Smart Home Blog

Recently home server Amahi based on Fedora Linux added two new applications to its repository – Videos5 and Gallery 3.

Videos5 allows you to stream video to the iPhone, iPad and iPod, Android devices and many others which support HTML5. Additionally it offers possibility to transcode streamed media. But that feature isn’t implemented yet in Videos5 application.

Gallery 2 was one of the most popular Amahi application. It gives an easy and intuitive way to organize photos on the web site or local network. The Gallery 3 is the next version of that popular tool. So, Amahi team hopes it’ll be also popular.

As we expected today Amahi Plug Edition for the Plug Computer platform based on the Marvell ® ARMADA processor was released. You can get it here.

Also Amahi launched a theme and app contest where you can win 6 FREE 1.2GHz Ionics Stratus Plug Computers with WiFi, Bluetooth, Z-Wave (for home automation) and Gigabit Ethernet! Don’t miss this brilliant opportunity!

[via Amahi Blog]

Amahi development team is going to release tomorrow a special distribution of their home service for Plug Computer – very compact device, based on Marvell ® ARMADA processor. The advantages of such solution are following:

• The Plug Computer offers remarkably low power consumption: 3 ~ 8 Watts, which is very impressive!
• It’s fanless and virtually noiseless. If you run yours with a flash drive, it has zero noise (and uses even less power!)
• Small footprint. You can put your server wherever it’s convenient. If you are in tight quarters, like in a student dorm, or a cramped office, this is the perfect solution to getting your data where you want it!
• It’s inexpensive – typically Plug Computers run $99 for a base system!

A typical setup is a 1.2GHz unit with an external USB drive attached. When idle, it comes to about 3 Watts; 7 to 8 Watts while booting and about 4 Watts with bursts of 6 Watts while streaming a full movie to an iPad with our very popular Videos5 app or a 1080p stream to an HDTV. Not bad indeed. And the next generation (already starting to ship) will have processors at 2GHz, as well as WiFi and Bluetooth built in! So, stay tune!

I wrote about Fedora based home server Amahi two years ago. Since that time I didn’t hear anything about that project. But recently I receive a newsletter from them and decided to check its current stage. What I can say. Amahi grew in the great project! First of all, it offers now a bunch of media applications such audio/video strimmers Ampache and Jinzora, UPnP and DLNA servers uShare and MiniDLNA, Squeezebox Server and Gallery 2. It also includes some useful applications to organize media library – OpenDB and VCD-db, take stock of home stuff – Home Inventory, manage family budget – clearBudget and MyPhpMoney, store favourite recipes – phpRecipeBook, keep all needed contacts – PHP Address Book and TheAddressBook. In addition, Amahi contains a few torrent clients, popular CMS – Drupal and WordPress, wiki, forums and a lot of web based utilities to make configuration and maintaining of the home server and home network much more easier. The number of applications is expanded and you may suggest your favourite on the project’s site. I suggested to include into Amahi a Tvheadend – TV streaming server for Linux supporting DVB-S, DVB-S2, DVB-C, DVB-T, ATSC, IPTV, and Analog video.

In conclusion I’d like to say it’s great that users have a choice when they build the home server between Amahi based on open source system and offered a rich functionality and home server from Microsoft.

Once I already blogged about Ubuntu Home Server. Now it’s time to announce another one – Amahi. Amahi is based on Fedora 8 and offers hard drive disk space monitoring, a private wiki, network PC drive backups and file sharing, Vista calendar / iCal / Outlook integration, a custom web browser search extension for IE and Firefox (very cool), plugin extension support (currently available: browser-based photo slideshow, food recipe recorder, BitTorrent downloader), print server, dynamic DNS configuration for remote access, and simple network setup.

I hope that Amahi can make a live of home users who have more then one PC. But it might be a good idea to add more entertainment stuff such UPnP media server or SlimServer. In any case Amahi is just in beta stage. So, it has a time for improvements.

[via eHomeUpgrade]