A little over a year ago, we built a new computer to use as a home theater PC (HTPC) in our family room.  The PC runs Gentoo linux, with the MythTV front end  - we use it as a DVR.  We’ve made a couple of improvements since we initially built the computer to set it up with a wireless-N ethernet bridge for streaming content from a server and to set up an RF remote control so we don’t have to use the keyboard for navigation.

One way in which our MythTV setup wasn’t quite ideal yet, though, was that we still needed to open the TV cabinet to turn the HTPC on and off separately from the TV.  We’ve done some reading on how to set the system up to power up/shut down based on key presses from the RF remote control, but it’s a rather complex setup.  Tonight while we were walking through Sears, though, we saw this Craftsman Automatic Power Switch that is intended for use with power tools and we got the idea to give it a try with our MythTV system in the family room.

Automatic Power Switch

We have the TV plugged in to the outlet labeled “Power Tool” and the ethernet bridge & HTPC plugged into the two “Accessory” outlets. After updating the BIOS settings on the PC to have it boot on power, the computer now starts booting as soon as the TV turns on.  When we turn the TV off, we also cut power to the PC and the ethernet bridge to avoid any parasite draw from those devices.  I suppose it works similarly to a stereo receiver with plugs on the back for other components to turn on and off at the same time, but since we don’t have a receiver in the family room, the power switch does the trick.

We were a little concerned that using a device intended for power tools wouldn’t work correctly for a television because the TV might either not pull enough power when the it was on or the it might pull too much power when it was off.  Luckily, though, that turned out to not be the case.  The whole television set-up is a lot more user-friendly now that we don’t have to separately turn on and shut down the PC and we like the fact that it’s a lot greener solution than what we had before because it eliminates any power draw from the ethernet bridge and HTPC when they’re not in use.  For about $20, we think it was a good buy.

A few months ago, we bought a Linksys WVC54GCA Wireless Home Monitoring Camera and put in the office looking out the window to the front yard.  Chad then set it up to work with some open source software called ZoneMinder (which is much more powerful than the software that came with the camera) to record a few seconds of video every time it detects motion.  The motion detection software that came with the camera might be ok for indoor usage, but didn’t work very well for recording outdoor images.  ZoneMinder seems to do a much more accurate job if identifying events to record.

Just a couple weeks ago, Chad added a script to capture a snapshot from the camera every 15 minutes.  The trickiest part about this was figuring out that a current still image is available from the \img\snapshot.cgi path of the camera.  The most recent one is posted in the right column of the blog.

Recording these snapshots is also pretty cool because it lets us see a timelapse of the front yard.  We haven’t been doing it long enough yet to see the seasons change, but watching the snow melt is pretty cool.  Here’s a video from last week of some snow melting during the day: Melting Snow.

Almost a year ago now, we built a new Home Theater PC (HTPC) that we’re using in our family room so that we can watch the content recorded by MythTV on the television.  When we built the new PC, we didn’t worry about getting a regular remote control working with it immediately … we figured it would be something we could add later on after we had the PC up and running in the family room.  So, for the last year or so, we’ve been using a wireless keyboard and mouse to control the HTPC rather than a remote control.  It’s worked out ok except that it means we have to have a keyboard and mouse out in the living room … and the wireless keyboard we have is exceptionally bad at transmitting key presses from the keyboard to the RF receiver when they’re further than about 4 feet apart, which is really frustrating.

We’d been talking for a while about what an improvement it would be to get a remote control, but just hadn’t done the research to know what would work with Linux and MythTV.  So, for one of Chad’s Christmas gifts, I decided to figure out what it would take to get a real remote control working with the HTPC and buy whatever components we needed.  When I started reading up on the options, I was really surprised by the number of different remotes that would work with Linux and MythTV.  The biggest thing for us, though, was that the HTPC we built is only a MythTV front end (the back end runs on a different PC), so it doesn’t have a tuner card in it, meaning that we didn’t have the IR receiver that would normally come with a tuner card (which is what we’d used in the past for setting up remote controls).  So, whatever we bought either needed to include a receiver or work with one that could be bought separately from a tuner card.  For our situation, it looked like one of the easiest solutions was to use a remote control that was intended for use with the Media Center Edition of Windows.  Most come with their own IR receivers and it sounds like most (if not all) will work with MythTV as documented on the MythTV wiki site.

StapStream Firefly PC Remote Control

One problem with using an IR remote control, though, is that the remote control needs to be used within line-of-sight with the receiver that is connected to the computer, but we prefer to keep the computer (and all of its wires) hidden in a cabinet so that no one knows it’s there.  We’ve solved this problem before with an IR repeater, but that means there still has to be a receiver set out in front of the TV for it to receive (and retransmit) the signal to inside the TV cabinet.  Once I thought more about that, I started looking for RF remote controls that would work with MythTV so that we wouldn’t have to maintain line-of-sight to the computer and also wouldn’t need a repeater sitting out on the TV cabinet.  What I found was the SnapStream Firefly remote.  It’s designed to be used with the BeyondTV DVR software sold by SnapStream, but can also be used with a variety of other applications, including MythTV.  Initially, I was a little concerned that we would have the same problem with an RF remote that we have with our RF keyboard where the range is really limited, but after reading reviews that said it had tremendous range through walls and floors, I was sold and I ordered one for Christmas.

Getting the Firefly remote to work with MythTV wasn’t all that complicated either.  There are step-by-step instructions on the MythTV wiki site that guide you through most of the process and provide the lircd.conf file that sets up the configuration for using this remote with MythTV.  The only snag we ran into with the installation was that we had initally compiled MythTV without Lirc support (since we weren’t using a remote control), so it took us a while to figure out that it needed to be recompiled with Lirc for everything to work correctly.  After that, the remote started working with MythTV and just needed a few adjustments to the repeat sensitivity in the lircrc file before it was working perfectly.

MythTV

So far, we’re pretty happy with the Firefly remote.  The only minor complaint we have is that its shape makes it easy to pick up and start using upside down without realizing it, but I think that’s something we’ll get used to over time.  The next step is to set up the HTPC to sleep & wake on button pushes from the remote control so that we don’t have to keep booting it up and shutting it down.  For now, though, just having a real remote is improvement enough!

In our kitchen, we have a Mac Mini with a small 15″ monitor that we use mostly for surfing the web and watching television that was recorded on another computer using MythTV.  For as long as we’ve had the Mac Mini, we’ve always used a wireless connection with it, which has worked pretty well for the most part, but there are times when the wireless signal is so weak we aren’t able to stream television or music to that computer, which can be pretty annoying since all of our multimedia content is stored elsewhere.  Using a wireless connection also has the downside of being interrupted every time the microwave runs, which is equally as annoying.  Recently, the network connection problems seem to be occurring more frequently, so we decided it was time to think about running a wired connection to the kitchen.

The New Network Jack

Of all of the rooms where we have computers located, the kitchen is actually the easiest location for fishing a network cable.  Even though it’s an insulated wall, the basement below it has an unfinished ceiling and there was already a coax cable running into the box where we wanted to locate the network cable, so we could use it as a guide.  We started by tying (and taping) multiple strings to the coax cable that had already been fished through the wall where we wanted the network cable to be and then we pulled it back down into the basement so that only the strings were left in the wall.  We then tied (and taped) a network cable to one of the strings and tried pulling it up from the basement.  It took a couple of tries (and we broke one of the strings in the process, which is why we were glad we’d thought to run several through the wall), but we were eventually able to fish the network cable into the electrical box in the kitchen.  Once we had the cable in place, we wired it to a network jack & face plate that we bought at Radio Shack and fixed the plate to the wall.  In the basement, we ran a long (30-foot?) cable across to “server room” on the other side of the house, where we plugged it in to our router.  (Our next project will be to neatly tuck this cable up into the rafters …)

When we first plugged a network cable into the new jack and the Mac, we had trouble getting the computer to detect the wired connection (it was giving an error message that the “Cable for Built in Ethernet is not plugged in”).  We thought maybe it was because we had used a standard Ethernet cable (rather than a cross-over cable, which is required for some Apple products), but after spending way too much time checking that we had wired the cable to the jack correctly and researching the problem online, we finally discovered that there was a problem with the Ethernet port on the Mac Mini.  One of the little “wires” used to make a connection with the Ethernet cable was bent down and kind of wedged behind another of the “wires”.  We think it must have been a manufacturing defect that we’d never noticed in the 4 years we’d had the computer because we’d never tried to use it with a wired network connection.  Luckily, we were able to use a couple of small needles to delicately pry up the wire that was preventing the computer from detecting the network connection and it now works fine.

The "Wired" Mac Mini

As always, the project took a little longer than we anticipated, but it was worth it to be able to play music or watch tv while we run the microwave.  We’re still noticing the playback skipping sometimes, but it’s much reduced from before and we’re blaming what’s happening now on the fact that the Mac is continually running more slowly and probably needs to be rebuilt …

We think we’ve finally found a feasible solution for getting a network connection to our home theater on the third floor of our house … without fishing cat-5 cable through our walls!

So, here’s the situation: we have a Linux server located in our basement that we use mostly as a file server and the back-end of our MythTV DVR system. The server is located in the basement primarily to keep the noise and heat out of our living spaces, but also because we’d eventually like to locate a service panel for structured wiring (home network, video, audio, etc.) in this room next to our electrical service panel, so it seems logical to to co-locate the server with the rest of our network equipment.

Now the challenge: to watch the television recorded by MythTV in our home theater on the third floor, we need to be able to stream the recorded video files from the server in the basement to a PC with a network connection that will be physically located nearer to the television (and connected to it via standard audio/video cables). Since some of the content we record will be in HD format (once we get the HD antenna up and running again), we need a fairly speedy network connection. Our first choice would be to have a wired connection, but that means running cables up three floors, most likely through insulated walls, which won’t be a small task. So, we’ve been exploring wireless alternatives, with limited success.

This weekend, though, we tried something that appears to solve the dilemma. The Netgear WNHDEB111 HD/Gaming 5 GHz Wireless-N Networking Kit comes with two access points/bridges. One gets plugged in to the router in the basement via a network cable and the other gets plugged in to the MythTV front-end PC in the home theater, also with a network cable. They communicate with each other over a wireless 802.11n network (that’s configured with the touch of a button) … and, so far, they seem really quick. We were able to stream two non-HD recordings and download a 2GB file over the wireless-N network at the same time without the playback skipping or stopping (something that wouldn’t be possible on our wireless-G network). The data speeds we calculated indicate that it should be able to handle transmitting an HD recording (approximately 10 GB per hour) without a problem. Although the network speed is somewhat slowed down when we place the access point for the home theater on the third floor, we get a really fast connection when it’s located in our second floor office and running cat-5 network cable from the office to the home theater on the third floor is no big deal, so we think we’ve found a winner.

Since we moved in to our house last September, we’ve been trying to figure out how to set up our network to deliver HD content to televisions and computers throughout our house (using the open source MythTV DVR software). In our previous home, we were able to run the whole bundle of wires (audio cables, video cables, coax, etc.) from our MythTV server through the drop ceiling in our basement to all of the rooms we needed to access. This house, however, is presenting a much greater challenge. Our computers and televisions are spread out over three floors without a single drop ceiling in the house.

We’ve realized it’s probably going to be too great of a challenge to run the full bundle of cables to every television in the house, so we’ll probably have to switch to a setup where we have separate client PCs near the televisions so that all we’ll have to run is network cable to provide a way for the clients to talk to the server (conveniently located in our basement). Even running just Ethernet cable, though, is no easy task, so we’ve been looking at other options.

Our first attempt at setting up the network was to run everything over wireless. It’s great for surfing the web, but even non-HD television skips. So, this weekend, we were at Best Buy and saw the Netgear Powerline HD network adapters that promise to provide a network over a home electrical system that runs at 200 mbps, capable of streaming HD content. We were both pretty skeptical, but thought we’d give it a try since it sounded like the perfect solution to our problems.

The adapters are easy enough to set up: one gets plugged in to an electrical outlet near the cable modem & router, with a network cable connecting it to the router. The other gets plugged into an outlet near the computer with a network cable connecting it to the computer. It takes about a minute, but the two eventually boot up and the blue light comes on, indicating they’ve “found” each other. Since setting them up, though, we’ve run a bunch of tests and been rather disappointed in the performance overall. On average, it appears to operate much more slowly than our (802.11g) wireless network and we weren’t able to achieve anything near 200 mbps unless we had both units plugged in to the same outlet (which of course isn’t practical). We aren’t sure if the poor performance is due to our wiring situation or if it’s typical for them to perform slowly, but even moving the two to outlets that are physically no more than 6 feet apart and clearly on the same circuit degraded the performance dramatically.

I think it’s fair to say that the power line adapters would perform fine for surfing the web, but come no where near performing well enough to transmit HD content from our basement computer to the television in the attic. So, it looks like they’ll be going back to Best Buy and we’ll continue to look for a way to snake Ethernet cable throughout our house.

One of the things that Chad and I thought we wanted in our new home when we started house hunting was a whole house stereo system, which is surprisingly popular in newer construction. We, however, fell in love with a nearly century old home, which not-so-surprisingly didn’t include a such a system. We considered this a minor drawback in comparison to the charm and character of the home, so we didn’t really think much more about it.

This weekend, though, we were finishing with some unpacking and started setting up some of our computer and stereo equipment. One of the things we brought with us from the old house was a couple of Airport Express’, which we had previously used to stream iTunes music from a computer to a single stereo for better sound quality than what we could get on the computer speakers. As we were setting them up, we commented on how nice it would be if we could get iTunes to stream to multiple Airport Express’ at the same time so we could have the same music playing in multiple locations in the house, but we couldn’t figure out a way to do it.

Today, I did some research on the Apple website for the Airport Express and it turns out that, with a quick firmware update, streaming music to multiple Airport Express’ from iTunes is possible. So, I updated the software this afternoon and have everything all set up to play music on the iPod HiFi in the kitchen as well as to the stereo in the family room, which pretty well covers the first floor. They seem to be working well and do a good job of creating the feel of a whole house sound system without all of the wiring.

The Airport Express is a pretty cool device that I’m not sure Apple has done a great job of marketing. We’ve owned two for a couple of years now and had no idea we could use them for so many different purposes. The Airport Express is a small device about the size of a large power adapter. It plugs into any outlet and connects to a stereo or set of powered speakers via an audio cable. We have ours set up to join our existing wireless network (which doesn’t have to be provided by an Apple router). From iTunes, we can then control playlists, volume, etc. and decide which set or sets of speakers we want to play the music on. I saw online today that you can also purchase a remote control for that can be used to control iTunes from any location where there is an Airport Express … depending on how far we take our setup, this might be something we’ll want to consider in the future. The Airport Express can also be used as a wireless print server and can be used to create a wireless network or extend an existing one (if your existing one is provided by an Apple router). We aren’t using ours for either of these functions yet, but considering the difficulty of running network and audio cable from the basement all the way up to the attic, the Airport Express (at about $100 each) seems like a pretty cost effective solution for a whole house stereo system, wireless print sharing, and extending our wireless network.