Smart Home Blog

The end of the year is a good time to summarize my favourite open source home automation system LinuxMCE. I’d like to start from the most important thing in my mind – building packages for version 1004 based on Kubuntu 10.04. Finally we have a chance to use modern OS with Long Term Support. That version is not stable yet but this is a very good present for New Year!

In addition to that the LinuxMCE has a lot of improvements. It becomes more and more user friendly. A big number of devices are plug-n-play now. For example, huge work was done to simplify DVB card installation. Now most of them are recognized and added by system automatically.
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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.

The popular online video service Hulu was integrated into LinuxMCE 0810 beta. That integration uses recently released Hulu Desktop for Linux. User has full control over Hulu player from both LinuxMCE UI1 and UI2. On-screen UI2 Orbiter uses native Hulu player functions to navigate on media library and control playback. But the rest Orbiters provide that functionality via their remote control screens.

The Hulu integration into LinuxMCE is good but unfortunately it can be used for US only. From another hand it may give the idea for developers how to integrate the rest famous video/audio services such YouTube, JustinTV, Revision3 etc.

The video demonstrated that functionality is available below.
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Finally the DVD ISO for LinuxMCE 0810 Beta can be downloaded from official torrent or via HTTP from download page. Also new article was created in the wiki to help install beta version, solve common problems and inform about upcoming changes.