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ZoneMinder is an integrated set of applications which provide a complete surveillance solution allowing capture, analysis, recording and monitoring of any
CCTV or security cameras attached to a Linux based machine. It is designed to run on distributions which support the Video For Linux (V4L) interface and
has been tested with video cameras attached to BTTV cards, various USB cameras and also supports most IP network cameras. A partial list is given in the
Wiki and Support sections, please give feedback in the Forums if it works with yours. ZoneMinder also requires MySQL and PHP, and is enhanced by a
webserver such as Apache.

Or this ?
http://www.linuxmce.org/nc.htm...

A introduction into LinuxMCE LinuxMCE is a whole home automation suite.
It the 'digital glue' between your media and all of your electrical appliances.
It includes full featured solutions for:
Security
Monitor sensors and trigger events
Monitor security cameras

I would not really prefer IR.

I would prefer it be IR. I can already use my LG smartphone to control every IR capable AV device in my home, including projector screens and lighting setups. It is my one remote already. Works well with XBMC or Linux Media Center Edition.

While everyone else scrambles to figure out who will dominate this space, me and my home cloud will continue streaming all my media to all my devices and controlling it all with an array of USB, Ethernet, RS-232 serial, and IR input AND output (the latter via Linux Infrared Remote Control)

Remotes are a solved problem: My phone is the only remote I need damnit, I can even bounce the signal to the other side of the house via IR -> Ethernet -> IR with LIRC. Bonus: If I lose it, I can geolocate it then give it a ring and listen for the tone. Set top-boxes are solved too: A Linux media center PC. Why? Because a TV with built in computer is too expensive to upgrade as fast as I want for games, Steam is on Linux, all my media, Hulu, Netflix, and my cablecard is too. Why not a proprietary OS? I can't hack new things into a proprietary OS like I can with Linux or BSD, like the aforementioned Ethernet assisted whole home IR signal routing technology. See: XP EoL, that's why.

If someone comes along and packages this shit all up nice and simple like -- Oh, guess what? Someone already did. My cousin does that for a living. He puts in very expensive whole home AV outfits. They use Ethernet as a backbone, and you can control anything from your tablet, phone, or these wanna-be phone/tablet looking touch enabled devices. Look up Crestron. I can do what they do for free with Linux. This Apple/Google/Amazon crap is playing at some mickey-mouse tier featureshit comparatively.

A DIY friendly system and the programming language on the ISY is easy to use and quite flexible.

DIY friendly? Why not go GPL? http://www.linuxmce.org/

Some video: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2176025602905109829

OTOH I would not want a home system. All I would want is a central button that I could use to turn the house into 'away' mode. It will turn off everything. Bit like some hotels where you must place your key to be able to urn on the lights.

Oh and keyless entry, like at the office placed on the height of where I have my wallet, so I can enter the house with my hands full.

Interesting idea.

Their hardware list is a little sad. I was hoping they provided some sort of thin-client which was multimedia capable, and available in the US. Small profile, fanless, with Ethernet/Wifi, capable of Audio & Video and hopefully a remote control.

I have a Hauppauge MediaMVP, and It's not very good with either the default software, or with the mvpmc open source client (Development has slowed since the last major release in 2007).

I could build something as a MythTV frontend, but once you factor in the cost of a low-profile system, IR remote, and no commercial/community support, etc. the commercial products look better & cheaper.

I've been looking at LinuxMCE for my own home system. It looks like a really good fit for what you want: Media, touchscreen controls, multiple outputs. Plus, it's a thin-client system, so once you decide on a terminal setup, you can repeat ad nauseum.

I would also point out that this may be a good setup for the expansion you're alluding to. For example, you could set up different accounts for either different works or different artists. Log all the terminals in one room to the account under that artist, and you could have the media for all the different pieces queued up on the menu.

Hmmm..if you ever had a Salvador Dali exhibit, you could have some Dark Side of the Moon playing on the sound system...

I think this remote of which you speak already exists...

http://wiki.linuxmce.org/index.php/Fiire_Chief

I think they are missing the point in saying that the universal remote's days are numbered. Smartphones just allow another way to do the same thing, and not always better. Currently, I use my desktop when im sitting at the pc, an ir remote when not, and an ipaq when roaming around the house. All three have different situation where they are better than others so to say one will hail the death of the other is missing the point that more options are available in general. I use linuxMCE for all my home AV needs and it allows me to use all three with the same interface. If anything I think the end result of smartphones being used more and more is less lost remotes.

and if he were to choose the iPod Touch/iPhone it would be great if someone would develop a nice application or webapp that could integrate with linuxmce so we could do cool home automation stuff too.

w/r/t smart home software, hope you've seen http://www.linuxmce.org./ I've got a weak linuxmce setup in my home, and it's very nice. Someone with any money at all could have a badass system orders of magnitude cheaper than any other way.

Openness is the key to the way out. The FCC surprisingly mandated last year that no cableco can any longer bundle their locked-in set-top box with their network and data (video). I think it was a political move to force cablecos to pioneer that service model, years before the telcos which are opening their platform at their own rate, but also inevitably.

As usual, the cablecos aren't meeting the mandate on schedule, but they are all able, or nearly all, to use 3rd party settop boxes. I believe they're all supposed to take whatever standard box you bring, that takes the cablecard HW, and get a cablecard (smartcard) keyed to your account. Even where there is no competition between network providers in a town (99.9%+ of USA), the box is still supposed to be BYOB.

In the meantime I think all the SW will run on a PC kinda clabbered together. Before even the PS3 is ready, which probably won't be for another year or so (I'd guess Spring '09, to build momentum and fix bugs for Christmas '09). Really I think that could be LinuxMCE, with PS3 media directors. I know that's what I'm working on.

One very good outcome will be that the Internet with BYOB DVRs means you can use the cableco network to access content not controlled ($) by the cableco. There is also competition from telcos for network termination, so we're also finally seeing the rise of geographic competition for both WANs and "TV" at the same time.

Which is why openness is important. For them to steal each other's customers, their equipment needs to interop on shared standards. They're not as clever as SW outfits like MS in "embrace and extend" to pervert public standards to proprietary advantage. So what's really necessary is developers racing to get the public hooked on a GUI that's not bundled with either the network, or the content, or the terminal settop box either of those providers would like to command. In the time while they're all scrambling to establish "the one true GUI", those incumbents will all be busy with their core deployments. So there's an opportunity for independent developers to get in there and grab mindshare, before one or the other giant corporate player locks it down.

The PS3, like all Blu-Ray players, includes a Java VM, running JME. That's also the standard for both European and N American cableboxes, as well as Google's Android phone profile (and lots of existing mobile phones). So there's a lot of room in this emerging open platform for reusing the same GUI objects across devices, executed across the network. I hope there's enough development of it to run circles around the likes of Sony, TimeWarner and AT&T/Verizon.

I Want My MyTV!

As far as running Linux, it looks like the NEC LUI is a poor, proprietary cousin of LinuxMCE , which you *can* get in the States, and just about everywhere, for that matter...

I believe the RSX RAM hacks against the Hypervisor are a cat & mouse game with Sony winning at the moment. But with the PS3's fast IO, its RAM isn't really a problem is you stream from the network, and don't use the machine as a real desktop - just a media terminal. If you do want it as desktop, then run its X server against X clients on some other machine(s) with lots of RAM and their own CPUs, but let the PS3 do the rendering to your giant TV.

The TiVo game is "Internet TV". Since Linux doesn't (necessarily) have DRM, it's a much better platform than TiVo for that, once there's a critical mass of developers and audience on good, cheap HW. That's what PS3/Linux/PlayTV will be by this Summer, but even a USB TV tuner will be good if PlayTV is locked down.

I don't know whether Wiimote will work with standard Bluetooth. Why don't you try to get it working?

Windows Media Center Edition has problems, especially with DRM, that prevent it being any good as a a real home media center. Does XBMC have those problems?

In the meantime, I think the dream project you're looking for is LinuxMCE. It should run on PS3s soon, now that PS3s are finally more than a toy since they can harness the SPUs for media. And 1080p, not just 1080i. As Linux, it's a lot more flexible, and a new UI is in design now (but the architecture is open for any UI people want to make).

4. Smart Devices are over-rated. Until you can easily access your computer from your cell phone, this won't be down the road 5 years. Yes I'm sure you can do it, but it's not common, certainly not on non-smart phones.

The LinuxMCE project looks like it would be better than the wimpy/uptight WindowsMCE for running a home theater in a feature-stuffed home media network, including content, telephony, automation, alarms, remote monitoring, and all kinds of bundled features of disparate apps for "the Home of the Future". But it also looks like it's got plenty of holes in support and reliability. It could use a lot of attention from developers and users feeding back improvements.

FWIW, if the project porting X and codecs to the PS3 had more developers, the PS3 would be an excellent home media terminal running LinuxMCE without whatever Sony's planning to saddle it with.

>true, but while the GPLv2 only talks about what you can and cant do with the code, the v3 goes on to talk about what you can and cant do with hardware thats to interact with the code in binary form.

Neither GPLv2 nor GPLv3 talks about what you can do with the code. You can do with the code (and with the hardware) whatever you want. But if you distribute the software you have to retain all four freedoms.

>i dont have a problem with tivo wanting to lock what can or cant be run on their device because basically they are into selling black boxes. but personally i would not bother as i would go for a generic box in combo with linux and mythtv. hell, it looks like with linuxMCE its a snap to set up: http://linuxmce.org/

If it would be just the hardware, than i would agree with you. But it is not at all about the hardware, it is about the software. If i put my code under the GPL i want that everyone who becomes a copy can use it, improve it and share it. If Tivo denies you this rights, whether by changing the license, by refusing to give you the source code, by using additional software to block you, by using hardware to block you or by any other technical or legal solution someone will find in the future, than Tivo violates the spirit of all GPLs and the license GPLv3.

true, but while the GPLv2 only talks about what you can and cant do with the code, the v3 goes on to talk about what you can and cant do with hardware thats to interact with the code in binary form.

to me thats like microsoft saying that only their server version of windows can run more then X cpus and Y amounts of ram. there is no technical limitations for this, its just compiled that way and expressed that way in the EULA: or for that matter not being allowed to run their cheapest desktop variants inside a virtual machine.

i dont have a problem with tivo wanting to lock what can or cant be run on their device because basically they are into selling black boxes. but personally i would not bother as i would go for a generic box in combo with linux and mythtv. hell, it looks like with linuxMCE its a snap to set up: http://linuxmce.org/

i just wonder if not we will find tivo using the user space driver interface thats being worked on to lock their machines using some kind of binary blob. sure, you can modify the hell of you the kernel or the ui, but screw with the blob and the device is useless.