topfs2 Wrote:Sorry to say but those screens on page 2 are both awful. If multi zone stuff even have the slightest chance of making it into trunk the GUI needs to be alot better.
Yeah, I think they are terrible too. I'll browse around and see how other software handles it and see what comes to mind. I'm a helluva lot better at abstract higher level control stuff like this than nitty gritty code implementation. Which means I'm still probably terrible at that too!
Quote:If anyone could sketch or make up a workflow which would be good for xbmc, kindof doubt it will happen, then it might be worth the time. Still its far easier to just get the prices down per xbmc box and use one for each tv (or even have xbmc in the tv) which would work better than one that controls multiple tv's and audio.
Yeah, I get your point and think that for the average person you are probably right on target. A multizone solution would probably cater more toward the higher budget crowd that might be looking for something like a slick crestron system but would rather it tie as cleanly as possible into their existing media database, home theater frontend, pvr stuff, etc. I realize that type of user might be much more likely to just pay high dollar for a custom installer to come put whatever uber expensive hardware is necessary in his home than to consider DIY options using opensource software and off the shelf hardware. I'm sure there are a few like me that will be in that position one day, but catering to a few is probably not high on devs priority list.
In any case, for an example of why someone might not just want multiple xbmc boxes locally, I'll give you a hypothethical "I'm dreaming" xbmc implementation (and some of this really will be dreaming)...
Say you have a house with 4 or so normal TV's, home theater, whatever. You also have distributed audio throughout the house (in ceiling or in wall speakers in most rooms). You could put xbmc on the tv's, but they won't do much for rooms with speakers and no display devices (perhaps kitchen, a living area, dining room, outside patio, pool area, front porch, garage, whatever). You could install some sort of xbmc with integrated dispay for each of those locations, but say you have 12 rooms... do you really want 12 xbmc installations and have to walk around the house to change audio selections in various rooms? What if you want the same song to play everywhere, or a couple of different songs to play in a couple of different groupings of rooms? You could install a crestron, russound, or whatever system to control the distributed audio (and they do it nicely), or perhaps a dumb receiver and distribution amp, but will they talk to xbmc? Why would you want them to? Well, xbmc already hosts the media datase and library. Would that have to be duplicated for a crestron or similar system? Even if they could read from the same library (fileserver), you'd have two different interfaces for your media... one to play music through your house, one to either watch videos or listen to music in certain rooms with displays. And your theater would probably have both interfaces. Ugh.
So here's the dream (please bear with me)... You have your fileserver with media library, another server running tv capture/pvr backend, and xbmc clients at each tv/display location. Great, we're headed there with xbmc now. But imagine in say each end of the house, perhaps the kitchen and a far hallway or garage, you have two other xbmc clients running on touchscreen displays. Maybe one sitting on a kitchen countertop, another mounted flush inwall in a hallway or garage. From these touchscreen xbmc installations I can pull up any media and send it to any room or groupings (zones the user configures). If I want soft classical music in the nursery, nothing in surrounding rooms, and heavy metal in the garage where I'm tinkering with an old car, it's just a few finger touches away. My wife in the other end of the house thinks the music in the nursery is still too loud, so she turns it off or turns it down just as easily. She then flips over to weather on the home screen to see the forcast for tomorrow, and then a quick look at the facebook plugin to see if she has any new messages. But that's not the end of my dream. It's getting late and I'm still out working in the garage. The kids should be asleep... it's past their bedtime and lights should be out. I wonder if they still have the TV on? I could simply walk upstairs to check it out, but isntead I pull up the xbmc on the wall over there and see that there is nothing playing in any of the kids' rooms. I leave them alone - they're being good. I do notice however that I left a movie running in the theater with the projector on... don't want that bulb to burn out too quickly so I shut that all down with a button press and get back to work. Now the doorbell rings and I know my wife is in the shower, so I take a look at the snapshot from the front door camera. Nothing there. Huh. I pull up the CCTV loop that is so easily accessible since my cameras all write to the same PVR/TV backend server that captures TV, and see that it is some kids who rang the doorbell and ran off. That reminds me that it really is getting pretty late, so I quickly navigate to the security screen and touch "goodnight" and get back to work in the garage knowing that all doors are locked, the lights are set appropriately, and the alarm is on. I'm greeted the next morning with xbmc having already started some of my favorite music in my bathroom while I get ready and showing RSS feeds in the kitchen. I head off to work, the kids start their favorite movie in the playroom, and the wife sets "All My Children" audio from the live tv stream to play in all rooms while she does a little straightening up of the house. I get home and want to relax out by the pool, so I grab a iPad (yes, I hate the closed nature too)
style tablet pc and launch yet another xbmc and stream my favorite old Star Trek episodes recorded earlier during the day for me to watch while I relax as the children swim.
OK, I'll stop dreaming. I know it sounds very undermining to xbmc to try to be a "one app to rule them all" solution. But to be honest, much of that work is already done and xbmc is putting together now the pieces to allow just that. PVR integration is in the works. People routinely record CCTV security feeds to mythTV and VDR. The DIY automation community has tons of software and resources to do lots of stuff, and the simpler things (lighting, locking doors, setting alarms) can be done so many ways I have to believe that at some point someone will write an add-on for xbmc that speaks to those devices directly or another small box handling the automations software. XBMC is moving to a centralized database so having server/client setups like I described above is not far fetched at all. YATSE shows that touch screen control is certainly possible within xbmc and its powerful skinning framework. XBMC already can power down a system - if we're talking server/clients it is a small step to simply ask "which client to power down?". The big missing piece in my fantasy above is multizone support, which to be honest doesn't need to apply to just music (as seen with the example of the wife listening to her favorite soaps as she moves about the house). And the multizone support could be so much more than just "send this stream there." It really could be a framework whereby different client installations talk to each other to monitor what is being played where, have over-ride options (perhaps with password requirement?), allow me to view in the kitchen what the kids are watching on HBO upstairs, etc. The multizone audio is the only thing that falls outside that kind of framework since it seems one physical machine would have to handle multiple audio devices, but even that might could be handled in exactly the same way - if you have 12 rooms and 12 sound card devices in one xbmc box (heh, not sure how
that would be possible... USB perhaps?), then have 12 instances of XBMC running simultaneously each hooked into a dedicated audio output device. Conflicts galore?!
Name those 12 xbmc instances audio 1-12 or kitchen audio, patio audio, whatever. Now from any xbmc install under the multizone screens you can see what is playing on any tv or in any audio zone in the house, as all xbmc instances are treated equal and all talk to each other. It just so happens that the touchscreen installs run a touchscreen skin that makes it a bit easier to navigate. But if you want to turn off audio at the pool from within the theater, so be it.
Ugh. Back to work.
If you allow control of multizone audio through the webserver, we could work in some controls for the iPhone Remote as well!
PVR integration is going to be awesome when polished. Maybe something like this can be considered for future dev work.
