Smart Home Blog

The latest update of Panasonic’s Social TV app brings a very interesting feature directly to your TV. Now you may watch TV show and see Twitter or Facebook stream at the same screen. What does it mean? Well, let’s imagine you watch a football game and want to discuss it with your friends and relatives. With new Social TV app it can be done very easy. Cool stuff indeed! By the way, Boxee announced similar feature a few years ago. But it offers its own live chat for that purpose and not Twitter or Facebook.

Last week Plex launched its new online service myPlex which extends rich Plex functionality much more. The first feature of myPlex is access to any media stored on your local Plex-servers over the Internet (several Plex-servers can be linked to one myPlex account). Moreover, you may not just navigate your media library but also stream media content to register mobile Plex-client or share it with your friends or family members. You don’t need any special actions to configure it.

Another useful feature of myPlex is a universal media queue. Using it you can easily add any web video (later will be added another sources as well) when you browse Internet from your laptop or desktop to queue which will be available to any Plex-client in your home. That feature is already available in Boxee long time ago. Now Plex users can use it as well.

Boxee team made a good present for all Netflix and Boxee fans on the Valentine’s Day. Netflix finally arrived to the Boxee Box! It’ll be available after firmware update (1.0.4.17443) manually or automatically. The Netflix Boxee App gives access to the huge collection of movies and TV shows in SD and HD quality. But unfortunately for US and Canada. The rest world is still waiting for Netflix expansion or some similar service. In any case, if you live in US or Canada and have Boxee Box and Netflix subscription just update it and enjoy!

You’re big fan of Twitter, DIY and like coffee then project Tweet-a-Pot may be interesting for you. The idea is following. A coffee machine is connected to the PC via small but power Arduino Board. Arduino IDE and Python should be installed on that PC. A simple Python script checks a status of your Twitter account and sends ON/OFF command to the coffee machine via Arduino Board according to the status.

Well, the Tweet-a-Pot looks very interesting for study home automation or play with Arduino Board. Practically it’d be much better to use X10 PC interface like CM15Pro and appliance module together with X10 Commander. Additionally you will able to connect more devices and lighting control. You’ll need just additional X10 modules for that.

Lucky VUDU subscribers will be able to watch 3D movies starting next week. They should be worry about increasing of their Internet speed. Because the 3D content will require the same amount of the bandwidth as the 2D streams. Except 3D compatible TV consumers will need supported devices such Blu-ray players or STBs. Currently VUDU supports a few models but it’ll increase them in the future. Good to see PS3, Boxee Box by D-Link and Iomega TV with Boxee in the supported devices list.