James Lloyd

Recently I have successfully migrated away from SKY HD and from Freeview+ to an entirely XBMC based solution.  Most importantly this solution currently has a very high WAF .  My setup is built using XBMC live in an overly powerful PC in a rather nice silverstone media center case.

My current problem is now I have relegated all of my media to the lounge,  using the ipod dock in the kitchen with a meagre 16GB Ipod seems positively lacking when, your media centre is connected directly to a 5Tb NAS.  What happens now is you play music in the lounge and turn it way up to a probably neighbour unsuitable level to be to properly enjoy it in the kitchen.  This is why I crave multi room audio, I wrote a while back why I think XBMC is a far better and cheaper solution than the Sonos solution, though Sonos still do have the killer feature present and correct.

So I’m am challenged with building my own solution some how.  My requirement is fairly straight forward:

• The ability to have the audio playing from the media centre play to another source at the same time.

I have no need for visuals or UI to be present in the other rooms as I can control the xbmc source with the XBMC iphone remote app, and possibly that Archos 7 tablet when its released .

Typically it appears the requirement is a very easy thing to say out loud, and yet another thing entirely to actually achieve.  The challenge as I currently understand it, is keeping the music streams to each room in sync.

My current stab in the dark is use a motorola DC800 bluetooth stereo adaptor, and use A2DP to stream the music to the second amp.  This when the adaptor arrives, I can see is going to present a couple of challenges.

1. Is it even possible to send audio out via the Line / SPdif out at the same time as A2DP ?
2. if it is, will the audio be in sync?

Answers on a post card, if I get it to work i’ll post the solution (assuming it doesn’t involve purchase of a sonos solution )

This morning, I flicked on the media centre to listen to some music, browsing to music library and the music is jumping all over the shop. What appeared to be happening, was media centre re scanning my library. This was very annoying particularly as I hadn’t added anything in a couple of months.

So whats the solution, seeing as the wife has gone Christmas shopping, I decided to format the system and install OSx 10.4.9 an uphuck release. bit ott? Read more…

The Zalman coolers have now been fitted, and the good news is the reduction is noise is quite substantial. The bad news is its not quite where I wanted it. All of the remaining noise is coming from the 3 HD’s and the northbridge cooler.
Read more…

So my media centre is now in place in the lounge, and is looking rather fabulous, even while in black. Why the manufacturers insist on changing colours from silver to black every no and then I don’t know. Read more…

Yesterday I got Vista Ultimate installed on my media centre. Installation all very smooth, except vista not having the drivers for my SATA 150 controller (why not its about 3 years old). Apart from that the install is all pretty smooth and possibly quicker than XP? That may not be actual fact as I was watching the Discovery channel at the time, learning about hovercraft (essential pub quiz research). Read more…

Yesterday my silverstone LM16 Media PC case arrived, all very exciting. So last night I after getting back from City link I immediately tor apart my desktop tower case. Read more…

Tags: xbox 360, media center extender, XVID
So last night I rebuilt my PC with Media Center Edition, somthing I have been putting off for some time. Due to the epic nightmare it always turns out to be. Antics that followed :

• Discovered didn’t have the drivers around for my SATA raid controller
• Found drivers
• Realised Cant install them from USB device as Windows will only look for them on A: drive
• Spend 20 minutes looking for a floppy disk
• Find floppy disk to find my floppy drive wont format it ( probably has had a strop through lack of attension
• Think Stuff it ill use the SATA 133 controller instead of the SATA 150 ( morale you can never have enough controllers on the mother board )
• All is well windows installs in record time ( about 10 minutes, despite telling me at the start this was going to last 39 minutes).

So I have got MCE up and running and immediately install the Xbox Media Center Extender software so I can connect my Xbox 360. This install takes quite an age though I suspect the large part of it was MCE indexing the music pictures and videos etc from my NAS box.

Got the whole thing up and running and can browse most of my mp3s on 360 ( most its still indexing got to 8800 tracks about now, probably NAS’s fault its not v quick ). Couple of odd things, MCE on the PC and MCE extender appear to keep separate metabases of your media files. most annoying of all the thing appears to be written to NOT PLAY XVID’s. GRRRR

Update : It seem the people at www.runtime360.com are on the case with DIVX and are writing a program called transcode ( currently beta 4.1 )