I think I forgot to post this, but I was having an issue when watching a show that pressing the Exit on the Harmony 550 was taking me all the way back to the main menu screen and I couldn't access the other episodes of the show without a lot of hassle.
Turns out the solution is pretty simple. Just go into your Harmony remote software and remap the "Exit" button. You want to change it from "exit" to "esc". That solved the issue for me and I haven't had any issues since.
Showing posts with label Logitech Harmony 550 remote. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Logitech Harmony 550 remote. Show all posts
Wednesday, 22 April 2009
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
I'm loving the setup, a networking issue solved, and a display issue still ongoing
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?
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?
Thursday, 2 April 2009
Progress Update: Cable Cut, Issues and tweaks
Its been busy lately, but I have been working on the project. The good news is that, generally speaking, everything works. I actually turned in cable cards today and canceled Tivo last week. Nice! The Harmony 550 remote also came in works well too. That all being said, I am working though some issues which will require tweaking.
Current Issues and tweaks:
1. Video playback: As you know, I am having the Mac Pro sharing folders to the mini over the network (wired with Netgear wall plugs). The .avi files generated from the torrent downloads are great. Full screen, sharp, looks very good and no playback issues. The Video TS DVDs though are another story. It seems to take a longer than hoped time to actually start playback once you select a DVD. I would say about 15 seconds or so. And once it starts playing it pauses for a second or two every 15 seconds or so of playback as if it needs to buffer. This seems to happen regardless of skin. I have played with the cache size in the settings but that doesn't seem to have any effect on it. So I'm working on this issue. I would rather not have to plug it in direct to the mini, but we'll see what happens.
2. Mounting Shared Volumes/Disks: This leads to the related problem of mounting the disks. I'm not sure why, but if I sleep or reset the mini, I have to CMND+K to remount both the shared folder and the movies USB drive in the shared folder. I have both mountings in the login sequence, but the mounting fails. Of course, this is annoying because I want to sleep the mini when not in use, and hence, this affects the Harmony remote login macro sequence.
Keep in mind, I am working on making this system as easy and seemless as possible. I want anyone to come in, pick up the remote, and without any instruction (or very very little) be able to start watching TV or movies and be like "wow cool! wait, this is a computer?"
I want the login sequence on start up input from the Harmony to be: Turn on TV, Turn on Onkyo receiver, Wake mini, mount the shared drives and folders, open plex, go full screen on plex. From there, user uses the Harmony to select what they want to watch. I basically have this setup, with the mounting error being the one snag for now.
3. Aeon Stark vs. Plex Mediastream skin: Stark looks fantastic. No doubt about it. That being said, I have been playing with the standard mediastream skin. And while the homepage interface isn't quite as nice and visually wowing as Stark, I think, at least for now, mediastream might be more to my liking. Once you select the TV shows or Movies, and get in there, there is just much more information readily available on screen to see. Like with Stark (or Aeon in general), you do get fan art in the background, but unlike Stark/Aeon, you get a lot more information right there immediately. All the TV episode info is there, including episode number, description, ratings, etc... I just know that myself and my GF, and really other people that might be over, I think will prefer the information all being there easy to see and get to than the skin which is a little more visually appealing. And the mediastream skin does look good too! One other thing is that the Stark is currently not officially supported with Plex. It still is an Xbox deal, although there is talk the Plex version will be released in the future. I think I'll end up staying with the Mediastream and wait to see what the Plex version of Stark does. I'll just do some screen shots later and repost them so you can see.
I think that covers my current issues. really not that much. Playback studdering and mounting of drives and folders. As soon as I get it worked out, I'll post the solutions. And I'll post some screenshots of the Stark v. Mediastream soon. Ok, here are the pics of the MediaStream in action. Keep in mind, the main screen shots, of the TV in the field and the movie seats, you can change to whatever you want, just like in Aeon / Stark
Current Issues and tweaks:
1. Video playback: As you know, I am having the Mac Pro sharing folders to the mini over the network (wired with Netgear wall plugs). The .avi files generated from the torrent downloads are great. Full screen, sharp, looks very good and no playback issues. The Video TS DVDs though are another story. It seems to take a longer than hoped time to actually start playback once you select a DVD. I would say about 15 seconds or so. And once it starts playing it pauses for a second or two every 15 seconds or so of playback as if it needs to buffer. This seems to happen regardless of skin. I have played with the cache size in the settings but that doesn't seem to have any effect on it. So I'm working on this issue. I would rather not have to plug it in direct to the mini, but we'll see what happens.
2. Mounting Shared Volumes/Disks: This leads to the related problem of mounting the disks. I'm not sure why, but if I sleep or reset the mini, I have to CMND+K to remount both the shared folder and the movies USB drive in the shared folder. I have both mountings in the login sequence, but the mounting fails. Of course, this is annoying because I want to sleep the mini when not in use, and hence, this affects the Harmony remote login macro sequence.
Keep in mind, I am working on making this system as easy and seemless as possible. I want anyone to come in, pick up the remote, and without any instruction (or very very little) be able to start watching TV or movies and be like "wow cool! wait, this is a computer?"
I want the login sequence on start up input from the Harmony to be: Turn on TV, Turn on Onkyo receiver, Wake mini, mount the shared drives and folders, open plex, go full screen on plex. From there, user uses the Harmony to select what they want to watch. I basically have this setup, with the mounting error being the one snag for now.
3. Aeon Stark vs. Plex Mediastream skin: Stark looks fantastic. No doubt about it. That being said, I have been playing with the standard mediastream skin. And while the homepage interface isn't quite as nice and visually wowing as Stark, I think, at least for now, mediastream might be more to my liking. Once you select the TV shows or Movies, and get in there, there is just much more information readily available on screen to see. Like with Stark (or Aeon in general), you do get fan art in the background, but unlike Stark/Aeon, you get a lot more information right there immediately. All the TV episode info is there, including episode number, description, ratings, etc... I just know that myself and my GF, and really other people that might be over, I think will prefer the information all being there easy to see and get to than the skin which is a little more visually appealing. And the mediastream skin does look good too! One other thing is that the Stark is currently not officially supported with Plex. It still is an Xbox deal, although there is talk the Plex version will be released in the future. I think I'll end up staying with the Mediastream and wait to see what the Plex version of Stark does. I'll just do some screen shots later and repost them so you can see.
I think that covers my current issues. really not that much. Playback studdering and mounting of drives and folders. As soon as I get it worked out, I'll post the solutions. And I'll post some screenshots of the Stark v. Mediastream soon. Ok, here are the pics of the MediaStream in action. Keep in mind, the main screen shots, of the TV in the field and the movie seats, you can change to whatever you want, just like in Aeon / Stark
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