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.

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.

I left the LinuxMCE core/hybrid and didn’t assemble the new one yet. So, I use my laptop or old desktop to watch movies. With desktop is everything fine. It run Kubuntu 0804 and I installed there Boxee – nice looking, social media center software. But there is Fedora 9 on my laptop and Boxee doesn’t offer binaries for it. There is an only one way to install Boxee from the source.

I found nice tutorial which explains how to install XBMC on Fedora 9. Since Boxee is based on XBMC I tried to use it to build Boxee. But without luck. By some reason the xbmc.bin wasn’t created.

Then I tried to build XBMC using recommendations from that tutorial. Finally I did it. XBMC is run under Fedora 9 without any problems. Will try to build Boxee again as well. Maybe the second time will be successful.

UPDATE: Finally I built Boxee under Fedora 10 (for 9 should be the same). The trick is that. Instead of running make install after make finishes the script make-boxee.sh should be run. I didn’t adjust it for Fedora 10 and it gave me a lot of warnings. But as result I was able run Boxee successfully.

UPDATE2: There is a problem with Boxee under Fedora 10. Instead of playback I see the fast-forward. Also Boxee crashes with Segmentation Fault very often. Will try to build with the fresh sources tonight.

New Linux-based commercial media center is gonna be ship in August. The Cirgon supports 1080i HD resolution and offers 320GB, 500GB, and 750GB hard drive options together with controls management and playback of music, photos, and video. The full spec of HTPC is available here. The price is starting at $2000.

Personally I’m happy to see another commercial product which uses Linux as operation system (Fedora in case of Cirgon). But as I see that HTPC misses a few important features. First of all, Cirgon is designed for HDTV. But it offers DVI output and not HDMI. Also the HTPC equiped by 10/100 Base-T Ethernet while Gigabit LAN is a standard de-facto now. And the last but important missed feature is PVR. This means that Cirgon cannot play, record and paused LiveTV. Taking into account the price Cirgon and missed features in my opinion it might be more reasonable to buy Popcorn Hour instead of it or build your own box based on VDR or MythTV.

In any case, it’s good tendency that producers started to use Linux for their commercial media centers.

[via LinuxDevices]

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]