Hack a Day » hometheater

Boxee social media center public alpha

Eliot — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:00:00 +0000

Boxee is the latest piece of software to enter the home theater PC space. It’s recently become available as a public alpha. The first build is only for OSX 10.5, but Ubuntu is coming. Built on the XBMC code base-they even hosted the XBMC developer con last weekend-it has the same goal of letting you navigate and watch/listen to all of your media from your using just a remote. There’s more than just that though.

What Boxee adds is a social layer. In the application, it shows your friends’ viewing activities. You can add account info for various video services to get to your saved playlists and subscriptions. You can download podcasts and send your listening habits to Last.FM.

Your online profile can be hooked to Twitter, FriendFeed, and tumblr, which can publish your recommendations, what you’re watching, what you’re listening to, and what you’re rating.

It’s only alpha so you can expect some quirkiness, and no user guide makes it an adventure. We love the look of the interface. Unfortunately all the dynamic resizing, animated, sliding, floating info boxes make it behave like the zooming user interface‘s retarded cousin.

What about the OSXBMC port we covered last month? The developers have decided to fork the code and develop it independently from the Linux port. It will still be nearly in sync with the Linux port, but they’ll have the freedom to removes things that are broken or unnecessary.

In any case, it’s great to have two fine media center replacements for Apple’s Front Row.

DIY Slingbox

Will O'Brien — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:44:00 +0000

[David] took some interesting steps to put together his own Slingbox-ish setup. He used a Mac mini running Quicktime Broadcaster to capture the stream from a Firewire video camera which his cable/satellite receiver is plugged into. You’ll have to use an OS X machine, but that’s not too difficult these days. Broadcaster is about the simplest way to capture from Firewire and stream. We’re using it in our own office to multicast the signal from a Canadian satellite box.

LCD projector repair

Will O'Brien — Sun, 25 May 2008 18:00:00 +0000

[Kieth] picked up an Infocus projector only to find that it needed some repair. The polarizer on the blue light path was toast. When he parted out an Optoma projector he scored a polarizer that was just about right for the repair. It’s a good read even if you don’t have a projector in pieces at the moment. He ended up bending the mounting bracket a bit to hold the filter and got his projector fully up and running again.

Projector hacks roundup

Will O'Brien — Fri, 23 May 2008 06:50:00 +0000

Projectors have long been a favorite toy of hardware hackers. From reactive displays to cheap home theater, there are plenty of reasons to play with photons. Seeing some cheap projector repair put us in the mood to cover some of our favorite projector projects – check em out after the break.

We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention [Johnny Lee]‘s interactive whiteboard right off the bat. His software uses a LED light pen and a wiimote to detect the users actions. If you’re looking for the code, hit the second project on this page. Oh, and don’t forget his automatic projector calibration project.

LumenLab projectors are just the thing for the true DIYer. Take a standard desktop or laptop LCD, strip the casing, add some optics and a decent light source (Metal Halide works great) and you’ve got your own projector. They can produce HD quality or be built as cheaply as possible. We wrote up our own build a while back for engadget.

If you’re considering building your own, you should look into some of the nicer custom projector controller projects, like the P-Brain.

We’ve seen a few DIY screens. The blackout cloth version, the tyvek/PVC version and the mix your own paint version and the DIY electric version.

Cheap projector repair

Will O'Brien — Thu, 22 May 2008 17:00:00 +0000

[Ryan] sent in this writeup on some DIY projector repair. The write-up is a little hard to follow, but maybe it’ll inspire some future projector landfill saves. [Dissident] replaced the light bulb and ballast in an older DLP projector with some salvaged MR-16 hardware from an even older over head projector. The main trick required was to bridge the trigger leads that tell the projector that the bulb is on and working.

DIY Home Theater Preamplifier

Will O'Brien — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 06:38:00 +0000

[Dane] built this excellent home theater pre-amplifier. He used [Mark Hennesy]‘s pre-amp design to start with, and added selectable XLR, RCA, SPDIF and even USB audio inputs. Discrete inputs from his DVD player provide surround input, and an analog matrix creates 7.1 surround from the 5.1 input. The design is very elegant, and even uses a VFD display that appears blue with some filters. I usually just buy my HT gear, but projects like this make me seriously consider re-building my entire HT from scratch.

Movie screen mask controller

Will O'Brien — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 21:22:00 +0000

I was looking for some ideas for one of my little projects, and I ran across this screen mask controller that [Danny] was working on a while back. The roller drops a mask down, and an optical encoder lets the controller know the position of the mask. The final version is supposed to support ethernet, but I couldn’t find any updates on the project.

DIY colorimeter

Will O'Brien — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 06:11:00 +0000

[brian] tipped me to this excellent colormeter project for calibrating your home theater/HD/etc It was designed specifically for the HCFR Colormeter software project. The project page is in english, but the probe writeup is in french. The fish well help you understand it while you resist the taunts avoid the flying cows. The device has at least one color sensor (a second is optional as well as an IR led or two for computer hardware controls) and connects to your computer via USB. The brain is a PIC 18F2550 (the fish calls it a PEAK) – no in circuit programming, you’ll need a programmer to build it.