Stewart Priest

HDMI over Cat5e

// June 28th, 2010 // No Comments » // DIY, Tech

As you may have read, I’ll be moving into my own place very soon, and this will give me the opportunity to ‘Pimp My House’. She Who Must Be Obeyed (SWMBO) has largely given me free reign to do whatever I like so long as “there aren’t cables running all over the house”. Well, there will, but none you’ll see.

The key element of any smart home is structured cabling – in my case Cat5e. I was planning on running HDMI to a couple of different rooms, but in lengths greater than 10 metres, its unreliable and expensive. So, how do I plan to get the HDMI signal from my V+ box in the loft, to my TV in the living room? By using a pair of HDMI baluns, of course! By using a pair of these boxes, I can use my structured cabling to send the HDMI signal from the V+ box to my TV. Simples! In case you’re wondering what these baluns look like, here they are:

Quite small and unobtrusive, I think you’ll agree. It’d be easy enough to cable-tie one of these bad boys to the wall mount or the VESA fitting at the back of the TV, or just to hide away with the rest of the cables, so SWMBO will be happy, and this leads to a quiet life for me. Its really a win-win situation. SWMBO is happy, I don’t have to spend loads of money on long HDMI cables and these boxes are £30 on Amazon. In fact, you can buy them here.

I’ll post a review when I put them to use, but all in all, these look great!

New House, New Project

// May 9th, 2010 // No Comments » // DIY, Tech, Windows 7

Those of you who follow my Twitter feed may already be aware of this, but for those of you who don’t, Jen and I have bought a house. It’s all very exciting, for a number of reasons. One of which is that I’ve been allowed to put all the tech I want into it! I suspect that Michelle will be very jealous.

I’ve been a fan of home automation for a long time, and whilst still living at home with the parents, I’ve been able to experiment with X10 with great success. Thankfully, the house is all on one level, with loft access. So far, it’s been decided that I’ll be running Cat5 cable to every room – maybe not the bathroom, but there’s still potential for that if I can justify it – along with speaker cable and possibly two or three HDMI cables.

I’ll have an automation server running Homeseer as a backend to the house, which will pull together pretty much all the tech in the house. My main media server will run Windows Home Server, serving up audio and video to Windows 7 PCs which run Windows Media Center.

Broadcast media will arrive in the house in a variety of different ways: 2 Virgin Media boxes will provide cable TV to either the TVs directly, or to the Windows 7 boxes to be played out via WMC; at least one Freesat box (there’s already a satellite dish feeding into the house); and regular old council telly – Freeview.

My studio equipment will live in its own room, herein referred to as my studio. The studio PC will live in the loft along with the servers so I can reduce the equipment noise in the studio itself. Monitor and keyboard/mouse will arrive in the room via an Adder standalone KVM box.

I’m sure there will be all kinds of pitfalls along the way, but with the help of the folks over at Automated Home, I’m sure things will go pretty well! Stay tuned for more news on the tech house. I can’t wait!

Media Browser on Windows Media Center

// April 3rd, 2010 // No Comments » // Tech Tips, Windows 7

Have you got loads of movies and TV shows “backed up from a legitimate copy of a DVD or Blu-Ray”? Are you finding it difficult to organise them using the default video and movie libraries in WMC? Well, there’s a solution. It’s a plugin called Media Browser. You can create categories for all kinds of video – there are even plugins available for the plugin which allow you to categorise your music and play podcasts/vodcasts directly from WMC!

If you create the folder structure properly for your TV shows, the end result is amazing. You get cover art for the show, the series/season, and even synopses of the individual episodes. Just click on each of the images below to get the full picture:

Amazing, isn’t it? What, you aren’t convinced yet? What about your movie collection? For movies and other video files, things work pretty much identically: you get cover art, plot synopses, and background poster art. If there’s more than one background available, they’ll transition automatically:

It should be noted that Media Browser gets all this data dynamically from themoviedb.org and thetvdb.org. If for any reason these sites are down or your connection to the web is broken, Media Browser won’t be able to pull the artwork and XML data down from these sites, so you’ll have a very empty looking library. For that reason, there’s another application which works in tandem with Media Browser. It’s called Meta Browser. I’ll delve too far into the operations of Meta Broswer in this post, so I’ll just say that it downloads this data and stores it locally for you so Media Browser doesn’t have to query these 3rd party sites each time you want to watch a video.

Are you convinced you need Media Browser now? If so, get it here, and set it up!

Setup is very simple indeed. All you need to do is install it and set your folders. Installation is incredibly intuitive, but if you need any help, you’ll find it over at Media Browser Support. I like all the fancy front end stuff like the cover art and background poster art, but for me, the best feature is in the backend. You can set up your categories of video: movies, TV shows, etc, but within each of these categories, you can specify as many folders as you like! They can be on seperate drives or even seperate machines altogether! Imagine: all your videos in different locations, and you can bring them all together in one library. No more looking in loads of folders to find the video you want, just click on the cover art and away you go!

I’ve been a user of WMC since its XP days, but WMC on Windows 7, coupled with Media Browser, its finally matured into the product its always wanted to be. If you have a spare PC/laptop, stick Windows 7 on it, get a WMC remote from Maplin (they’re only £20!), download Media Browser and you’ll be laughing. No more watching your movies and TV shows on your PC. Get them back on your TV where they belong!