Smart Home Blog

A web/telephone based workshop, which will be held on the 29th of March, at 12:00 noon, Eastern Daylight Time was announced on the LinuxMCE site. It is scheduled for two hours. It’ll cover following topics:
covered:

• Orbiter UI Theory and Implementation
• About Inherited User Interface Design
• An explanation of the main UI targets currently in use
  • UI1 Horizontal 3:4 (used for TVs and horizontally oriented orbiters such as tablets.)
  • UI1 Vertical 4:3 (used for PDAs)
  • UI2 Horizontal (used for the UI2 TV displays)
  • Symbian 60 (the variation used to describe the mobile orbiter displays)
  • SmallUI (for The Cisco 7970), as well as a small mention of skin variations
• Loading and looking around in HADesigner
• DesignObj manipulation
• Children of DesignObjs
• Grouping DesignObjs
• Attaching events to DesignObjs (for buttons, etc.)
• Using orbiter’s Goto Design Object for basic testing
• A mention on assigning to screens, and using ScreenGen. can’t go into detail.
• A mention of the other common designobj types… Arrays, Datagrids, and Desktops
• Discussion on Skins
• Other Discussions that may result.

To be productive, please, setup HADesigner according to this wiki article and read that forum topic to configure audio and video from the workshop on your PC.

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Yesterday I heard a good news. LinuxMCE development team decided to use the latest stable release of VDR instead of 1.4.7. Right decision indeed. VDR 1.6.0 includes a lot of improvements like support of UTF-8, better integration with CAM, better implementation of functionality to decode HD signal. With support of UTF-8 it shouldn’t be any problems with displaying of Russian EPG on the on-screen menu and showing correctly Russian names in the recorded file names. Which is not possible with version 1.4.7 without UTF-8 patch. Improvement of HDTV support is also important because many people want to watch HD on their wide screen TVs.

The first version of LinuxMCE 0710 Beta 4 (maybe it’ll be Beta 5) with VDR 1.6.0 will be available in the beginning of April. Hope it’ll include some improvement for VDR on media director as well.

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Thanks to the big fan of LinuxMCE company Fredonia Traiding Ltd people can download LinuxMCE distributions from its European mirror. You can find there all versions of LinuxMCE including the latest 0710 Beta 4 i386 and AMD64 CD/DVD ISOs. Hope this will help to LinuxMCE community to grow faster!

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Today fourth beta of LinuxMCE 0710 was released. The ChangeLog includes support subtitles for DivX playback, improvements of Telecom plug-in, support for ELO and 3M touchscreen, latest fixes for MythTV and more.

Personally I’m interested to get fixed CM11A interface and better VDR integration. I’m afraid that Beta 4 doesn’t include CM11A fixes. Also there is no any word about VDR improvements in the ChangeLog. In any case I’m going to download, install and play with that version. Hope we’ll have the stable release very soon.

LinuxMCE 0710 Beta 4 can be downloaded via official Torrent. Both CD and DVD ISOs are available.

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Since I wrote about MAME plugin and JavaMO for LinuxMCE both applications got a good progress. MAME plugin now displays correctly extracted game’s meta data and picture (see its Screencast). So, hope to find it in the next 0710 beta 3 build.

The results of development of JavaMO - Mobile Orbiter for phones with support of Java, can be tested on the next build of 0710 beta 3. The Orbiter works fine on the Windows Mobile and a Nokia Symbian phones. So, can’t wait the next build to play with it!

And finally the extremely annoying bug with wrong checksum in the CM11A interface was fixed recently! Additionally many improvements were made to give consumers more repayable X10 interface. Well done!

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