Here's what the Audio & Video part of the house looks like now

(click to enlarge)

There's 3 places in the house where we listen to music, theatre room, living room and sauna. Living room has it's own equipment. Theatre equipment handles the sauna speakers as well. iTunes on an iMac is used to store and organize audio collection, and also play music in theatre room.

Sauna & Living Room use the iTunes collection via MPD (Music player daemon) Wall mounted touchscreen is used to control MPD which plays the music.

Living room has diskless ubuntu HTPC which boots from gentoo server, in addition to MPD, it also runs Xine which is used as frontend for VDR, streaming SDTV content from the server. Everything in living room and then some can be controlled with Harmony 525 remote control.

Theatre room playback is handled by Plex running on the iMac. Plex used to organize video library.

So, this HTPC project has grown a bit.

Basically the whole house is now a big tech toy (including home automation with computer controlled lights, wall sockets, motion sensors, smoke detectors, temperature sensors, door sensors, etc, but that's another story, you can read more about it in the other blog. Only in Finnish though for now, sorry.)

It still works . Did some extra watchdog scripts to catch any possible errors that may happen. Now if VDR gets hung without internal watchdog catching it and if process doesn't die it is detected by a watchdog which tries to periodically access svdrp. Also some encrypted channels sometimes cause VDSB (Video Data Stream Broken) on recordings, which causes multiple restarts. It is also detected and timer is automatically removed.

It works! It works!

No major problems since the new setup was implemented. The boot time for the ubuntu box is now reasonable, I removed all unnecessary bullcrap from init. One interesting point is that my NFS shares (music, movies) has to be mounted on both server and client?! If they are only mounted on server (which I thought would be all I need) the videos show in menus ok, but playing just wont work. Apparently xinelibout in fact does not stream the external files over the network but instead orders the client to play them from a specific location.