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Re: [LUG] A couple of questions

 

Dave wrote:
> Thanks Grant.
>
> You asked what leant me towards MCE as opposed to any others. I've think 
> MythTV (which MCE has in it) is the best Home Theatre Software around but 
> I've long had a big yearning to play around with Home Automation (X10 etc..) 
> and MCE seems to give the best options for HA, TV Streaming et al and to be 
> honest I don't know of any other 'all in one' package like this (I know 
> there are various Home Theatre packages but these seem to concentrate on the 
> Video/Music side of things?).
>
> If you watch the Video of what can be done with MCE it blows you away (or it 
> did me I especially like the 'follow me' technology which can work via 
> carrying your Bluetooth phone).
>
> Regards,
> Dave.
>   
Hi Dave,

I figured it'd be the HA side of it - to be honest, the media side of 
MCE doesn't seem to offer much over anything else going.

I have watched that video - indeed, I have shown it to many people 
myself. It is indeed very clever stuff, but my comment about needing 
relatively specific hardware still stands.

The "follow me" feature on their remote control is precisely because it 
is a bluetooth RC.

When I tried MCE a while ago, I found the most annoying thing about it 
(for me) was that when setting up the "core", it defaulted to being the 
centre of attention for everything. Some of its features are not 
particularly clearly expressed. The "core" has a DHCP server running - 
which is one of the ways the other MCE boxes automatically get all the 
correct information. It didn't seem to mention anything about the "core" 
being a DHCP server and it took me a little while to figure out why the 
other machines on my network could no longer get to the Internet... they 
were picking up addresses from the MCE core and not from my original 
DHCP server.

Anyway, good luck with it. I hope you enjoy it. Whilst you're at it, why 
not give some other distros a try on other hardware... you might like 
Linux as a desktop system too. ;)

Grant.

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