Whole house media and security for home automation control?
#1
Question 
I am setting up a house under construction with five security cameras, dvr and 5 4" security monitors.

Using a tv tuner card I assume I can bring the security feed into XBMC? I would like to eliminate the 4" screens and use XBMC to send the signal to any one of the six televisions in the home. Also, if possible toggle which camera is current being viewed (RS232?).

Is it possible to stream video to a iPhone or iPod touch so they can view their security camera's while away from home.
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#2
To set that up you going to need to be a good C++ programmer or learn how to code Python:
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Development_Notes
http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Python_Development

See similar topics on home automation control here:
http://forum.xbmc.org/tags.php?tag=home+...on+control

...its not exactly the point with XBMC to do that out-of-the-box:
http://xbmc.org/about/vision/

LinuxMCE on the other hand is designed to do that but is not exactly eye candy nor a user-friendly media player:
http://linuxmce.com

Happy coding/scripting!

Fiasco Wrote:Is it possible to stream video to a iPhone or iPod touch so they can view their security camera's while away from home.
http://streamer.collect3.com.au
http://remote.collect3.com.au
Almost nothing is impossible with software but no one has done it yet as far as I know.
Always read the XBMC online-manual, FAQ and search the forum before posting.
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#3
shoot me a pm if you want more details I have finished my setup

I went another route on cameras I used webcams with special adapter for rj45 however the software I use will work with standard cameras, ip cameras, capture cards and more.

The system setup I can access any camera from xbmc from any room it also send you a visual photo and alert when someone is approaching. One trick I did was make and install a custom made usb doorbell which when rung it displays the video camera at the front door on any tv you are using.

and if you have smart phones you can access the system and look at any camera away from home at the office wherever plus the software will notify you with a snapshot of whos at what camera. One cool thing is it does have a built in webserver and webpage but you can also make your own html page and display the cameras any way or size you want.

Also the system is great because you can set motion recording to save disk space or you can use it as a 24/7 DVR up to you and the software is cheap less than 50 bucks

I originally was going to go with 7" screens instead went with 10" tablets and can view all cameras from any one of them. One huge plus is that I also can control XBMC and lights from the same tablets via custom html page. The tablets cost me less than 300 for all 3 of them.

PM me its simpler than it sounds.

OH I know someone is going to say why are you using webcams blah blah well how many cameras you know of with built in autofocus lowlight filters and more .....just becuase you say you know doesn't mean nada
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#4
XBMC_FREAK Wrote:shoot me a pm if you want more details I have finished my setup

Why PM if you can share your setup with the entire community? ;-)
I'm interested, and i'm sure other people as well, so a post with some more info on you setup would be great!
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#5
Elvito Wrote:Why PM if you can share your setup with the entire community? ;-)
I'm interested, and i'm sure other people as well, so a post with some more info on you setup would be great!

i second that, tired PM'ing but not working for some reason....
4x ATV2's (v4.3) XBMC Frodo12.2. Raspberry Pi running MYSQL 5.5.31-0+wheezy1. NAS is a Drobo FS
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#6
...2 years later....
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#7
I have no problem sharing information that I have learned, it is a pain sometimes expressing here what you have learned and what your setup is but you guys requested it so here it goes.


Okay here's a screenshot of the custom page for displaying my cams. I built the entire website in DreamWeaver and Photoshop with simple html and some java. I designed and coded it this way since almost everything that has a browser can handle html and java. I will do my best to properly explain HOW I put it together, and willing to share the actual addon which I built to load into XBMC's webserver.

Image

The page does some cool stuff you can click any smaller cam view and it will load it in the larger video area on the left frame. The cams can be moved using the arrows. One thing if you notice there is small icons on the upper right that when clicked will load the cameras fullscreen in XBMCl. The small images shift through cameras as you select which one you want to view.

All the cameras are viewable anytime I have set for motion zoning record and ftp upload and when activated they take a snapshot and record video while there is motion.

Once the snapshot is uploaded it takes about a second for XBMC To pop an alert. Every Camera which took a snapshot will popup individually. Meaning if there is driveway motion you will see XBMC POPup alert,then if someone is at the door it will do another alert popup like this screenshots of the popups.

Image Front DOOR

heres another popup

Image DRIVEWAY

I can give anyone the settings for DialogKaiToast.xml file setting for the larger viewing area on the popup...
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#8
OKAY so here is how the setup is put together. I will try to post as much details as I can hopefully can help others towards their projects. If I confuse you please ask questions, I will do my best to answer them.

A lil background first currently have a collection of over 1000 avi movies and over 20 individual tv shows with multiple seasons with a total episode count around 2000 plus all legal of course. Currently I have 4 sata drives running on a windows server 2k3 box. I also run a ftp server which you will understand why I even mention the server later on. I did it this way but you can do it on any OS of your choice such as win7 winx xp linux whatever you use to serve your drives.

I purchased three viewsonic v210 tablets cheap which I use daily. I can go into detail on these but they are 10" ARM based wifi touchscreen tablets I couldn't find anything else that I wanted without spending a crap load on each one. The tablets use embedded windows ce which is perfect for an instant on touchscreen remote. From cold boot they load in 30 seconds and from stand by they load immediately which is perfect for me.

Image

They look like the Icon I created however I will post a pic of the remotes running my setup.

THE DETAILS NOW

I built my camera box using a very small hp epc-42. its not the fastest pc in the world but for streaming its small and robust. Loaded a clean install of xp pro and webcam software. I put in a 1gb stick for memory and loaded it with a small 10gb drive which is for OS only. I chose webcams for a lot of reasons and I use a special adapter which converts usb to rj45 Ethernet cable and back to usb for long runs. each cam,adapter and wire cost me less than 60 bucks each look on craigslist for cheap high Megapixel Cams I use microsoft and logitech webcams and yes they can be used outdoors just look at the specs before you buy them.

After I setup the cameras within the software, I setup motion zoning. The motion security is set to take a snapshot and upload it to a ftp server, record a video to a mapped network drive ( SERVER) and send me a sms pic alert which is kinda nice.

You can use zoneminder, or yawcam, however I chose webcam xp. One of the ftp options is to set a certain file name convention which is cool but since I have to make it easy for XBMC to understand I had to use some trickery.

The magic happens with two tools EVENTGHOST and WINAutomation. Originally I used Python scripts within eventghost but it kept crashing for me so I decided to kill the scripts and just use a running service with a couple of self executables.

Win Automation can do some real slick stuff like create self executable processes for anything such as batch file renames etc but I use it to copy camera motion snapshots to an archive then rename the files to a simple Cam1 Cam2 Cam3 Cam4 and place them in a another folder called XBMC ALERT. I did this because I did not want to loose the time stamp that is part of the original camera snapshots file name obviously for archiving. I also created another self executable for deleting everything in the folder XBMC ALERT after pop-ups alerts have finished displaying within XBMC.

EventGhost which you all know by now, using plug-ins directory watcher, XBMC is all that is needed for the pop-ups to alert.

Basically there's two directories being watched the first one is where the the snapshots were ftp'd to the other is XBMC ALERT.

When directory watcher sees new files created within a certain directory (ftp directory) it starts the self executable to copy those files untouched to a archive folder then takes a copy renames the files Cam1 ,Cam2 etc and places all new renamed files into XBMC ALERT folder. Within eventghost I used eventghost jump after this process finishes sucessfully then it goes into another eventghost process.

The second process then watches the directory XBMC alert and using the XBMC plugin sends the popup with a custom message which is your choice on the message. The camera pic will not show up this way you must adjust the DialogKaiToast.xml for XBMC and point it to the image files. From there the popup will display the image properly. After eventghost waits 1 second with the event timer being used after a second it runs the self executable to delete the files in the folder XBMC alert.

This works as a loop over and over again.

Heres the changes I made to DialogKaitoast.xml

<window id="107">
<animation effect="slide" start="0,80" end="0,0" time="200">WindowOpen</animation>
<animation effect="slide" start="0,0" end="0,80" time="999">WindowClose</animation>
<coordinates>
<system>1</system>
<posx>500</posx>
<posy>650</posy>
</coordinates>
<controls>
<control type="group">
<control type="image">
<posx>-100</posx>
<posy>-500</posy>
<width>700</width>
<height>500</height>
<texture border="20,20,20,2">InfoMessagePanel.png</texture>
</control>
<control type="image" id="400">
<description>avatar</description>
<posx>-70</posx>
<posy>-450</posy>
<width>640</width>
<height>360</height>
<aspectratio>keep</aspectratio>
<texture>I:\\xbmcalert\cam_1.jpg</texture>
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#9
To watch the camera feeds I created a folder on the server called security cameras and added the share through XBMC.

Within the folder there are .pls files created for each camera and when clicked streams the video feed within XBMC for the camera you selected.

Every room in the house gets the alerts and also can view any stream at anytime to watch while away you must have a dns redirect service theres alot of free ones out there.

Point it towards your routers external ip given to you by your service provider.
Create the url and from there just enter the custom url on your phone and you can view any camera



example of the .pls file you can create them in notepad just add the pls extension instead of txt.

[playlist]

File1=mms://192.168.5.21:9001

Title1=mms://192.168.5.21:9001

Length1=0

NumberOfEntries=1

Version=2
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#10
There's a few things I want to change but it wont be till I have time. One of them is changing the message popup to display which camera is alerting vs Alert Motion Detected. They other is making the icons better in the XBMC controls I JUST NEED SOME TIME AHHHHHHH
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#11
Heres a few screenshots of my custom remote page let me know what you guys think. I created it as a web addon to XBMC.

STATUS Web PORTAL

Image

TV CONTROLS
Image

XBMC CONTROLS
Image

WEATHER PAGE
Image

CAMERAS PAGE
Image

WHOLE HOUSE AUDIO
Image

CONTROL PAGE KEEPING PRIVATE sorry guys

Controls Thermostat functions
Controls Sprinklers on or off besides there is a normal scheduler
Controls Garage Door Open or Close
COMING SOON MAILBOX Notification



POWER PAGE KEEPING PRIVATE

Powers on or off any light in the house including some external lights like wired driveway lights and Patio Mood lighting.


WELL I hope this helps someone to get an idea of what types of things you can automate in their home.
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#12
ALSO let me know if anyone wants to know about the usb doorbell I built.

When pushed makes a doorbell sound and automatically switches the tv to the front door video stream.
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#13
I was going to say damned nice until I saw Boys II Men in your music collection.... Now it just plain sucks Tongue


I used LinuxMCE in a similar fashion to what your doing for a while, with my LMCE box doubling as a media server as well hosting all the multimedia data for my XBMC front ends. I do wish I would have gone further to explore ways to display the data from the XBMC front end (for a while I was using a simple remote desktop-type solution called from a script on the XBMC front end, but remote navigation sucked and I always had to have a keyboard/mouse setup to accurately control it)

One thing I was rather proud of, but never finished was integrating voice control using a combination of older ALICE bot AIML language for the interaction and commands. I threw a couple extra hooks in the AIML code to interpret commands for given voice/typing actions such as TV on/off, light [X] on/off.. and so on. ALICE was fairly good at interpreting voice and typed commands and sending it to the LIRCD port in LMCE to the point I had it turning the lights on and off based on the zone it heard the microphone from and a few other small tidbits, but never got much further past that before I put the project on hiatus.
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#14
Looks good, I have been playing with WebCamXP, but the price of it is $$, the other thing i noticed is the delay in the video feed.

Going to keep searching for some other windows based software, that does multiple USB webcams & motion detection, but haven't had much luck so far.

Matt.
4x ATV2's (v4.3) XBMC Frodo12.2. Raspberry Pi running MYSQL 5.5.31-0+wheezy1. NAS is a Drobo FS
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#15
Looks good man! I wish I could code.

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Whole house media and security for home automation control?0