select from one row.

Music Albums - List View

Music Albums - Showcase view

Music Albums - Low List view

Note the artist logo being displayed in the bottom right.

Track List of the Duran Duran Arena album

Album Information screen

For each album you can select to view its Album Information using the right click context menu. The album information if available is downloaded by the inbuilt Universal Album Scraper.

In this albums case there is no album description and some of the other information is unavailable. The albums you can see at the bottom are not necessarily on my system they are simply the Discography of the currently playing artist. This Discography information is displayed by the Artist SlideShow add-on I believe.

If you push the directional button down on to one of the Discography albums it just displays a large image of that album cover.

Here you can see an album who’s album information is fully populated.You can see some text which is the album description and the Moods, Styles, Themes are populated.

Note: Because I am still playing Duran Duran in the background it is their album discography that gets
displayed not R.E.M’s.

Music Library – Artist Views

This is my default view for Artists – Low List

Initially to ensure each artist had a single fanart background image and a thumb image, that’s the square image of the artist you can see in the bottom left, I used the inbuilt Universal Artists Scraper. This is powered by various metadata websites including TheAudioDB.com website. I found that the Universal Artists Scraper did a pretty good job and got fanart and thumb images for most of my album artists, however for those that it did not, I registered on TheAudioDB.com website and created new pages for my missing artists and I contributed, I uploaded images and bio’s I found on Google, I was then able to ensure I had basic information and more importantly images for each artist in my collection.

Once I had the basics up and running with the Universal Artists Scraper, I then later used the CDArt Manager add-on to download extra fanart, cdart, clearlogo's, banners, ártist thumbs.

Music Artists - List view

Music Artists – Wall view

Music Artists – 3D Wall view

Music Artists – Showcase view

Artist Information

Like the album information you can right click to bring up the context menu on an artist and select artist information. The Universal Artists Scraper is used to obtain the artist information metadata.

Music Genres - Custom icons and background images

Summary

Well I think that is it for part 1. As you can see XBMC with the Aeon MQ4 skin is allot more graphical than the Windows Media Center Music Library, but that also means allot more work getting artwork organised but I think the effort is worth the results of how the user interface ends up looking!

The only real issue I have now with the XBMC music library is that the Artist SlideShow add-on seems a bit buggy and has a tendency to crash after I stop playback sometimes or start playing a new album, it then does not work properly until I reboot the HTPC. Hopefully the add-on developers can sort this out at some point?

If you are in the process of migrating from Windows Media Center to XBMC we would love to hear about your progress, thoughts and feedback.

www.phaze1digital.com

Finally stopped Windows Media Player–Overwriting Folder.jpg files ?

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 22:09:00 +0000

If you have been using Windows Media Player / Windows Media Center for any length of time, you will know that WMP is a bugger for overwriting your hi-res Folder.jpg files in your albums folders.

As a result I have never embedded album cover images in to the MP3 files, as if you do that WMP will then take it upon its self to overwrite my hi-res 600x600 Folder.jpg images with a crappy low-res 200x200 Folder.jpg, which Windows Media Center will then cache and you end up with terrible looking album covers in MCE on your TV.

If you don’t embed the cover images in to the MP3 files, then MCE will pickup and cache your nice hi-res Folder.jpg image. This has been working fine for me in Windows 7 / Media Center.

However iTunes requires that the cover image is embedded in the MP3 files, which is why I have never used iTunes fully. We just got a 27” Apple iMAC computer and I plan to use iTunes and get in to all that stuff.

Also developing a new XBMC system at the moment and I am currently working out all the artwork in XBMC, which there is allot more of with all the add-ons for cdArt, ClearArt, FanArt and all that carry on. From my tests XBMC will just pickup and cache the Folder.jpg that’s in the albums folder, so if that Folder.jpg has been molested by WMP, you again end up with a crappy 200x200 cover image in XBMC on the TV. Seems XBMC does not display / cache the embedded hi-res cover images in the MP3 files.

Long story short WMP is and always has been a pain in the arse with Microsoft not knowing what they are doing with artwork images. There is nothing you can do in the WMP settings to stop this behaviour and I always thought there was no way to stop it overwriting Folder.jpg files if you embed cover images.
However a new search today and I have found a genius who apparently has come up with a solution, in my initial basic tests I can confirm that it does appear to work, but I need you to test and confirm as well!

On your Windows PC go in to regedit then browse to:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MediaPlayer\Preferences

Create two new DWORD entries

LargeAlbumArtSize
SmallAlbumArtSize

Give them the value of: ffffffff and then reboot. You will need to do this on every Windows PC where WMP looks at your music files.

This Voodoo Magic appears to totally stop WMP overwriting your hi-res Folder.jpg files and even stops it creating the AlbumArtSmall.jpg files.

If this does indeed pan out and works as I think it does, it will finally mean I can embed the hi-res cover images in to all the MP3 files and then be able to add my music collection in to iTunes. Also both MCE and XBMC will pickup the un-molested hi-res Folder.jpg file and cache them for display on the TV.
Thank $%^& for that!

On this screen shot you can see I have embedded the hi-res cover image in to the MP3 files, I used MP3TAG. You can see that my Folder.jpg is still 600x600 and there is no AlbumArtSmall.jpg file in sight!

The only issue I can see is with Media Center extenders, I imagine you would have to load their user registry hive to be able to make this edit for the extender user accounts. As I only have one MCX and I plan to ditch it along with Windows Media Center, when my new XBMC system is up and running HAHA I don’t really care about that!

UPDATE:

I embedded all my hi-res 600x600 Folder.jpg files in to all my music files, I did it rather quickly using the Actions Import Cover feature of MP3Tag, would have taken weeks manually!

However today I have noticed in some albums folders, not all of them, just seems random in some album folders, there are files like these being created:

AlbumArt_{E6043A2C-BBEB-49C5-BCF0-5259B6332C34}_Large.jpg
AlbumArt_{E6043A2C-BBEB-49C5-BCF0-5259B6332C34}_Small.jpg

The large one is 200x200 the small one is 75x75

I have double checked several Folder.jpg files and they have remained untouched at 600x600 and not down-res to 200x200 this is good news! However this creation of these Large / Small jpg files is an annoying side affect that I would like to be able to stop them being created all together, but not sure how ?

I posted the question on MS Answers here

SoundGraph VF310 15c2:0036 Linux / XBMC

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 09:45:00 +0000

I have an OrigenAE M10 HTPC case which has a SoundGraph IR/VFD unit – Model: VF310 15c2:0036. This is the LCD display on the front of the HTPC case. Before I attempted to get the LCD display working under Linux Ubuntu 12.10 minimal and XBMC V12.0 Frodo, I had read several forum threads and it sounded very difficult to set this up under Linux especially with this particular model, however it turned out to be quite simple.

I already have the IR receiver working in MCE mode, I did have difficulties with this and was having issues with double presses / commands from the remote being sent to XBMC. I had installed LIRC initially and I think that and the inbuilt modules in the kernel for iMon where conflicting, in the end I uninstalled LIRC and only used the in kernel modules. I followed this user guide here and the “Do everything completely in-kernel”" option to get the MCE (Logitech Harmony) remote control working properly. You can see some comments I made on that thread here. I am not going to cover the setup of the remote control here as I had allot of problems with it.

Anyways I am looking at the LCD display today not the remote control setup. This is how I got it working. I also started a thread about it here on the XBMC forum.

To double check which VFD unit you have from terminal type

lsusb

Bus 002 Device 003: ID 15c2:0036 SoundGraph Inc. LC16M VFD Display/IR Receiver

1. From terminal I installed LCDProc

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lcdproc

I then read the relevant parts of the LCDProc user manual here.

2. Edit the LCDd.conf file located in /etc

cd /etc
sudo nano LCDd.conf

Scroll down to the [Server] section and change this line from:

Driver=curses

To:

Driver=imon

Note: There is also an imonlcd driver I tried this initially but I just got garbled text on the display.

Scroll a bit further down to the Welcome and Goodbye messages, change these to suit your requirements. These messages are displayed when the HTPC is turned on from shutdown and when it is shutting down.

# Hello message: each entry represents a display line; default: builtin
#Hello=" Welcome to"
#Hello=" LCDproc!"

# GoodBye message: each entry represents a display line; default: builtin
#GoodBye="Thanks for using"
#GoodBye=" LCDproc!"

Change this setting:

# If yes, the the serverscreen will be rotated as a usual info screen. If no,
# it will be a background screen, only visible when no other screens are
# active. The special value 'blank' is similar to no, but only a blank screen
# is displayed. [default: on; legal: on, off, blank]
#ServerScreen=on

To:

ServerScreen=blank

You need to remove the comment # in front of it to make the setting active.
I wanted to slow down the speed that the text scrolls across the LCD display, I tried changing this setting but it does not seem to do anything?

# set title scrolling speed [default: 10; legal: 0-10]
#TitleSpeed=10

I change it to:

TitleSpeed=1

Save and exit the LCDd.conf file to do that press Ctrl+X on the keyboard then Y then hit enter.

3. In the XBMC settings in System enable the option for LCD/VFD

4. Edit the LCD.xml fie. There is an LCD.xml file in your userdata folder, you can customise and change
this file if required? You can read more about the LCD.xml file here.

I did make one change to the file and that was:

From this:

<navigation>
      <line>$INFO[System.CurrentWindow]</line>
      <line>$INFO[System.CurrentControl]</line>
      <line>Freemem: $INFO[System.FreeMemory]</line>
      <line>$INFO[System.ScreenWidth]x$INFO[System.ScreenHeight] $INFO[System.ScreenMode]</line>
   </navigation>

To this:

<navigation>
      <line>$INFO[System.CurrentWindow]</line>
      <line>$INFO[System.CurrentControl]</line>
      <line>Transport Controls</line>
   </navigation>

Because when I navigated in the XBMC GUI over the transport controls like Play / Pause / Stop etc the second line on the display would output my free memory like this: FREEMEM: 3382MB I don’t know why it does not display the name of the current transport control you are on? So I changed it to simply read “Transport Controls”

5. Reboot and your LCD display should now be working!

This is what gets displayed when nothing is happening

XBMC Running….
Current date and time..

You can change this in the LCD.xml file in the general section.

When I navigate around the XBMC GUI the second line on the display shows what Menu item I am currently on?

Here I am playing a music track Depeche Mode – Personal Jesus, the track play and remaining times are also shown. You can change what gets displayed for music playback in the music section of the LCD.xml file.

Not very clear in the photo, but I am currently highlighting one of the transport controls in the XBMC GUI and “Transport Controls” now scrolls across the screen whenever I do this.

Here I am now in my movie library in XBMC and as I navigate over the different movie titles, if I pause on a title it displays that titles name on the LCD display.

Here I am playing a movie – E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial

This is a bit funky, when in the System settings area and also when I am on some of the other system type menus it looks like this

Summary

The only other slight issue is that when I shutdown the HTPC (S5 Shutdown) the Goodbye message stays on the screen and the LCD display does not turn off. However if I put the HTPC in to S3 Sleep mode instead then the LCD display is turned off and the Goodbye message is not displayed. Also the Welcome message does not stay on the display long enough for my liking.

Overall I am very pleased that the LCD display is now working as I thought it would be a complete nightmare to setup and actually it was relatively simple. I wish I could say the same for setting up the IR MCE remote control, as that was a nightmare!

Please keep in mind I do not have LIRC installed, if you are using LIRC for your remote control this may or may not work ?

Phaze1 Digital

Looking at XBMC Frodo–Aeon Nox skin

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Thu, 28 Feb 2013 11:50:00 +0000

My Linux Ubuntu 12.10 Minimal / XBMC V12.0 Frodo HTPC project has been coming along, almost at the point of getting in to XBMC skin configurations. I installed the Aeon Nox skin for a quick look.

Which skin are you using for XBMC? What do you recommend? The Aeon ones always seemed to be the best to me. Obviously on a proper HTPC build like the one I did recently for this project, horsepower is not an issue, how does this skin perform on devices like jail broken Apple TVs and Raspberry Pi?

Main Menu – Music

The background image of the speakers randomly changes to another background related to music, likewise on the other menu items like Movies and TV Shows the background images are dynamic and change.
On the Music menu (Or on other menus) you press the down arrow on the remote control to show the submenu which shows things like Recent – Artists – Albums – Songs – Files

Main Menu – Movies

On the Movies submenu you can select things like Titles, Genres, Movie Sets (My Movies.dk don’t support sets currently), Trailers, Latest.

Main Menu – Music Videos

Main Menu – TV Shows

Main Menu – Videos

Main Menu – Shutdown

Main Menu - Weather

Main Menu – Pictures

There is still no proper pictures library in XBMC by default, unlike the Windows Media Center pictures library. Its just a folder / file browsing type of deal. I believe there are some picture library add-ons for XBMC I need to look in to these.

Artists – InfoWall View

I am currently using the inbuilt Universal Scrapers for Music Artist and Album images and metadata. When I installed the Aeon Nox skin, it also installed some additional add-ons. These where called: Artist Slideshow, Artwork Downloader and I think there was another one called CDArt which I can’t find now in the settings, will need to look in to all these new metadata add-ons and see how they are going to work, as I know some of these add-ons actually place new folders and files in amongst your data on your server, unlike the Universal scrapers which don’t do that. So I am cautious about them. Especially if Posters are selected for download and they start replacing your My Movies.dk movie covers.

Artists – TriPanel View

Albums – Wall View

The album cover images have not been downloaded by any of the XBMC scraper add-ons they are all just my Folder.jpg images in the album folders.

Albums – InfoPanel View

Album – Track List

Album Now Playing on main menu

The coloured blocks you can see is a dynamic and moving music visualisation, that spins round and the blocks move up and down, you can also pick other visualisations in the Music Playback settings.

There seems to be two now playing screens? If I click back on the remote control from the main menu when an album is playing, I then get this screen. The top left image of the band is dynamic and changes this is the Artist Slideshow add-on I think.

Movies Titles – Wall View
Looks a bit like the Covers Full Screen view in My Movies in MCE and is the view I normally use.

Movie Title – Info page

I haven’t figured out the Actors and Crew images yet, the parental rating is shown, however XBMC does not have proper parental controls like My Movies in MCE does. You can see the synopsis and other details and also the media information about the file is shown and the SMB path to the server at the bottom. This particular movie is a 1080P MKV file with a DTS audio track.

Movie Titles – TriPanel View

There are 14 different views from what I can tell in Aeon Nox, below are just some of them!

Movie Titles – Panel View

Movie Titles – Posters View

Movie Titles – Shift View

TV Shows – BannerPlex

I really like this view. Shame XBMC does not properly support TV Series that are DVD rips, you can read more about that here.

TV Shows – Seasons – List View

TV Shows – Episodes List

The wife and I have been watching Heroes lately, we are now on season 3 and I have totally lost the plot of what’s going on!
Again Media Info is shown about the file and the ticks next to some of the episodes is the Watched status, the ones that don’t have ticks are unwatched.

TV Shows – Episode Information

Summary

I think the Aeon Nox skin looks great, fantastic eye candy anyways! But its a big change from Windows Media Center and I was just getting use to the default XBMC Confluence skin. I think once I have worked out exactly how these new metadata add-ons are going to function and how they will affect the data on my server, I will feel more comfortable using a skin of this kind. The other thing that is a little daunting is the number of skin settings that you can mess about with. My other concern for myself here at home as I plan to use a Raspberry PI or Apple TV in my girls room, is how a skin like this might perform on hardware like that. I’d rather not have to use different looking skins on different hardware.

Let me know what you think? Any long term XBMC users reading? Any feedback or comments welcome!

mControl update iOS app to version 1.1.2559

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 20:55:00 +0000

I was very pleased to see an update today for the mControl iOS app. Seems they have fixed some things and now I am able to control Z-wave Door Sensors, Motion Sensors and a IP Camera Motion Sensor (Foscam), these are all devices in VeraLite as I am using the mControl Vera Luup Driver.

What's New in Version 1.1

Added new devices to the app
-Added Generic device support
-Added simplified chines language
-Fix Camera streaming
-Added ZigBee ON/OFF/Dimmer device support
-Added ZigBee meter Device support
-Fix thermostat bug
-Fix reconnect issues
Goto Bed, Arm House, Disarm House are all scenes within VeraLite not macros in mControl. Not sure why it says 0 next to them?

However I can now run these Vera scenes from the mControl iOS app.

Before this update it was not possible to run Vera scenes via the mControl iOS app, there was previously no Run button, it would just say Label and you couldn’t select anything.

Goto Bed VeraLite scene in the mControl iOS app.

Porch (Room) – The Porch Sensor is an Everspring motion sensor, you can see the mControl iOS app is correctly displaying the status of this sensor.

I can now Arm or Disarm (Bypass) this motion sensor using the mControl iOS app. Previously before this new update, all security sensors would just say Label next to them and you couldn’t control them.

Back Garden (Room) – The camera sensor you can see is the on-board motion sensor on my outdoor Foscam IP Camera, which I integrated in to VeraLite using the miOS Foscam add-in. This enables you to use the Foscam’s motion sensor as a regular motion sensor device in Vera, which you can trigger scenes off.

I can now Arm or Disarm the Foscam motion sensor in the updated mControl iOS app.

Kitchen (Room) – Patio Door sensor is an Everspring Door / Window sensor device again this device is setup in VeraLite.

mControl iOS app can now control this door sensor and Arm / Disarm it.

Living Room – Nothing new here, the three devices are all Z-wave devices setup in VeraLite, which mControl can see and control via the Vera Luup Driver. The Macros are actually macros setup in mControl and not Vera Scenes in this case.

Looks like the mControl mobile webpage needs updating as well, still missing buttons for some Vera devices.

Always nice to see updates from mControl, I just wish they were a bit quicker.

If mControl do one thing, they ought to create an XBMC add-in like their excellent Windows Media Center add-in, that would be at the top of my mControl feature wish list.

For more information about mControl and their products visit their website here.

XBMC / Vera Integration send notifications to XBMC

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 21:17:00 +0000

This is written for XBMC V12 Frodo. If you want to be able to send event notifications from Vera to your TV screens running XBMC read on.

First you need to enabled HTTP control in XBMC, to do this go to System - Settings – Services – Webserver. Enable “Allow control of XBMC via HTTP”.

The default port number is 8080, my user name is xbmc I did not set a password.

Now for a quick test, open a web browser and enter this in to the address bar and hit enter

http://192.168.1.7:8080/jsonrpc?request={%22jsonrpc%22:%222.0%22,%22method%22:%22GUI.ShowNotification%22,%22params%22:{%22title%22:%22Motion%20Detected%22,%22message%22:%22Front%20Door%22},%22id%22:1}

Change the IP address to the IP address of your XBMC PC. On your XBMC it should pop up with a notification that has a title of Motion Detected and the message says Front Door.

Customize the HTTP command to change the title and message text for your own purposes.

http://192.168.1.7:8080/jsonrpc?request={%22jsonrpc%22:%222.0%22,%22method%22:%22GUI.ShowNotification%22,%22params%22:{%22title%22:%22Motion%20Detected%22,%22message%22:%22Front%20Door%22},%22id%22:1}

I have an Everspring Z-wave motion detector outside my front door, so I can monitor if someone is outside my house at my porch. In VeraLite I have a scene that turns on my porch light when this motion sensor detects movement (If its night) and it also sends the popup notification to the XBMC PC in the living room.

To do this simply click in to the Luup tab of your scene and add in the HTTP command string.

You need to add some extra code however, the bits highlighted in red below are what you need to add for the HTTP command to work in Vera.

luup.inet.wget("http://192.168.1.7:8080/jsonrpc?request={%22jsonrpc%22:%222.0%22,%22method%22:%22GUI.ShowNotification%22,%22params%22:{%22title%22:%22Motion%20Detected%22,%22message%22:%22Front%20Door%22},%22id%22:1}")

Click the Save Lua button, then confirm changes – Save and Reload Vera.

Now try running your Vera scene and your new notification should pop up on your XBMC / TV screen.

Job done!

XBMC / Vera Home Automation–Basic integration

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 16:13:00 +0000

Those of you who read my blog regular, will know I have been using Windows Media Center and the mControl Home Automation add-in for controlling my Micasaverde VeraLite Z-wave gateway. If not you can take a peek here.

It works well and I can control and view the status of lights, door & motion sensors, IP cameras and run scenes in Vera from the Windows Media Center UI on the TV.

I am currently working on migrating away from Windows Media Center to XBMC running on Linux Ubuntu and one of the biggest things I will miss in XBMC is this type of integration with my Vera Home Automation system.

What I am going to write about today is no where near as advanced as what I have setup in Windows Media Center, however its a good starting point and I am going to demonstration some basic Vera / XBMC integration using the new XBMCState add-on.

What I am going to setup is so the lights in my Living room automatically brighten up to 100% if I stop or pause Video playback in XBMC and when I start or resume Video playback in XBMC the lights automatically dim down to 25%.

As of writing today the XBMCState add-on is not in the Mios App store properly so you need to download and install it manually, if you are reading this much later then you will probably find it in the Mios app store by then.

Introduction: From the developer..

1. Install the XBMCState plugin from the mios app store (take note of your Vera IP and XBMCState device ID)
2. Install the XBMC addon from the zip file below. (If you use safari, be careful cause it automatically unzip the file and XBMC give some error to install it)
3. Go to the add-on setting and put the Vera IP, XBMCState device ID, put yes to all the event that you are interested in.
4. RESTART XBMC. When you change the IP address and ID device you absolutely have to restart XBMC to take affect.
6. Try it out.

For now these event are triggered:
Music started
Video Started
Music paused
Video paused
Music resumed
Video resumed
Music stopped
Video stopped
Music ended
Video ended
Home menu
Video menu
Music menu
Weather menu
Setting menu
Program menu
Picture Menu

Music and video title of the file that is actually played is also showed.
There also now a debug mode that show what is send to Vera in the log file if activate.

Tested on Frodo
Windows = OK
Linux = OK
Mac = OK
Raspberry = OK

Getting started:

Download the Vera add-on from here. (If you reading this at a later date, install it from the Mios app store instead as it should be up there then).

In Vera go to the Apps tab – Develop Apps tab, select Luup files and click Choose file, browse to the D_XBMCState.json file and then click the Go button to upload it to Vera

Install the XBMCState Vera add-on from the mIOS apps page here

This should create a new XBMCState device in Vera under the Devices tab (no room)

Click the Spanner on this device go to the Advanced tab and make a note of the Device ID number.
You can change the name: field from XBMCState to something meaningful like XBMC – Lounge or XBMC – Bedroom etc. I will come back to this later as you need to add an IP address as well.

Download the Zip file for the XBMC add-on here save it to some where your XBMC PC can access. Go in to XBMC and go to System – Settings – Add-ons. Select Install from zip file

Browse to the zip file and the add-on will be installed and enabled

Now from System – Settings – Add-ons, select Enabled Add-ons

Select Services

Right click the Micasaverde XBMC event item and select Configure

Insert the IP address of your Vera unit and enter the Device ID number of the XBMCState device in Vera.

XBMC state tab

Player state tab

Here you can select the different events that can happen in XBMC and that the XBMCState device in Vera will detect. I have selected Yes on the following Video playback states. Click OK and reboot the XBMC PC.

Go back to Vera and configure the new XBMCState device, go to the Advanced tab, I changed the name to XBMC – Lounge and enter the static IP address of your XBMC PC. Assign the device to a room. Save the changes and Reload Vera.

Now we can test its working? start playing a Video in XBMC.
The XBMCState Device status in Vera should say:

Computer: Up
Player: Video_start

Pause the Video playback in XBMC, the player status should change to Video_pause

This tells us that the XBMC add-on is successfully communicating with Vera.

Now we just need to add some triggers to our lighting scenes so the lights can be controlled via the Video playback status of XBMC.

In Vera I created two new scenes, you might be able to just use some of your existing scenes

XBMC – Lounge On (Scene)

So in my Lounge I have two lamps I want to be turned on when Video playback in XBMC is stopped or paused, so I just clicked both of these lamps to be on in the scene.

Next go to the Triggers tab of the scene, I added two new triggers one for Video Stopped and one for Video Paused

Video Stopped trigger

Device = Select your XBMCState device in this case #53 XBMC – Lounge
What type of event is the trigger? = Player State Changes
Name for this Trigger = Video Stopped
Player State = Video is Stopped

Now repeat this and recreate the second trigger for Video Paused.

Now we only want this to happen if its night time, you don’t want your lights coming on and off with video playback in XBMC if its day time. So for both of the triggers you just setup you need to click in to each Luup Event button

And paste in this is_night code:

if ( luup.is_night() ) then
return true
else
return false
end

XBMC - Lounge Dim 25% (Scene)

Now we need to setup the scene that dims down the lights when Video playback in XBMC is Started or Resumed. Its the same as the above but your triggers are slightly different.

Set your lights to dim to the desired percentage

Again I have two triggers but this time for Video Resumed and Video Starting

Video Resumed trigger

Video Starting trigger

Again you need to click the Luup Event buttons on each trigger and add in the is_night code as before.

Save all that in Vera and Reload.

Now at night time when you start or resume video playback in XBMC your lights should auto dim down and when you stop or pause video playback the lights will brighten up.

More than one XBMC PC ?

If you have multiple XBMC PCs you can simply create more XBMCState devices in Vera, to do this go to the Apps tab in Vera scroll down and find the XBMCState app click It.

Click create another.

Obviously you will need to install the XBMCState add-on in to XBMC on those other XBMC PCs.

Summary

This is revision one of this guide so things maybe updated and changed as the XBMCState Vera / XBMC add-ons are further developed.

This is certainty not mControl in Windows Media Center but its definitely a first step in the right direction and thanks to the developers I am feeling slightly happier about the test Linux / XBMC PC that is sat in my living room, now that the lights can be controlled with XBMC Video playback!

Looking at TV Series DVD rips (VIDEO_TS) in XBMC

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 13:38:00 +0000

If you have ever tried to add TV Series DVD rips that are in VIDEO_TS folders or .ISO images in to the XBMC TV Shows Library, then you know its not easy. Generally XBMC does not support this and the general consensus on the XBMC forums seems to be to re-encode all your DVDs and create individual episode VIDEO files like .avi or .mkv. This is obviously allot of work to do, so I have been looking at other possibilities.

I did try adding TV Series DVD rips that are in VIDEO_TS folders back in XBMC V11 Eden, you can read about that here. What I found is that if I added a new SMB source to point to my TV – DVD folders on my WHS server and selected TheTVDB scraper in XBMC it would add an entry for that TV Series in the XBMC TV Shows Library as seen in the first screen show below, however when you clicked in to it I was unable to start the playback of the DVD as seen in the second screen shot below.

XBMC Eden – TV Shows Library (Pokoyo DVD rip)

Unable to play the TV Series from the XBMC TV Shows Library, no episode information present.

However when using the XBMC Video files area instead of the TV Show Library, I could browse to the Disk1 folder, if I right clicked this and selected Play the DVD would play fine.

I recently tried adding TV Series DVD rips that are in VIDEO_TS folders again in to XBMC V12 Frodo and similar behaviour as above was exhibited and again I was unable to play the DVD disc from the XBMC TV Shows Library.

Someone on the XBMC forums then kindly pointed me to a hack / workaround. Which you can see here. There is also a Wiki page here which explains more about it.

The hack is a two part deal, I had to edit my XBMC advancedsettings.xml file in my user directory and add this section:

And I had to rename the Disc folders on my WHS server, below is an example of how my folder structure was previously setup for the Planet of the Apes TV series.

It is the Disc folders in bold I had to rename.

\\Server
\TV
\DVD
\Planet of The Apes
  \Disk1
\VIDEO_TS
\Disk2
\VIDEO_TS
  \Disk3
\VIDEO_TS
\Disk4
\VIDEO_TS

Below you can see my renamed folder structure. Disk1 contains episodes 1-4, Disk2 contains episodes 5-8, Disk3 contains episodes 9-12 and Disk4 contains episodes 13-14.

\\Server
\TV
\DVD
\Planet of The Apes
\Planet of the Apes.S01.E01E02E03E04
\VIDEO_TS
\Planet of the Apes.S01.E05E06E07E08
\VIDEO_TS
  \Planet of the Apes.S01.E09E10E11E12
\VIDEO_TS
\Planet of the Apes.S01.E13E14
\VIDEO_TS

The name of the TV Series is critical, for example Planet of the Apes.S01.E01E02E03E04 the name of the TV show in red must match identically with the name of this TV show as in TheTVDB.com database website.

I initially had my folders named like this:- Planet of The Apes The Complete TV Series.S01.E01E02E03E04 and this didn’t work TheTVDB scraper in XBMC did not add any episodes.

So once you have your new folder structure setup with the renamed Disc folders, you can try and add this TV Series in to the XBMC TV Shows Library. If its already present in the library? You need to remove it and re-add it.

Your TV Series should then look like this in the XBMC TV Show Library. You can see each episode is correctly listed with the episode number and the episode title.

If you select Show Information on episode 1 you can see that it has the correct synopsis / description

If you select Show Information on episode 2 you can see that it has a different synopsis / description relating to that particular episode.

Playing the DVD Disc

Now this is where it falls down when compared to Windows Media Center and My Movies. As we know episodes 1-4 are on Disc1. If you click to play any of the episodes 1-4, DVD playback will be started, but it does not start the playback directly of the episode you selected. It simply starts the playback of the DVD and you will have to then manually select which episode you wish to watch from the DVD’s title menu. Also all four episodes 1-4 will be marked as watched (The tick) even if you just clicked to play episode 1.

If I selected to play episode 5 the DVD Disc 2 would be played, as we already established episode 5 is on Disc2.

Here you can see the DVD Disc1 title menu and this is where I have to select which episode I want to watch.

Short comings and issues

This is clearly not as good as My Movies in Windows Media Center, because My Movies have something called TV Episode Disc mapping, you can see how this is handled in My Movies in their tutorial video here, which shows the process of mapping chapters and titles on the DVD disc to the correct episode numbers.

From the My Movies website:-

“For TV Series on DVD to be displayed correctly in the tv series library, the episodes of the DVD must be mapped to the title and chapter structure of the disc. In this video, you will see how to map the episodes of the disc to the structure, by using the Collection Management program and Windows Media Player, allowing the DVD to be supported for the TV Series functionality.”

So when I click on an episode in My Movies / Windows Media Center that episode is actually played directly and I never have to use the DVD Discs title menu and manually select the episode I want to watch.

It is extremely unlikely that this episode mapping functionality will be added in to XBMC, as it is geared up for TV Series in VIDEO files and not on DVD discs.

So you may decide this solution I have just demonstrated is not good enough, if you want to click play on an episode within XBMC and for it to play directly, you have two other options as far as I can see it:

1. Re-encode all your TV Series DVD discs and split out each episode in to an individual episode VIDEO file like a .avi or .mkv, this would be very time consuming on large collections.

2. Download your TV Series again from the Internet, how you do that and if its legal is up to you? But it could be quicker to simply download the TV Series so they are in individual VIDEO files which XBMC works well with and to remove your TV Series DVD rips from your server!!

My Movies.dk metadata for XBMC

I am still using My Movies database for metadata on my WHS server and I use the My Movies Collection Management program to edit and update titles in my collection. Now My Movies also has some short comings with XBMC. It is true that My Movies supports creating metadata aka .nfo and .tbn files for Movies so you can also add these titles in to the XBMC Movie Library. This generally works well. BUT My Movies does not currently support metadata for XBMC for TV Series.

This is not a massive issue for TV Series that are in VIDEO files, as you can simply use the inbuilt TheTVDB scraper in XBMC and all is well.

But there is an issue with My Movies and TV Series DVD Disc titles in Collection Management. So what’s the problem?

When you enable metadata creation for XBMC in the My Movies settings, for some reason for TV Series that are DVD Disc titles, Collection Management creates a movie.nfo and movie.tbn file. It does not do this for my TV Series that are in VIDEO files so they are displayed OK in XBMC TV Shows Library, it only creates these .nfo files in the VIDEO_TS folders of my TV Series DVD rips. This has a bad affect in XBMC.

Here is an example of a movie.nfo file created by My Movies for this TV Series on DVD rip.

If you look at the <title> its called “Planet of The Apes: The Complete TV Series” and the synopsis reads as:

“It changed the face of television forever.
Based on the enormously popular and successful Planet Of The Apes movies, the 1974 TV series has become a true cult classic. Now all the 14 episodes (in...</outline>
<plot>It changed the face of television forever.
Based on the enormously popular and successful Planet Of The Apes movies, the 1974 TV series has become a true cult classic. Now all the 14 episodes (including "The Liberator", which never aired during the show's original run) have been compiled and are available to own for the first time.
After their spacecraft travels through a time warp, two astronauts (Ron Harper, James Naughton) from 1981 crash-land back on Earth in the year 3085 - a time when intelligent apes rule and humans have been reduced to servants or pets. Captured by the apes and sentenced to death, they are saved by a curious chimpanzee named Galen (Roddy McDowall). But now all three are on the run, trying to keep one step ahead of the gorilla army led by General Urko (Mark Lenard), who is determined to kill the renegades.“

Now because of the presence of this movie.nfo file created by My Movies it has a negative affect in XBMC. You can see now that all the episodes have “Planet of The Apes: The Complete TV Series” in the title, rather than their individual titles, as shown in the previous screen shot above.

Also each episode having its own unique synopsis / description is now lost and all the episodes have the same generic synopsis as in the movie.nfo file.

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episodes 1 & 2 have the same synopsis as do all the episodes.

I’m not sure I even need these movie.nfo files that My Movies creates, as when I removed them the Planets of the Apes series looked correct in both Windows Media Center and in XBMC. The problem is Collection Management / My Movies for WHS will automatically regenerate these movie.nfo files for TV Series that are DVD Disc titles, so unfortunately the My Movies developers will have to look in to this and they have no plans in the near future to look at their XBMC integration again. What I think we need is a settings option to stop the creation of these movie.nfo files and related files like movie.tbn for TV Series DVD Disc titles.

Final Thoughts

I am quite pleased with this hack / workaround for XBMC and if it wasn’t for this issue with My Movies and these movie.nfo files, I think this would be my preferred final solution.

Getting TV Series DVD rips to be displayed correctly in the XBMC TV Shows library has always been difficult and now I finally have a possible solution, I have hit a bit of a wall with the My Movies back-end system. Hopefully this will be addressed in the future at some point, fingers crossed.

OrigenAE M10 Mini-ITX HTPC Build

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 18:06:00 +0000

Quick post today looking at a new HTPC Build I just did. I plan to install Ubuntu Minimal and XBMC !

HTPC Case – OrigenAE M10
Motherboard - Intel DH67CF
CPU – Intel 2nd Generation Core i3-2100
Aftermarket Cooler – Akasa K25
Zalman Fan Mate 2
RAM - Corsair 4GB DDR3
SSD – Crucial 64GB M4
Blu-ray ROM – Sony BC-5650H (On its way from Hong Kong)

OrigenAE M10 case – this particular case has a right of centre eject button for the optical drive, I’ve seen some of these cases where the button is on the left, so make sure you get the right slot loading optical drive which is easier said than done. I can’t seem to source any new slot loading Blu-ray drives in the UK, they are either second hand or refurbished. So I have a new one coming from Hong Kong thanks to my Chinese friend I know who is sending me one.

It also has the VF310 SoundGraph VFD/IR display, which I have read is extremely difficult to get working under Linux, unlike the VF210 version of it. Not looking forward to that!

I read that the rear intake fan was a little noisy running at full speed, so I bought a Zalman Fan Mate 2 to I can slow down the speed of this fan and make it quieter! If I still lived in a hot country I wouldn’t do this.

There is no doubt that the OrigenAE M10 is the original beautiful looking Mini-ITX HTPC case and I have always fancied having one, but the internal layout is a bit of a let down and could have been done better, you can only install one 2.5” SSD drive and it screws to the side of the case as shown in the next three pictures.

Outside of the case (Lid off) looking in at the SSD.

Cases some in Black or Silver.

PICO PSU and External Power Brick are supplied with the case.

External power brick next to a Harmony remote.

Rear connections and ports on the Intel motherboard, you can also install a low profile PCI-E card.

Installing the Mini-ITX Motherboard

I’m sure the stock CPU coolers are decent these days but old habits die hard, so I opted for an Aftermarket Akasa low profile cooler.

It spins quite slowly and I can hardly hear it. I am only using the Zalman Fan Mate 2 on the rear chassis fan and they recommend you be careful if using them on a CPU fan for obvious reasons if its set too low and not doing its job properly cooling the chip.

You can see I have the single Corsair 4GB RAM chip installed as well now.

This is interesting, don't think I have seen this before, the circuit board you can see in the below picture is for the SoundGraph VRD, there is a switch on it, the default position is SoundGraph, the other says Philips. There is also a pin connector which says Philips IR, I am guessing if you don’t want to use the SoundGraph IR receiver you can set it to Philips and use a standard internal IR receiver board. Not sure where the IR window is, presuming its built in to the LCD Display some where.

Optical drive bay now installed, but I have no optical drive at the moment to put in to it. If you look at the bottom right you can see the circuit board for the front power switch arrangement.

I had to put on the Power LED cable the other way round as to what is shown in the Intel motherboard diagram, reversed the pins – / + etc.

After realising my TV was on the wrong HDMI input and a brief panic, I was then able to see the boot screens and get in to the BIOS.

Quick Summary

Very nice, good build quality and great looking Mini-ITX HTPC case. If you want this style of chassis with an LCD display then this is probably the one to go for, budget allowing. If your not bothered about an LCD I would recommend a fanless solution like the Streacom FC8. The OrigenAE M10 came with one of those daft iMon Pad remotes, would like to see it shipped with a decent MCE remote. Internal design around the optical drive bay could be better, you are limited to what types of slot loading drives you can use, due to button position and mechanism and I think they could have made it so you could install two 2.5” hard drives.
Next I need to install an OS, I have decided to install Linux Ubuntu and XBMC with a view to migrating all my HTPC’s away from Windows 7 / MCE in the long term. Will let you know how that works out? As I am new to Linux so it could be a bit of a learning curve. So keep reading the blog to find out. Or leave a comment if you have recently moved away from MCE.

WHS 2011 Remote Web Access–Music Player Black / Blank Silverlight app problem

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 22:11:00 +0000

I’m looking for users who have had this problem with the Windows Home Server 2011 Remote Web Access - Music Player Silverlight app, on larger music collections when you attempt to play an album the Silverlight app is launched in the browser popup window but the album does not play and you just get a black / blank window. Or sometimes the Silverlight popup app will just quit out and exit.

Full details here on the Home Server Show forum.

What it should look like:

I'd like to hear from users who have suffered with this bug.

Thanks

CallerID made Simples! with W7 Caller ID

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 16:08:00 +0000

I have tinkered with CallerID solutions for Windows Media Center over the years using programs such as Vista CallerID & TapiRex however it was always a bit of a black art to setup and get working properly. However now thanks to Stan Berghici developer of W7 CallerID its simples!

I recently migrated to a new HP Microserver running WHS 2011 away from my old home made WHS V1 PC and wanted to get CallerID working again. First thing you need to do before you even start is ensure you have the CallerID service enabled on your land line? I contacted BT and requested the feature be added, some telco’s may add a small monthly charge for this service.

To see a list of W7 Caller ID features click here, you may also want to view some of the various demo videos that are on the website.

W7 Caller ID

One of the features is “Bluetooth support of the following smart phone brands: iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7.5 Mango and Blackberry.” I haven’t currently set this up so will not be covering these feature, maybe in part 2.
Next get yourself a compatible modem, Stan has some recommended modems on the website here, however I am in the UK and I got one of these modems off of eBay:

“Conexant USB 56K V.92 Fax Modem W2K/XP/VISTA/7 CALLERID”

Chipset set: Conexant 93010

Then head over to the W7 Caller ID website and download the software here. There are three main components of the software, Server, PC Client and MCE Client. There is also a Media Portal add-in. It is also possible to send notifications to XBMC and Apple MAC using Growl.

Read the Setup Guide here.

I installed W7CallerIDServerSetup.msi on to my WHS 2011 server. W7CallerIDClientSetup.msi on to my Windows 7 laptop and W7CallerIDMCESetup.msi on to my Windows 7 Media Center PCs.

W7 Caller ID Server: Settings

My USB modem was automatically detected, I did not need to change any settings such as the Caller ID Command. I did however click in to the modem name and rename to “Harrison Home” as the name of the modem gets displayed in MCE on the popup notification.

Bluetooth tab is for pairing a Smart Phone via Bluetooth to receive notifications. I will skip this part for now but its all covered in the Setup Guide.

The Network tab is used to configure a network listener for use with Notify Pro, again covered in the Setup Guide.

Targets tab – In here you specify the list of remote targets, these are the PCs you want to receive the notifications, in my case I have two Windows 7 HTPC’s with the W7 CallerID MCE addin installed, these use port 8000. My Windows 7 laptop / workstation only has the W7 CallerID PC client installed and this uses port 8020.

In the E-mail tab I simply added my Gmail details, using my email address in both the From and To fields, I now get notifications sent to my inbox when someone has phoned the house.

On the Import tab you can import contacts from Gmail and Outook. I did not user this feature and manually added my contacts in to the Callers List, see below.

Other tab. This is an important tab! You must ensure that you correctly configure the Phone Mask and Alternative Phone Mask before you start adding contacts in to your Callers list or the formatting of the phone numbers will be incorrect. I added my contacts before I had properly configured these Phone Masks and found I had to delete and recreate all my contacts after I had properly set the Phone Masks.

The Phone Masks you can see below are correct for the UK. (I think)

Phone Mask - 0xxxx-xxxxxx

This means the area code will start with a zero and is 5 digits long, e.g my towns area code is 01423 the X’s after the dash denote how many digits the rest of the UK land line phone number is. My phone number is 6 digits long as are all my contacts phone numbers. (Maybe they are longer in big cities?)

Alternative Phone Mask - 07xx-xxxxxxx

Is for mobile numbers, as far as I am aware all UK mobile phone numbers start with 07 and the prefix is 4 digits long, the rest of the mobile phone number is 7 digits long. Again all my contacts in my Callers List all have mobile numbers start with 07 and that length of digits.

Other things you can enable on the Other tab is MCE Pause / Continue Playback, so when a call comes in MCE will be paused and playback resumed when the call has finished, I find this works sometimes but not others, I need to test it some more. You can enable Speech so that the name and number of the caller is read out and set the Speech volume level.

It maybe worth noting the location of the Callers List database file on my server is in the Administrator users Documents folder and the file is called: W7CallerID.sdf

W7 Caller ID Server: Caller List

In the Callers List you can manually add your new contacts.

Adding a new contact, enter their name phone number and upload a picture if you wish. I am not sure what the Type field is for and have not used it.

W7 Caller ID PC Client

If you want to install the PC Client on your laptop / desktop there is not much at all to configure, just enter the host PC name of the PC Client (Not the Server). And enable Speech or not.

Logs - in the screen shot above you can see there is a Logs option, in here you can view a log of all call history, you can filter on the last number of days.

This is what the W7 CallerID PC Client – Notification looks like when it pops up

W7 Caller ID MCE add-in

After installing the MCE add-in there is nothing you can see in MCE, no new icon etc, its just a background service that runs in MCE.

This is what the MCE notification looks like when it pops up

Summary:

I think W7 CallerID is great, its certainly the most easiest CallerID program I have ever used. Quick and easy to setup. W7 Caller ID is not a free solution but is reasonably priced at $19.95. I found the developer Stan very helpful and quick to answer any questions I had, there is also a user forum here. Which I have just noticed has more details about supported modems, here is the modem I am using.

Overall if you are looking for a CallerID solution which you can integrate easily in to your Home Theatre PC’s or other PCs / Laptops and even mobile devices you can’t go far wrong with W7 CallerID.

www.phaze1digital.com

New Home Automation App for Windows 8 and Micasaverde Vera

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 10:13:00 +0000

One of our favourite developers Martin Millmore of Millesoft has been busy lately, Ian recently wrote about a new Tunerfree app for Windows 8 and Windows RT now Martin has released a Windows 8 & Windows RT app for Vera Home Automation called Home Controller.
You can see the app on the Microsoft site here.

For those of you that don’t know Vera and VeraLite are low powered router type devices which act as the primary controller for your Z-wave Home Automation devices. The one user interface that has been missing for Vera is a Windows desktop application. Home Controller has a free 7 day trial and is priced at $5.99.

You can find the thread on the Micasaverde forum for Home Controller here. Which is where you should post your feedback.

Millesoft also have a Home Automation add-in for Windows Media Center called Power Controller MCE.

Home Controller for Windows 8 & Windows RT:
‘

Description

Home Controller is the premier home automation controller for Windows 8. It works with the MiCasaVerde Vera home automation server to allow you to take control of your whole house from one easy to use screen. Bring all of the power of the MiCasaVerde controller to your screen, to control your Z-Wave devices where ever you are.
We are so confident that you will love this software that you can try it out for free for 7 days, then buy a license at the special introductory price!

Supports the following devices:

Scenes
Switches
Dimmer Switches
Heating and Cooling controls
Locks
Window covers
Humidity sensors
Temperature sensors
Light sensors
Power meters
Webcams
and any other devices controlled using the same protocols.
Also features auto local/remote switching, and supports accounts with multiple Vera servers.

Features

Z-Wave control
MICasaVerde Vera integration
Home automation

If you are interested in purchasing a MicasaVerde Vera Z-wave system or any Z-wave home automation devices, or are looking for a consultant to help you with your own project, you can contact me as I am an authorised dealer and can supply to you these products at slightly cheaper prices than the main UK Z-wave online stores.
www.phaze1digital.com

Major mControl update coming soon

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 15:21:00 +0000

Via Embedded Automation - We are setting up to release a major revision and it includes the following: Release date is scheduled for 1st week of December.

• Major Feature added – 24/7 Surveillance system:
• Continues recording of IP cameras
• RTSP camera support • H.264 MP4 recording of all camera
• Transcoding of mpeg/mjpeg camera to h.264 MP4
• Camera streaming to clients enhanced
• Steaming playback of recordded surveillance video
• Simplified scheduler to setup recording
• URL Rewrite Authentication/Authorization
• Added persistence setting for drivers
• Added logic for notifications for Email/SMS:
• Added central location for SMTP and SMS settings
• Added support for multiple email/SMS account notification
• Added custom body and subject to email/SMS action
• Added email/SMS forwarding camera url action for quick view
• Added support for TekMar - A high efficiency HVAC system
• Added Simplified Chinese support
• Added EnOcean support – wireless lighting and sensor protocol
• Room controller
• Low voltage control
• Light sensors
• Temperature sensor
• Door/Window sensors
• Occupancy sensors
• Thermostats
• Other combination devices
• Enhancements:
• Added Zwave locks through VeraLite
• Windows and door sensors support through VeraLite
• Fix Thermostat through VeraLite

and other minor bug-fixes.

I am interested in the VeraLite additions and fixes, hopefully these will resolve the issues I reported to mControl support.

How to control Vera Z-wave devices and run Vera scenes from the command line .CMD

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Sat, 06 Oct 2012 16:03:00 +0000

In my last post I looked at integrating mControl with VeraLite. The next thing I wanted to setup was to be able to control Z-wave devices associated with Vera and run scenes that I’d setup in Vera via the command line on the Windows 7 Home Theatre PC.

Overview:

Why control Vera Z-wave devices and scenes from the command line you may ask? So I could program my Logitech Harmony universal remote control to be able to run these .CMD files with a little help from AutoHotKey installed on the HTPC. So for example I have added additional custom buttons to the Harmony remote’s LCD screen for my Watch Movies activity, so I can control the lights in the room via the Harmony remote at the click of a button.

The way that this works, is you teach your Harmony remote a keyboard command like Ctrl+Alt+A you then have an AutoHotKey script on the HTPC that waits for this keyboard command, once detected the script runs your .CMD file that sends a HTTP request to Vera to do something, like turn on a light. You can read more about setting up AutoHotKey and programming the Harmony remote on a previous post here. Scroll down the blog post and look for the part entitled: Logitech Harmony remote control.
Below is an example of what’s in the AutoHotKey script:

^!A::
IfWinExist Untitled - Left Lamp On
WinActivate
else
Run C:\Lights\Run-CMD.vbs C:\Lights\Lounge-On-Left.cmd
return

Getting started:

wGet

You will need to install and setup Wget on your HTPC first. I installed wGet on to my Windows 7 HTPC, I also had to add the path of where wget.exe is located which on my x64 PC was C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin in to the Windows Environment Variables PATH. To do this right click Computer from the start menu and select properties, then select Advanced System Settings and the Environment Variables button, under system variables scroll down to PATH click Edit and add in the path to wget.exe be sure to separate with ;

So now you have setup Wget you can look at creating some Vera HTTP commands.

Turning a Z-wave device on and off

Here is an example HTTP command which turns on my Lamp (Left) device in my living room. You need to know what your DeviceNum is?

wget --delete-after "http://192.168.1.100:3480/data_request?id=lu_action&output_format=xml&DeviceNum=3&serviceId=urn:upnp-org:serviceId:SwitchPower1&action=SetTarget&newTargetValue=1"

There are two ways to work out the device number, you can go to the Vera UI in a browser find the device in question, click the spanner icon and then go to the settings tab. You can see that this Lamp (Left) device is ID 3 and DeviceNum=3 in the above HTTP string to turn on this device.

The second method of listing the ID numbers for all your devices and scenes in Vera is to use the URL below, which displays a page of XML with all the information in it. Change IP-Address for the internal IP address of your Vera box.

http://IP-Address/port_3480/data_request?id=lu_sdata&output_format=xml

This example HTTP command turns off the Lamp (Left) device:

wget --delete-after "http://192.168.1.100:3480/data_request?id=lu_action&output_format=xml&DeviceNum=3&serviceId=urn:upnp-org:serviceId:SwitchPower1&action=SetTarget&newTargetValue=0"

Note:

SetTarget&newTargetValue=0 = OFF

SetTarget&newTargetValue=1 = ON

To test your Vera HTTP commands you can just run them in a browser and the Z-wave device should respond. Obviously you need to change the IP address 192.168.1.100 to the IP address of your own Vera unit.

Once you have confirmed that they work you can create the .CMD files and just paste in the whole HTTP command. I won’t tell you how to create a new .CMD file as you should know how to do that. If you double click the .CMD file the HTTP command should be sent to Vera and the Z-wave device respond.

Run a Vera scene

In this example we are going to look at a HTTP command to run a scene in Vera. Again first you need to know the scene number of the particular scene you would like to create your .CMD file for. My scene is called “Lounge On” if I look at the scene in Vera I can see its number is = 1

Or if I look at the XML code from the URL I mentioned above, I can see this:

<scene active="0" name="Lounge On" id="1" room="1"/>

So now I know the ID number of the scene I want to create a .CMD file for, I can use the HTTP command below, note I have the number 1 at the end: RunScene&SceneNum=1 If my scene had an ID of 5 I would change this to be RunScene&SceneNum=5 etc.

HTTP Command to run a Vera Scene:

wget --delete-after "http://192.168.1.100:3480/data_request?id=lu_action&serviceId=urn:micasaverde-com:serviceId:HomeAutomationGateway1&action=RunScene&SceneNum=1"

So what I ended up with was folder on the HTPC with all my .CMD files in it to run various scenes and turn on/off various devices.

If you want to know more about how to setup AutoHotkey and program your Harmony remote control to be able to run these .CMD files then as I already said you need to read my previous post here. Ignore all the stuff about mControl Soap commands and the Amulet voice remote, the part you need to follow is entitled: Logitech Harmony remote control.

Summary:

Using the command line with your Home Theatre PC to send HTTP requests to your Vera Home Automation box, enables you to use your programmable universal remote control like a Logitech Harmony, to turn on and off Z-wave devices and also enables you to run scenes in Vera. When setup correctly it works perfectly and at the touch of a button on your remote control you will be able to initiate pretty much anything you have configured in Vera. Why spend extra money on a Z-wave compatible remote control? When you can program your existing Harmony remote to control Vera via your HTPC.

Here is a photo of my Logitech Harmony’s LCD screen with some custom buttons to control Z-wave devices like my lights and fireplace.

www.phaze1digital.com

Home Automation with Windows Media Center (mControl V3) integrated with VeraLite

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Fri, 05 Oct 2012 10:20:00 +0000

I recently purchased a Micasaverde VeraLite Z-wave home automation gateway device, this is a small low powered router like box that becomes the primary controller of your wireless Z-wave network. Z-wave devices are things like plug-in lamp and appliance modules, replacement wall light switches, door contact sensors and PIR motion sensors, sirens, smoke alarms, key fobs and hand held controllers and more. VeraLite can control all of these types of Z-wave home automation devices, you have unlimited options for scenes, rooms, timers, events and notifications. You can read more about Vera3 and VeraLite here.

mControl by Embedded Automation is an excellent PC based home automation software suite similar to products like HomeSeer. Embedded Automation also offer a low powered embedded device called mStation, which unfortunately I haven’t had the opportunity to try out.
I have been using the mControl software for a few years now and recently upgraded from version 2.1 to their latest version 3. mControl is more comprehensive than Vera as, it can control many more types of home automation systems and devices. Some information from the mControl product page:

mControl v3 is the next generation of Embedded Automation's award-winning Digital Home Software platform. In addition to providing all of the features and functionality of mControl v2, mControl v3's platform provides many new advancements:

Built-in support for Embedded Automation's mBee line of ZigBee wireless technologies
mControl Editor - universal browser-based configuration and administration interface
Advanced surveillance with N-up camera display - allowing real-time streaming of standard and hi-definition IP cameras (using popular streaming standards)
Native iPad/iPhone App - free download from the Apple App Store mRemote (with Module Maker) - integrated remote control interface with device editor allows integration of virtually any serial, IP or infrared (IR) device
Enhanced mobile user interface - optimized for smart phone browsers
Data Logging infrastructure - captures history of status and events for analysis and when used with Embedded Automation's mChronicle utility, allows data to be sent to cloud databases for advanced analytics and charting
Enhanced database allows for device and macro reuse, and nested zones
RESTful API provides a simplified method for building apps around the mControl engine
Many other core and driver enhancements ... more to come

For home owners, mControl v3 provides unrivalled value for home monitoring and control - without expensive and awkward plans. mControl v3 also provides our partners a scalable platform for advanced solutions. From making your personal home a better place or deploying an energy management solution to a range of homes, mControl v3 is the foundation for the Digital Home.

The reason why I got in to using mControl is because of their brilliant Windows Media Center MCML add-in. This allows you to control your home from all the TV screens in the house. When I changed my primary Z-wave controller to VeraLite I was keen not to lose this functionality, I did try to integrate my existing mControl V2.1 installation with Vera but I came across some issues that I was unable to resolve, Embedded Automation support recommended I should upgrade to V3 and now everything is working. I have to say the guys at the Embedded Automation are very good and always answer my questions, which is more than I can say for the support at Micasaverde which seems to be lacking and I did not always receive a response from them and when I did it wasn’t that helpful. The upside is that the Vera user forums are much more active than the mControl ones and the expert users on the Vera forum are great and really helped me out with setting up my Vera installation.

First we will take a look at the mControl Media Center add-in that I see on my TV screens and then I will discuss how I integrated VeraLite with mControl.
It is possible to run scenes that have been configured in Vera from the mControl user interfaces, this screen shot shows some of the Vera scenes I have added in to mControl for example Goto Bed, Arm Doors and Disarm doors, when I click Run on one of these, mControl sends a HTTP command to the Vera box for it to run the scene.

I am also able to control Z-wave PIR sensors via the mControl interface, remember all these Z-wave devices are associated with the VeraLite box as the primary Z-wave controller, yet using the mControl Vera Luup Driver we can still use the mControl interface and have it send HTTP commands to the Vera box to control these devices and scenes. On this screen shot you can see I can Arm and Disarm my porch PIR sensor and the current status of that sensor is displayed. I can also turn on and off the Porch light which connected to a Z-wave wall switch module.

This is the Living Room zone, the lamps are connected to Z-wave plug-in dimmer modules and the electric fireplace is connected to a plug-in appliance module. The scenes you can see in this screen shot (Lounge On, Dim Lounge 75, Dim Lounge 50, Dim Lounge 25) are actually scenes I have created in mControl Editor rather than scenes that are in VeraLite, but most of my scenes are now configured and setup in VeraLite rather than in mControl.

Kitchen zone, in here I have a Z-wave dimmable wall switch connected to the main ceiling lights, I also have a plug-in Z-wave appliance module connected to my LED lighting that is in the kitchen. See my previous LED Lighting project posts for more about that! You can also see a Patio Door sensor, this is a Z-wave door contact sensor that can be armed and disarmed, if the door is opened whilst the door sensor is armed a Z-wave siren in the house will sound off at 90DB. Also if it’s night time when the armed door is opened, all the lights inside and outside the house will automatically turn on, I also receive email notifications for events such as these. Again you can see more mControl created scenes (Kitchen On, Dim Kitchen 75, Dim Kitchen 50).

One new development since using VeraLite is that using a Foscam add-in for Vera I am now able to use the motion detector on the outdoor Foscam IP camera and trigger scenes in Vera upon motion. This means I have a new Camera Sensor device showing, I was unable to do this with mControl. On this screen shot you can see an appliance module for the LED lighting in the garden, the Security Camera which the live feed can be viewed on the TV screen, and the new Camera Sensor device which can be armed / disarmed.

Master bedroom, not much going on in here, just a plug-in dimmable lamp module.

Likewise in the Kids Bedroom.

Activities – These scenes or macro’s as they are called in mControl are all scenes created using the mControl Editor rather than in VeraLite.

Here’s a few screen shots of the new mControl V3 mobile webpage:

There does seem to be some limitation with the mControl Vera Luup Driver here, as you can see below there are no buttons to Arm or Bypass security sensors, but I can do this in mControl for Windows Media Center no problem. Hopefully Embedded Automation can resolved this.

Embedded Automation as of mControl V3 now have native iOS applications for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.

One thing to note if you are an existing mControl V2.1 user with mPanels, mControl V3 does not support mPanels and my desktop software mPanel has stopped working.

mControl V3 – VeraLite integration

I previously had installed mControl V2.1 on to my WHS V1 server, that version of mControl had a proper WHS add-in for the console. Version 3 of mControl no longer supports WHS console and therefore I have lost the WHS Console add-in for mControl. This is not a big deal however. The new mControl V3 applications are based on SilverLight so they open in the browser now.

mControl Editor

The mControl Editor is used to setup and configure mControl, this is where you can created your zones (rooms), configure mRemote which is a software remote control, IP Cameras, Devices, Macros (scenes) and more.

mControl Service Manager

The service manager is where you setup and configure drivers. You can see from the screen shot below mControl and control allot of different systems, like Rako, Lutron, Somfy, ELK alarms panels, Insteon and more.

Before I got my VeraLite unit, mControl was being used as the primary Z-wave controller using the Z-wave Controller driver and an Aeon Labs Z-stick 2 USB dongle. Since VeraLite is now my primary Z-wave controller I have no need to use the Z-wave Controller driver in mControl and I have sold my Aeon Labs Z-stick.

What I am using now in the mControl Services Manager is the Vera (Luup) Driver and I will take a look at this now and how you set this up. You can see the Vera Luup Driver is using HTTP to send requests to the primary Z-wave controller aka the VeraLite box. I am also using the WMC (Windows Media Center) Controller, this allows me to automatically dim and brighten lights when I play / pause video content in Media Center but that’s another blog post I think.

If you click to Configure the Vera Luup Controller you will see this dialogue. All you need to do in here is specify the internal IP address of your Vera box and then save and restart the mControl Server service.

We can now start adding devices and scenes in to mControl, but first we need to get a list of these devices and scenes that are already setup in the Vera. To do this enter this URL in to your browser, where the IP address is the IP of your Vera / VeraLite box.

http://IP-Address/port_3480/data_request?id=lu_sdata&output_format=xml

You will then see a page with XML code, from this page you can find the ID numbers of the devices and scenes in Vera, so for example I am going to add a device in to mControl for my Lamp (Left) in the living room. If I find that device from the XML code, I can see its device ID number is “3”

<device name="Lamp (Left)" altid="2" id="3" category="2" subcategory="0" room="1" parent="1" status="0" level="0" state="-1" comment=""/>

^{Adding a device}
Armed with this information I can now add a new device in to mControl for this lamp. Go to the mControl Editor and click the Devices tab and click the New button, you will then see this dialogue:

From the Adapter drop down menu select Vera Luup Controller

Under the Module drop down menu you can select the type of Z-wave device that you are configuring, you can also select scene from here to run a Vera scene. As we are setting up a dimmable lamp module in this example, select Dimmable Light.

One thing I really don’t like about Vera is the lack of the ability for users to pick and change device icons which is highly frustrating. However you don’t have that problem in mControl, select the desired icon for your Z-wave device, I picked the lamp icon.

Enter a name for the new device and enter the devices ID number in Vera, as we already established the ID number for this particular lamp module in Vera is 3. You can also adjust the Dim/Bright by % the default is 20%. Click OK to create your first Vera device in mControl.

The new device is then added to the list of devices. If you select the Zones Associated tab you can then associate this new device to a zone or room. This lamp is in the Living Room so right click the Living Room zone from the pane on the right and select Add Device Shortcut.

You should be able to test your device from this screen, click the On / Off / Bright / Dim buttons etc does the lamp respond correctly?

Adding a scene

To add a new device into mControl that can run a Vera scene, you would do the following:
First you need to find out what the scene ID number is in Vera? I have an existing scene in Vera called “Lounge On” I now want to create a new device in mControl that can run this scene.
Use that URL I gave earlier to load that page with the XML code on it, then find the scene from the list. As you can see my “Lounge On’ scene is ID number “1”

<scene active="0" name="Lounge On" id="1" room="1"/>

Now from the Devices tab in the mControl Editor select the New button again.
Again name the device, select Vera Luup Driver, this time under module select Scene, choose an icon and specify the scene number – in this example its “1” Click OK

The new device to run the Vera scene is then listed under the device tab, again we can associate this device to a zone as before. Test the device by clicking the Apply button to run the Vera scene. The Vera scene should then be executed.

If I open the mControl Windows Media Center add-in you can see the two new (Test) devices I have just created are now visible in Media Center.

Summary

As you can see for Windows Media Center users mControl is a great product, even for none Windows Media Center users mControl is still a powerful PC home automation system. I am very happy with mControl V3 and glad I upgraded from mControl V2.1 now that the Vera Luup Driver is working properly and this has enabled me to integrate my VeraLite Z-wave network with the mControl user interfaces. I just hope Embedded Automation have plans for an XBMC add-in?

If you are interested in purchasing a MicasaVerde Vera Z-wave system or any Z-wave home automation devices, or are looking for a consultant to help you with your own project, you can contact me as I am an authorised dealer and can supply to you these products at slightly cheaper prices than the main UK Z-wave online stores.
www.phaze1digital.com

Add a YouTube TV icon in to Windows Media Center plus YouTube TV setup

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 11:17:00 +0000

Following on from Ian’s recent post here about a new YouTube TV user interface at www.youtube.com/tv I wanted to set this up on my HTPC’s around the house and also configure our Android and iOS mobile devices for use with the Mobile YouTube website, where you can browse YouTube and then select videos via the mobile device and then send them for playback on the HTPC / TV.
This works pretty well and I am glad I set it up, my wife also agrees and out of all the many audio visual and home automation things I have built in our house, this is the one feature she has said she actually likes LOL. As she can now browse YouTube on her Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 tablet and send her Thai music videos either to the TV in the living room or to the TV in our bedroom, and have the sound play out of the speakers in the room. This is the downside for me though as I am now listening to more Thai music hehe.
First things you will notice is that www.youtube.com/tv does not work in Internet Explorer and you get a YouTube 404 not found page, you have to use Google Chrome on the HTPC. This meant I had to download and install Google Chrome on to each of my HTPC’s as I usually just use Internet Explorer on the HTPC’s.
Once I had Chrome installed the next thing was to add an icon in to Media Center to launch YouTube TV in the Chrome browser. I just wrote a blog post here about using a utility called Relaunch to do this. So following that guide you can create a new icon in Media Center for YouTube TV as shown in the below screen shot:

You can download the YouTube .PNG image I used for the icon here from my SkyDrive.
New YouTube TV tile in Media Center on the Extra’s menu

OK so now that you have a way to launch YouTube TV from Media Center we will take a quick look at the new YouTube TV user interface.
Main menu:

Gaming Menu:

My Subscriptions:

Playlists:

My Uploads:

Search Results:

As you can see the user interface is pretty nice! And its certainly much better than previous 10 foot UI’s from YouTube like the XL and Leanback ones.
Now I am going to take a look at some of the setup and settings.
The first thing you need to do is sign in to your YouTube account

When you select Sign In you will see the screen below, open another browser tab and go to www.youtube.com/activate

You will then see this page, enter the code in and click Continue.

You will then see this screen, click Allow Access button.

You will then see Success! You can now close this browser tab and return to the YouTube TV page.

You should now be signed in to YouTube TV

The next thing to do is pair your mobile devices, in our case we have a Samsung Galaxy Tab and an iPod Touch.
Note: Sending YouTube videos from the Android and iOS YouTube native apps to your HTPC / TV doesn’t seem to be possible. Rather than using the YouTube app you have to use their mobile site instead.

You will then see this screen, which gives you another code and suggests going to youtube.com/pair on your mobile device. However I am going to do it slightly differently as I had some issues with the same device getting paired twice and found this to be a better way of pairing your mobile device, read on..

Now pick up your mobile device and go to the mobile YouTube website. This is the URL for the YouTube mobile website : http://m.youtube.com
The following screens are taken from the Android tablet:
Instead of going to youtube.com/pair as suggested above, I found it better to open m.youtube.com on the mobile device, navigate to a video and then click the small TV icon with a play symbol on it, the select + Add YouTube TV

Now you see this screen, enter the Pair code you were given on the PC and name the TV, i.e. where is this HTPC located in the house? In this example I am pairing the Android tablet to YouTube TV running on the master bedroom HTPC. So I called it “Master Bedroom TV”

You should then be connected to the TV, in this case the Master Bedroom TV. You can see I can also select to play videos to the Living Room TV as well.

So now when I pressed play on this video, it did not play locally on the Android tablet, instead it played on the Master Bedroom TV screen. You can see in the above screen shot that you have pause / play / skip controls and you can move the playback slider to jump forwards or backwards in the video.
Repeat this process for all your mobile devices you wish to pair.

If you then go back to the YouTube/TV user interface on the PC, in the settings, you can see the number of devices that have been paired. If you click in to this….

It lists the paired devices you can also disconnect all paired devices from this screen.

Overall this seems to work very well, you need to first ensure from Windows Media Center you click the YouTube TV icon to launch YouTube TV in Chrome, you can then pick up one of your mobile devices and navigate to the m.youtube.com mobile website, I created shortcut icons on the Android and iOS home pages for quick access.
You then simple browse YouTube on the mobile device and find a video you wish to play, you then click the small grey TV icon with the play symbol in it and you get a menu where you can choose the TV screen to play to and it then plays on that TV and you have some basic transport controls on the mobile device.
Some times the mobile device does disconnect, if you let the mobile device go to sleep and then turn it on again you may find its disconnected and you have lost your connect, I was using my Regular MCE remote control anyways with the HTPC so I could still pause and play the video in YouTube TV. I’m not sure how you get the mobile device to reconnect to the currently playing video on the TV once the connection has been lost?
Another problem I don’t like is the videos on the TV never play in proper full screen mode, I always have two grey bars either side as shown below. If I use a mouse I can bring up some other controls at the bottom and there is an icon that looks to be a full screen button but it only changes the grey bars to big black ones instead.

Also sometimes the mouse cursor stays slap bang in the middle of the TV screen and does not disappear.
So that’s it, give it a go I think you will like it, its certainly the best YouTube viewing experience we have had on the TV’s and its even better now because we don’t even have to navigate around a YouTube interface on the HTPC which usually sucks, we can do it in the palm of our hands!

www.phaze1digital.com

Add a Google Chrome icon in to Windows Media Center

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 09:13:00 +0000

I previously wrote about a method of adding an Internet Explorer icon in to Windows Media Center here using a utility called Media Center Launcher Configurator. There is a newer utility called Relaunch which I think is a better tool for this job. You can use Relaunch to add any icon you wish in to Media Center to launch your desktop applications. When using Relaunch to create an icon also know as a tile, when you select this icon from the Media Center menu, Media Center is automatically minimized and your desktop application launched, when you then close the launched desktop application, Media Center is automatically maximized.

Download the latest version of Relaunch from here currently version 202. The utility is a standalone .exe file that requires no installation so you can save it and run it from any folder on your PC, I created a folder for it under C:\Program Files (x86)\Relaunch an saved the .exe in to here.
Right click the .exe and run as Administrator

Now there are some predefined tiles you can select and add in to Media Center

We are going to create our own new custom tile.

Under App to Launch select Custom

With: Chrome

Trigger: Change this to Close App (The GreenButton) trigger seems to be problematic and kept crashing Chrome on my PC.)

Uncheck Fullsceen unless you want Chrome to be launched in to fullscreen?

URL: You can add any URL in to the URL field this is the webpage that will be loaded when Google Chrome is launched.

Name: Google Chrome (Name that appears under the tile in Media Center)

Image: Browse to the path of your .PNG icon image for this custom tile. I just found one from a Google image search, if you are too lazy you can download my icon below from my SkyDrive.

Once all the fields have been populated correctly click the Add button.
Note: I recommend you close down Media Center whilst doing this.
After clicking add your new custom tile called Google Chrome will be listed under Current Tiles. You can select these current tiles and click the Remove button to remove the tile from Media Center.

Now open Media Center and navigate to the Extra’s Library your new Google Chrome icon will be in there.

You can then use a program like Media Center Studio if you wish to move the icon on to one of the menu strips in Media Center, I moved it to the Extra’s menu strip.

How Relaunch works is it creates an MCL file under:
C:\Users\YourUsername\AppData\Roaming\Media Center Programs

Below you can see the code within the MCL file:

<application run="C:\Users\Stuart\AppData\Local\Relaunch\googlechrome.exe"
Name = "Google Chrome"
bgcolor="RGB(0,0,0)"
startimage="C:\Users\Stuart\AppData\Local\Relaunch\googlechrome.png"
thumbnailImage=""
sharedviewport="false" >
</application>

You can download my Google Chrome .PNG icon from here
Now because we selected Close App as the trigger when we setup the tile in Relaunch you need some method of exiting Google Chrome on the TV screen to be returned to Media Center. If you are using a wireless keyboard/mouse or a smart phone mouse cursor app you can just click the Red X in the top right hand corner to exit Chrome and Media Center will be restored.

I have previously programmed my Logitech Harmony universal remote control with a custom button that sends a Ctrl+F4 command to close applications down.

Following on from Ian’s post the other day, my next blog post will be about the new www.youtube.com/tv user interface for YouTube on your big screen, I will also be using Relaunch to create an icon in Media Center to launch this YouTube TV interface in to Chrome. I will also cover some of the setup and how to connect your Android and iOS device for remote control of the YouTube TV UI.

UPDATE: The below is from the developer of Relaunch:

Here is some clarification:
Close App works by waiting for chrome.exe to close and then it relaunches Media Center. Green button waits for ehome.exe (AKA Media Center) to come back into focus. As soon as Media Center comes back into focus it will close Chrome. This later option is what you were running into.

Close App is intended to work exactly as you are now using it.

Green button is intended to work by launching Chrome. When the green button is pressed, Media Center will come back into focus and Chrome will be closed. By using the full screen (or kiosk mode) you can link to youtube.com/tv and have it launch without all the window trimmings and then close it and launch Media Center with the green button when you are done.

www.phaze1digital.com

mControl & VeraLite integration nightmare!

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Thu, 16 Aug 2012 23:34:00 +0000

Most of you who read my blog will know I am a mControl Home Automation user and I’ve done several posts about mControl in the past. I decided to sign up for a dealership with Micasaverde and purchase a VeraLite unit for testing. My plan was always to keep mControl as its integrated in to Windows Media Center on every TV in the house!
I was told by a friend of mine that he had successfully integrated mControl & Vera using the mControl Vera Luup Driver. With my original setup with mControl I was using an Aeon Labs Z-stick as the primary Z-wave controller, this was connected to the back of the WHSV1 server where mControl is installed. The plan when VeraLite box arrived was to use the VeraLite as the primary Z-wave controller and then use the mControl Vera Luup Driver which sends HTTP requests to Vera to control your lights and other devices, thus making the Z-stick totally redundant and no longer required. This all sounded great however now I have got the VeraLite box up and running the integration between the two systems has not gone as smoothly as I would have liked and there are two big problems that are making this integration a no go.
I have done a YouTube video explaining what these two problems are and until I get them resolved my mControl installation is now basically broken!

The problems in short are:
1. Device status not being correctly updated in mControl UI - Turn lamp on via mControl UI and mControl does not update the status of the device and shows it as still OFF when actually the lamp has turned on OK. Also the dim level stays at 0% when should be 100% (Vera Luup Device Type = Dimable Light).
2. ON button not working properly for appliance modules - The off button in mControl UI does work and the ON button also turns off the appliance. ON button does not turn on the appliance module.
(Vera Luup Device Type = Binary Light)
Watch the Youtube video to see what I mean, this is a call out to any other mControl and Vera or VeraLite users that have got this setup and working for any advise or possible solutions.
There is a 3 page thread I started on the Micasaverde forum about these issues, also one here and one here on the mControl forums. I don’t know who originally wrote the mControl Vera Luup driver? I have contacted mControl support but no reply as yet. I may now contact Micasaverde support as well see if they know anything? Although I have contacted them a few days ago about another question of how to make the Z-stick a secondary to VeraLite being primary controller as I see this as a plan B if I can’t get the mControl Vera Luup driver working, but I’ve not heard from their support either yet! Not sure how long is a normal wait time?
I am really liking Vera however in the few days I have been using it, I bought it mainly so I could have timers for lights coming on and off that will work when the mControl WHS server is in sleep mode. But Vera is showing to be a very powerful and cheap Z-wave Home Automation gateway solution. I will probably do some blog posts about Vera when I have got it all setup and know how stuff works more.

Stolen my blog articles and traffic for cash generation?

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Fri, 10 Aug 2012 07:43:00 +0000

Update: Blogger aka Google have now taken down the offending site. I have to say their response time was much quicker than I expected it would be, so a big thumbs up to them for sorting it out!

Its come to my attention that there is a cloned fake “The Media Center Blog” on the Internet, the fake blog can be found here: http://phonemediacenter.blogspot.co.uk. Whoever created this blog has stolen a large selection of my past article content, every article on the fake site was originally written by myself. I can only assume they have done this to steal content and traffic to generate cash as there is a Paid-To-Promote banner at the top of the fake blog.

I am currently discussing this with the legal team at Google with the hope that the fake blog will be taken down off the Internet. If you happen to see any other blogs that look like they contain my Media Center blog content please let me know so I can report those as well.

I don’t know how long the fake blog has existed? But the ticker says 2000 + hits and it is now appearing in Google search results for Media Center and related keywords that I write about.

My genuine URL’s for my two blogs are:

http://windowsmediacenter.blogspot.co.uk/
http://thedigitallifestyle.com/w/index.php/author/cw-kid/

If you have a Google Blogger blog and find yourself in the same situation you can contact Google by filling out a DMCA Report.

http://support.google.com/bin/
request.py?&product=blogger&contact_type=lr_dmca

Thanks

Stuart.

LED Strip Lighting Project–Part5

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Wed, 18 Jul 2012 10:11:00 +0000

I wanted to install some LED lights outside on the decking. I figured out I could run two 5050 LED Controllers and LED strips from the one large 15amp LED Driver power supply, so I hooked up my second LED Controller / RF touch remote kit.
Testing the second LED Controller connected to the same 15A power supply

The LED strip in the kitchen and the one just outside on the deck won’t be in colour sync, however I wanted two LED Controllers and two RF touch remote controls, so I could independently control the kitchen or deck lights. As I didn’t want the outside lights on all the time if I just wanted the ones in the kitchen on.
I drilled a hole out in the corner behind the washing machine, through the external wall which I then fed through the cables to the outside.

I did actually buy a 2 amp LED driver power supply but I didn’t need it in the end, I will use this behind the kids wall mounted TV in their bedroom as they now want LED lights in their room, I just need to buy another IR remote control and LED controller, will probably buy the cheaper 24 key IR version.
2 Amp LED Driver Power Supply is allot smaller than I imagined it would be.

Larger 15A Power Supply left and the smaller 2A Power Supply right.

Patio window at the rear of the house / decking area.

The hole in the wall from the kitchen is just below the electric meter box on the left of the picture, this is where the LED strip starts and at the other end on the right the LED strip is just cut off to length.

Pink!

The LED’s are much brighter than I imagined and light up the decking area well. I was going to add a second LED strip at the opposite side of the decking but I don’t think I will bother, one strip seems to be bright enough.

Not the best picture but its very Blue!

I added an ACT HomePro Z-WAVE appliance plug under the kitchen cupboards that plugs into the 15 amp LED Driver power supply, this will enable me to turn on and off the LED lights from the mControl Home Automation system rather than just being able to use the RF touch remotes, I will also now be able to set on/off timers and also to cut all power to the LED Driver power supply which I wouldn’t have been able to do other wise with the kick boards in place.

mControl MCML add-in for Windows Media Center with custom LED Lights device icon.
Back Garden – LED Lights – ON/OFF

Kitchen – LED Lights - ON/OFF

mControl for Internet Explorer

Youtube Video:

Well that’s it, once I’ve gotten the LEDs up and running behind the kids bedroom TV I think I will be all done on the LED lighting front, for now at least!
Next project? Maybe some bespoke Z-wave enabled motorized Somfy blackout roller blinds!

LED Strip Lighting Project–Part4

noreply@blogger.com (Stuart Harrison) — Sun, 15 Jul 2012 10:41:00 +0000

In part 3 I used about 3 metres of 5050 LED strip in the kitchen, that left me with about 2 metres to create something for the back of the wall mounted HDTV in the living room.
With the length of LED strip I had left I measured and worked out the lengths of four pieces. You can cut these LED strips at the marked intervals.

As this was a waterproof LED strip I was working on, I had to slice back the silicone cover with a Stanley knife to reveal the four golden contact pins. The peg was used to keep the silicone cover held back out of the way. Using the LED cable I bought I had to use maybe 2 inch lengths of this cable that would join the 4 LED strips, this will become clearer in pictures further down the page.

Now I am not going to lie soldering these cables on was allot harder than I imagined, keeping in mind the LED strip is only 8MM wide and the contact pins are very close together, I’ve done quite a bit of soldering before but I am by no means an expert and my shaky hands don’t really help either. Ideally You need a keen eye and a steady hand for the job.
You should tin the ends of each cable first with solder and I found if I put a small blob of solder on each of the four contact pins on the LED strip first, when I came to attach the cable it was much easier. However the biggest problem as the contact pins are so close together, is ensuring that you do not bridge the gap between these contacts with your solder or wires etc.

This is the desired result joining two of the LED strips with our LED cable so we can create a right angle bend behind the TV.

You can buy right angled LED pieces off eBay like the ones shown below, but I can’t see how they would help? As you still need to solder them on?

I think its important to test each join you create before proceeding to the next one.

Here you can get an idea of how it might look when stuck behind the TV, once I had finished soldering I carefully attached some black electrical tape over the ends.

Here you can see the completed loom laid out on the kitchen floor.

Note there are only 3 corners that I joined using the LED cable, the last one top left is just cut off at the end and does not join back round to the start.

As this loom is going behind the TV I opted for an IR remote control and not RF. This is so I can program my Logitech Harmony universal remote control to control the LED lights, I will then not use the original 44 key LED remote control.
The LED controller is also allot smaller than it looks in the pictures on eBay when compared to the top off a bottle of Coke.

OK so now I am starting to attach the LED strip to the back of the TV, I forgot to mention in part 3 that these LED strips all have sticky 3M backing.

Completed installation.

On all these photographs and in the YouTube video there is a light halo, you don’t actually see this in real life and the pictures and video don’t really do it justice to how well it really looks.

YouTube video of the completed installation.

Stuart’s Living Room

Well that’s it for part 4. In part 5 I may cover programming and teaching your Logitech Harmony universal remote control to be able to control the LED lights instead of using the supplied IR remote control. Or I may look at my LED installation in the back garden, but I’ve not done that yet and its raining allot here in the UK so maybe a few weeks away.