LebGeeks

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#1 September 23 2011

BashLogic
Member

Technology Mayhem

ok,

just as many others i have had my fun with technologies. sometimes i am inspired to do more and sometimes i get so fed up that i run to the shop to buy the next best thing. so here is  todays story.

for a long time, i used to use the xbox (gen1) with my old tube tv to watch some series with the misses. for this, i had my xbox in the loving room and used POE adapters to connect to my home office thru the power  outlet. the bandwidth was sufficient to stream media across to the living room.

s during a snowy winter day, we decided to sell our flat and move to another. in the newer flat, i was unable to make use of the same implementation i had. thanks to the lousy power surge fuses, POE connection was just not stable even thou the distance was shorter. so i had to give up, of i went to the shop thinking that the xbox was dying out on me, after all i had bought it from a flea market for peanuts. so i bought a PS3 in hope that it would resolve my issue, NJET!!! it definitely was due to the darn fuses. so i had to give up and run back to the shop and buy a 25m long ethernet cable. ALAS! that did not do the job, my old 100mb switches were just too congested for HD streams. so back to the shop to buy 1gb switches. so now the connection was ok but he picture was horrible. the new PS3 unlike the old xbox, spat out a very ugly image quality so once again back to the shop and even thou i was reluctant, i bought a 46" samsung. Yeppie.... NOT!! my celerron pc was just too weak to stream HD to the PS3 so back to the flea market to get a dual core, a full HD would have required a quad core

so this setup has worked for a while. the sad story has been having to operate and navigate as if operating a train, first turn on the PC, make  sure that the PS3 media server is running,  turn on the PS3, seach for the appropriate share  and launch. woot woot we have audio/video coming thru! this 2.0 setup worked for a while but then it didnt always suffice, sometimes the PS3 media server would go bezerk and sometimes it was unable convert certain codec types having to hack and tweak to  get some videos to run thru. ALAS technology strikes again! the latest PS3 firmware includes DRM sniffers that sniff the media and upon identifying certain types of watermarks, tadaa media replay is halted!!! arghh!!

home mediahub v3.0; of i go to the shop to buy a laptop with HDMI. i ended up with a LENOVO some model (absolutelly no idea, i just grabbed the first thing i got my hands on and was cheap). so now i have the laptop connected to my TV and with a wireless keyboard i can browse from my couch. i can use vlc to play media without the codec convergence headache, and i can watch full hd media.

the next headache, first things first, my tv is not channeling the hdmi audio thru the scart output so i could use my wireless headphones. option a- buy a new tv, option b- buy a media amplifier, option c- try my luck by using to use a hacked samsung firmware and see whether the audio channeling is resolved within that or maybe hack it myself (cant be bothered, too lazzy and got better things to do). Dunno, will see what will be the next solution for that.the second issue is the pc mouse. with the big screen, a wireless keyboard and a touchpad. the tv as a monitor feels to be lifeless and stale. next project home mediahub v3.5, get a wiimote and use the hacked code to use it as a mouse. we will see what the next technology mayhem will achieve. somehow for a change, i am optimistic and eager to try out the wiimote as a mouse. so i will start by first creating the infrared glove that would operate as a mouse and then see what the next technology mayhem is going to be. i minority report i guess...

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