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Author Topic: Single HTPC for content to all of the rooms  (Read 1274 times)

forumsviewer

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Single HTPC for content to all of the rooms
« on: January 22, 2011, 09:41:00 pm »

Hello everyone,

I have project that I would like to begin on but would first like to get some opinions of others who know more about this than I. I have envisioned what I want to do and have happen, but just not entirely sure what direction to take with it. Note that I realize that this is a project and so it is self-rewarding for myself to successfully implement what I would like to do.

I have a home with 6 TV's in seperate rooms. The home was built in 2000 so to the rooms only have coaxial cable and of course TV and some rooms telephone wire. All of the coaxial cable does bulk up into a utility closet in the basement at a centralized location.

I want to design out a HTPC type system that has all of my DVD's loaded onto it on the hard drive and be able to specify what room gets what movie at what time. This is an incentive tool for the kids to be able to do chores for the ability to essentially pick a movie, time and location they want to watch the movie with their friends.

It is obvious that i'm not going to be utilizing all of MC's features.  I'm primarily interested in the versatility that MC may offer me for each of my TV rooms to connect into the main MC server.  I want a lot of control in how I distribute the media in the home.

I am going to start out with not having menus/remotes etc at each TV location. Everything will be controlled through a GUI or web based GUI on my laptop or VNC into the HTPC to specify what room, what movie and what time.  Does MC have this ability?

I realize that other companies call these TV rooms "extenders" or "front-ends" or even "placeshifter".  I'm just not very familiar with MC enough to know if it has the ability for me to basically design out and program my own extender software to basically touch base with MC to let it know it is there as room 1 (or 2, or 3, etc) and have MC schedule in to "play movie X in room 1 at 7:00pm tonight".

I'm looking at several options but MC seems to be very powerful and has a lot of customization abilities.  I'm just not so sure how developer friendly MC is with its library server or other server type tools.  Any insight into this?

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JimH

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Re: Single HTPC for content to all of the rooms
« Reply #1 on: January 25, 2011, 04:00:57 pm »

Welcome to the forum.  You might read about DLNA and our Media Network features.  You could start here:
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Media_Network

For Dev tools, try the DevZone:
http://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/DevZone
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