Have you ever thought about getting into Home Automation, but you just aren’t sure where to start? Well you can start where I did with the great advice and knowledge of my friend Dave “Utah” Evans because he’s brought all he has to offer to the web in the way of a new blog called HARoundup.com. One of the best things about Home Automation Roundup is all the news and tips are from Utah’s perspective which is just like most of us; a computer nerd that likes gadgets and isn’t a part of the elitist Home Automation industry. So in other words he’s on a similar budget with similar expectations. I’ve waited to post this until he had a full month of blogging under his belt, so do me a favor and help me welcome him to the blogosphere my adding his RSS feed to your reader and leaving a comment on the site.

Thanks to my friend Craig Eugea I noticed I was quoted in an MSNBC.com article. You know it really never gets old to see your name in print. It has been some time for me as well. In fact the last one of my quotes to be used — because everyone knows I always have something to say — was back in January of ‘08 at the end of the format war. Anyways, I was glad I had a chance to defend plasma’s honor in such a pro-LED LCD TV article and honestly the fact that it was included makes me rethink my opinion of MSNBC in general.

Disconnect the u727 and open terminal and run these three commands then reboot — always be careful with sudo and especially rm -rf, they can destroy your data if you aren’t careful.

sudo mount -uw /
sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/NovatelWireless3G.kext/
sudo rm -rf /System/Library/Extensions/NovatelWirelessFilter.kext/ 

Now after you reboot, plug in the u727. At first it’ll pop up like a USB drive, eject it and eventually a Network dialog box will pop up, so hit preferences — not sure if there is a way to always prevent it from mounting. Now you should see it listed with the other network devices other system preferences. Hit “Apply” at the bottom right, and now hit connect.

The best part is now you don’t need SmartView and whenever you plug the modem in, the WWAN icon will show up on the menu bar which is much better and something that never worked with SmartView installed.

So I finally broke down today and bought a 13-inch MacBook Pro. Ultimately it came down to be being less superficial than I usually am when it comes to computers and swallowing my pride. You see I just hate the idea of buying another laptop with a useless optical drive. So while I’ll almost never use the DVD drive I’m now faced with carrying around, at least I’ll have the following perks. No overheating, no loud fan running all the time, two USB ports, a Firewire 800 port to capture HDV with, an SD slot (which in effect frees up another USB port), about 30% more battery life, another 80GB of disc space, and some much appreciated performance. And for this I gave up about $100, a 20-inch Apple Cinema display, and about 1.5lbs to carry around when I travel. Seems like a good trade, but I miss my Air already; dammit Apple.

Since the Jasper model looks identical to the older 360 you have to know what to look for to tell you have/are buying one. There are a few ways to identify it, but the most dependable is to look at the power requirements, which are printed on the serial number sticker on the back. While the older models required 14.2 amps, the Jasper only draws 12.1 amps. Now the great news is that you can actually see this sticker without opening the box by looking through the hole for the barcode sticker.

First look through this hole.

This is a falcon, notice it is labeled 14.2 amps.

This is the Jasper, it is labeled 12.1 amps.

These pictures were from an older Engadget post.

According to my kill-a-watt, the Jasper 360 only uses 90 watts while in Media Center mode, while the Falcon uses about 108. It is noticeably quieter than the Falcon as well, but still not silent enough to be in my home theater. The PSU makes some of the noise and the Jasper will work with the older PSU or a newer one (the newer one won’t work on the Falcon). Not sure if there is any way to tell which PSU is included when you buy it, but the one I bought had the older style PSU.

I’ll be honest. Part of the reason I wrote this was because I went looking for this information today and couldn’t easily find it via Google. So I figured I’d Google juice the title and drive traffic while at the same time help those in need find this information. And besides, it’s been way to long since I wrote anything here.

First download md5sum.exe and grab the MD5 hash from Microsoft’s site. To save you the trouble I’ll post the x86 hash here, but you should always get it when you are downloading a file. 8867C13330F56A93944BCD46DCD73590

Now simply call md5sum from the command line using just the iso as an argument, and after a few minutes it should spit out the same hash. 

Pretty easy huh?

One of the key add-ins in my household is one that adds the ability to control Media Center and extenders via my Home Automation controller since even the basic operations in my home are dependent on it. I can’t even watch Live TV in my house if this doesn’t work, so I needed a solution. Autonomic homes has supported Windows 7 since beta, but I’m not willing to pay $800 just for this one feature, so I needed the open source project that was free to work, the same one that I was using with Vista.

The now poorly named VMCController is a background MC add-in that features a few control ports so I can fully control any extender in my house via TCP. To get it working on Windows 7, I had to download and install the latest version as normal, but when I launched MC, I got an error about the add-in failing to load. So with some help from Olddog at the projects codeplex discussion page, I was able to get it working. You’ll need to download Olddog’s updated DLLs. But in order to replace the DLLs, first thing you need to do is to delete the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Classes\Installer\Assemblies\Global\Default registry key as per this MS KB article — always backup the registry before editing by righting clicking on the parent object and choosing export. Now reboot and open Windows Explorer to C:\Windows\Assembly. Find VmcController.Add-In, then right click on it and select uninstall. Now copy the new VmcController.Add-In.dll from the OldDog’s zip file to C:\Windows\eHome and all the DLLs to C:\program files\Media Center Network Controller\ and finally start Media Center and test by telneting to localhost port 40500.

The only problem I’m having is that a few of the buttons don’t work, but I found work arounds. So instead of using button-skipfwd I used the command playrate skipforward, which does the same thing.

Hopefully the main contributer to the project will update the source with OldDog’s changes so that we can just run the installer like the old days, but at least it is working.

Over-the-air and Blu-ray Discs via Netflix.
I get almost all of my content from two places. Over-the-air provides most of our content and my kids are actually very pleased with the cartoons on PBS and hardly miss the Disney Channel — although I do bring up YouTube on occasion so my daughter can watch The Wiggles. We watch the nightly news and network TV shows like Lost and for the most part get to see everything we want. We watch about two or three Blu-ray Discs from Netflix each week, and have not once used the Watch Now feature on the BD300 or purchased a single show on the Apple TV or Xbox 360.

The missing piece.
The one missing piece is some premium TV shows on HBO and SciFi HD that have yet to be released on Blu-ray. I don’t mind waiting an extra 6 months for a series to be released on Blu-ray, but when the show is only released on DVD, it really drives me nuts. Luckily this scenario seems to be going away as more and more TV shows are coming to Blu-ray, but until then, we’ll have to find other ways to watch our shows.

Various sources
Most know my friends Warren and Andy helped me create a process to automatically download and convert shows for Media Center and while I had tons of fun working on the project — and continue to work on a version for movies — I have to admit I stopped using it because I felt guilty about watching the one or two shows I don’t have access to just to save some money. So from now on, I’ll just wait until the shows are released on Blu-ray to watch them.

With about five months to go until the FSU Seminoles open up the college football season against the Miami Hurricanes on ESPN HD, I’ll end up not having cable for 8 months which is about $500. This still seems like a good idea, but at the same time I dread adding the service back and dealing with an installer, etc. So while it makes sense this year, I’m still not 100% sure I’ll do it all again next year. I suppose it depends on what happens with DirecTV and Media Center, because with DirecTV canceling and adding service is super easy. But if the DirecTV Media Center tuner isn’t ready by September, then I’ll have to go back to FiOS. And although FiOS has fantastic quality and selection of HD, their service dispatch system is quite possibly the worst in the industry.

One of the commenters on the Engadget HD Podcast recently asked me to do this so here goes. It’s been over two years since I did a post like this and I have to say I’m amazed at how much of my equipment is the same and at the same time, how much is different.

My equipment list

• Pioneer PDP-6010FD (Kuro)
• Saphire towers and center
• Speakercraft surrounds
• XPS 420 running Vista Media Center
• LG BD300 Blu-ray player
• HDHomeRun
• Xbox 360
• Pioneer Elite VSX-91TX AV receiver
• 32″ Sharp Aquas — Linksys DMA2100
• 19″ Sharp Aquas — Linksys DMA2100
• OrigenAE rc197 Remotes in each room
• Elk M1-Gold alarm
• Global Cache GC-100
• MSI Wind PC running WHS
• Insteon Dimmers (about 14)
• ISY-99 Insteon Controller
• HAI thermostat
• MacBook Air
• Latitude D430
• 20″ cinema Display
• Actiontec MI424-WR FiOS WiFi router

The main uses from my perspective is to make various video files Media Center compatible, but since MPG and AC3 are pretty much the most standard codecs in the industry, there are plenty of other uses. Both of them require the latest version of DVRMSToolBox, written by my good from Andy. In fact it is what makes the entire process automatic. For both profiles, the DTB temp directory is used to create the files and then the final file is moved back to the location of the original file (in the case of the MKV AC3 files, the name is changed for obvious reasons). Until I release the rest of my process, you can create a simple “process conditioner” to automatically convert these files, or you can run them on demand with DVRMStoMPEGGUI (or queue them up manually).

The first is a very simple VOB to MPG converter. All it does is use ffmpeg to repackage the MPG and AC3 streams into an MPG container. The best way to create a vob to convert is to use something like DVDShrink to rip only the main feature and the main AC3 audio to a single vob. You can use DTS, but as you might know, in the case of Media Center DTS is not supported nativly and thus doesn’t work on extenders. To use this drop “Convert vob into mpg – ffmpeg.dpc” into “C:\Program Files\DVRMSToolbox\Profiles” and put ffmpeg.conf into “C:\Program Files\DVRMSToolbox\Applications\ConvertFfmpeg”

The second one was actually very difficult to get right and I’d still like to do some more testing. What it does is extract a DTS stream from an MKV file, then convert it to AC3 with eac3to, then finally remuxes it back to an MKV with AC3. It only retains the original video and audio streams and in fact doesn’t touch the video stream. To use it you’ll need to download eac3to and MKVtoolnix (both free). First extract the eac3to archive to “C:\Program Files\DVRMSToolbox\Applications\eac3to” and install MKVtoolnix with the isntall path of “C:\Program Files\DVRMSToolbox\Applications\MKVtoolnix\” And of course you’ll have to copy the “Convert MKV with DTS to MKV with AC3.dpc” to “C:\Program Files\DVRMSToolbox\Profiles”

Please let me know if these work for you or not, I’m really hoping to get these throughly tested before my final project is complete.

**Update** Already had to update the DTS to AC3 profile, this one should work better. Thanks Rich. 

**UPdate2** Had to update it once again because the AC3 bit rate was too high for dvr-ms files, it is now set to 448 instead of 640.