Smart Home Blog

LinuxMCE development team recently announced a new version of its Web Orbiter. A new Web Orbiter 2.0 is based on Ajax technology and offers more convenient way to control system from the web browser. The previous version refreshed page every couple of minutes to display updated statuses of devices. Using Ajax technology allows update the changed only elements without refreshing the page.

The new Web Orbiter 2.0 works on any PC with web browser Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Midori or IE. Also it supports mobile browser versions such OperaMini, OperaMobile 10 and S60 browser. So, using it you can setup iPhone, iPad (see the photo above – custom version of UI1) or some another smartphone or webpad as LinuxMCE control panel just adjusting the size of the Orbiter via admin site.

You can get the Web Orbiter 2.0 with the latest update of LinuxMCE 0810.

Base LinuxMCE distribution includes Sqeezebox Control Center aka SlimServer. It allows to build multi-room audio system very easy. But Squeezeboxes are not so cheap as we’d like. So, Dianemo developers (company which offers commercial installations of LinuxMCE and returns back to community a lot of new and fixed functionality) implemented support of several sound cards (including USB ones) on one core or media director. Each card has one Squeezeslave (software implementation of Squeezebox) associated with it. As result using cheap USB sound cards you can build multi-room audio system.

Code to implement SoftAudio feature will be added to the project repository soon. So, hope we’ll have it in some new 0810 update next month.

Almost all well-known produces of hardware and software for home automation and entertainment area have iPhone/iPod Touch application to control their devices and systems. LinuxMCE doesn’t provide such possibility yet. But that situation is going to change soon. For example, it’s already ready basic web Orbiter adopted for Apple devices – iOrbiter. It’s based on iPhone User Interface Framework iUI. I tested it with my 0710 installation (see a few screenshots here). It works fast, provides basic functionality to search and play media and run scenarios. I’m sure it’ll be extended soon.

Another way to control LinuxMCE from iPhone will be LMCE Remote. It’s native iPhone application (see image above). As wiki page describes the it’s almost ready. Source code should be in the LinuxMCE repository and the application will be available via App Store and LinuxMCE site (I guess). So, when it happens many existing users will be happy as well as new ones will get a good opportunity to try LinuxMCE.

A few days after LinuxMCE 0810 beta2 was announced the development team released the first update. There are following main changes:

• fixed issue with broken dependencies for packages pluto-orbiter and pluto-mythtv-scripts. Actually it should be added a new repository URL in the /etc/apt/sources.list:
  deb http://www.avenard.org/files/ubuntu-repos intrepid release
• AV Wizard was improved a bit to produce better xorg.conf and better support of audio over HDMI;
• Wake-On-LAN has been fixed;
• web admin has received some stream lining.

All existing installations can be updated via apt-get. Just don’t forget to add repository mentioned above. Please, submit all found bugs and issues via LinuxMCE Trac (be sure that your issue wasn’t already submitted!) and ask help on the forum. Good luck with new beta!

Today the second beta version of LinuxMCE 0810 was released. I’d like highlight following changes there. The first one is very important for non English spoken countries. It’s support of UTF-8 (I participated in that task too). Thanks to that addition of new translations in the system will be simpler.

Another interesting change is improving of setup of graphic card drivers and adding of VDPAU support to the MythTV and Xine. So, I hope it’ll allow to playback MKV files using Xine and not Mplayer (I don’t oppose to Mplayer but the pause doesn’t work during MKV playback under my LinuxMCE 0710 installation).

The DVD with new 0810 Beta2 can be downloaded from the official LinuxMCE torrent. Note that you still use installation scripts to setup the latest version of LinuxMCE 0810.