Really wanted to make navigating MMS on the nokia easier so I implemented mouse input which is luckily also what a touch screen is. Yay!
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Category: HTPC
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My Media System 1.0.8.4 released
A new stable release of MMS is out. This is a bugfix release and so 15 bugs have been fixed and no new features implemented. Upgrading is recommended.
I have so far projected the picture of my Sanyo PLV-Z4 projector onto the wall. Clearly this is not optimal, so I have been looking for a screen for a while. I decided to built it DIY-style this weekend. It’s a lot cheaper than buying one from new and can give excellent results. Plus there is nothing to beat the feeling of having created something yourself.
For the project the following materials was used:
- 228x131cm 16mm MDF board (screen size calculator).
- 40mm wide wood frame
- 1 liter of very low gloss paint. The color code used was S-1502B (I think it’s a european standard).
- 100 ml very low gloss black paint.
The wood was bought at Bauhaus and the paint at the local paint shop.
After we carried the board up the stairs it was quite clear that it was perhaps a little too big for the wall. But after some rearranging we got it to fit 🙂
Here’s a picture of the screen being painted.
I have been super happy with how it turned out. First a picture of a TV source (4:3) projected on the screen.
Finally a picture of the result with a 16:9 source.
Sadly the camera on my phone doesn’t do the final result justice. More pictures with real camera here on flickr.
It’s cool that the Playstation 3 runs Linux. That means it can run all kinds of nice applications 🙂
My TV crashed (luckily it didn’t burn) so I was looking for alternative solutions and finally found the perfect one. The Sanyo PLV-Z4 projector does 720p HD and is very quiet. Looking around for a modeline for X I found several ones which should work but really doesn’t. I finally found the following one which seems to work rather well:
Modeline “1280×720” 74.400 1280 1728 1768 1984 720 725 730 750 +hsync +vsync
I’ve watched different kind of content on it from TV, XviD, DVD to HD and it works really well with all. I was a little afraid that XviD ~800kbit would be very blocky but it is actually not a problem. Of course HD just looks amazing.
Joysticks are arriving tomorrow, then it’s old school arcade gaming time 🙂
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The future of HTPCs
So I was thinking today about what the future of home theater PC’s and where mmsv2 (or actually the next big version) fits into this.
I’ve come to the conclusion that what is really missing currently is integration. Your HTPC just stores the media and doesn’t really interface with the rest of the world. You don’t want to use your remote control to tag and organize your image collection. You want your HTPC for presentation, sort of like when you do a presentation. It should be slightly more advanced but not much. Instead the advanced jobs should be done on a regular PC and the synced with the HTPC.
This brings up the next question. How do we get there? I think firstly the interface should be designed with this in mind and then for the most used application, such as F-spot, a plugin could be written in that app to synchronize with mms.