Here's where I'm at now - close to a week after cutting the cable and basically being set up. Very happy! Ok, well, to be honest, I haven't really had much time to watch TV or movies, but, my GF has watched a little bit, and we started catching up on Hero's last night.
I'll start with the remote. Its great, really nice to finally have one remote. So nice, actually, my GF was motivated to email this:
I went into the living room and realized I forgot to shut the TV/Mac system down, so I picked up the remote and hit the off button. And I look and I'm like, damn, everything shut down except the TV - now what button do I press?
So I'm sitting there thinking what to do and I look down at the remote and amazingly it apparently read my mind and says, "Did everything shut off?"
So I said, "No, dammit". Then 2 seconds later it says to me, "So now is everything off?" And I said, no, there's still one thing on, which is the TV, but since these are yes and no questions I can't tell you that ...
Then without missing a beat it asks if it's the TV that's still on. "Yes, actually; it's the TV that didn't shut down." So next thing I know the TV shuts down. Wow.
"So did that work? Is it off now?" it smugly responds.
Yeah, it worked. Thanks. That was actually easy, pain-free and fast. Three adjectives that usually don't describe a remote ...
I can't wait until the next time I have to pick it up!
When was the last time someone got excited about a remote! Considering now 4 remotes have been replaced with one, everyone is happy!
With the Harmony and the Plex, its all right there, and the viewing experience is really nice. With TV shows, you select, and the theme music starts playing. All the artwork is in place, formatted properly, looks great, the show descriptions are all there, the shows are in order, full episode description and oh, I am really loving pressing play and putting the remote down. By that I mean, all the commercials are gone. With Tivo, it was always picking up the Tivo, pressing the 30 sec adv. button 4 or 5 times, oh damn, went too far, rewind, etc... Now, you can see, a show is 42 or 43 minutes, and just plays. SO nice.
Movies - Again, so nice - all the artwork for the DVDs is there, most have fan art in the background, "I" is mapped on the Harmony so you can press info and get more info on the movie, change the artwork, and best of all, watch the trailer! This is so nice, something I always wanted with the Apple TV setup. The quality of the trailer for this section isn't HD, but its definitely good.
An issue I ran into last night which drove me crazy. After watching Hero's, we tried to watch a different show but it didn't work. Played around a bit and found the mini wasn't connected to the Mac Pro and wouldn't connect. Going to the Pro, I couldn't connect to the mini. But, both computers could connect/share with the macbook laptop. SOOO strange. Was driving me crazy. I ran Maintenance 3.8 on both (repaired permissions, etc..) reset both computers, reset the router, etc... Long story short, the last thing I tried, which turned out to be it, was unplug the Netgear Cat 5/6 extension wall plugs and plug them back in - bam - everything was back up and running. So, if you run into these kind of things, like with most problems, unplug EVERYTHING electrical and plug back in lol.
Ok, so now the one thing which is kinda a thorn in my side - the display.
If the mini is off, and I manually turn it on, then it goes through the start up, the shared folders mount, and the plex starts in full screen and I'm good to go.
Shut down with the harmony is to turn off the onkyo and samsung, and the plex gets a sleep command, which also sleeps the mini. This all works great. I don't want the mini on 24/7 using power for no reason obviously.
The problem is the wake - everything turns on fine with the harmony - onkyo turns on, samsung comes on, and the Play command is sent to the mini/plex which wakes it from sleep.
Now this doesn't happen all the time, but I would say 75% of the time - where the screen flickers, I can see the desktop of the mini, but not the plex yet, and then the screen goes either all blue, black, or to snow. If its snow, I can either unplug the display connection from the mini, and plug back it and everything works good. Or if you wait about 5-10 minutes, it comes back up on its own sometimes.
If its black or blue, that sometimes works, but usually not. If you get the mouse out, you can see the cursor moving around and sometimes you can get expose to move windows and such, but either way, its a PIA.
I'm not sure if this is because the samsung TV is kinda old (4 years, I think) and now, the LCD TVs are better at accepting different HDMI inputs or what. I do know my samsung DOES have problems as a TV where I can lose picture and it goes to black (it will actually say HDMI connection lost) for like 5 seconds, then flicker and come back on - very annoying. TV repairman said it would be like $600 to fix - forget that - but never the less, this is my current biggest problem.
I think its the TV itself and not the setup. Of course, I'm hoping to upgrade the TV to a nice 1080 LCD in the summer or fall, hopefully a 2008 samsung which will have prices cut to make way for the new badass 09 samsungs.
I don't really want to spend the money, the current TV, when working, works and looks great - BUT, I mean, if the TV is fracked up (yes, a nod to BSG :) ) then hey, its not my fault, right?
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