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LinuxMCE is of course a open-source media centre distro.\u00a0 But did you know you can use it as a home automation controller as well?\u00a0 Other goodies are lurking under the bonnet too such as the integrated Asrerisk VoIP system, already pre-configured for many providers and phone hardware.\u00a0 Read on for the overview of this amazing free system.<\/span><\/p>\n Submission by: Marie O. Schmidt<\/a> – LinuxMCE is known foremost for its Media Centre<\/strong> functionality.\u00a0\u00a0 LinuxMCE does media, yes. TV viewing and recording, by utilizing either VDR or MythTV, DVD\/CD viewing\/listening and ripping, utilizing Xine as a media player, initial support for Blu-ray Disc using MPlayer.<\/p>\n But media is only 20% of the LinuxMCE experience. On top of that LinuxMCE facilitates whole house automation. Anything that can be electrically manipulated, LinuxMCE can control.\u00a0 Combining media and Home Automation<\/strong> produces synergy effect. Starting to play a media file automatically dims the lights in that room for example.<\/p>\n On top of media and home automation, LinuxMCE provides a phone system. Utilizing a full blown asterisk distro with out of the box configurations for VoIP<\/strong> providers, plug and play support for hardware VoIP phones, LinuxMCE eases the use of Asterisk for the average user.<\/p>\n Combining media, home automation and telephony allows the media to stop, the lights to come back up, when an important phone call comes in. All unimportant callers can be automatically routed to a voice mail box, when you are watching a movie for example.<\/p>\n But LinuxMCE goes even further. When you leave you arm your house, and LinuxMCE utilizes analogue and IP cameras to monitor your property as part of its Security System<\/strong>. LinuxMCE turns off all your AV gear, and your lights. If one of the motion sensors, or one of the cameras detects movement then lights associated with those motion sensor or those cameras, can be turned on and the picture of the intruder will be sent to your mobile. On your phone you have the ability to click a button and talk directly to the intruder via your AV gear and the connected speakers.<\/p>\n That’s around 80% of what LinuxMCE is all about. The last 20% is, each Media Director, the devices that control your TV and\/or projectors, are also usable as full blown Linux KDE desktops, with OpenOffice.org, The Gimp, Firefox and Thunderbird, just to name a few of the applications available.<\/p>\n LinuxMCE can be used by all kinds of Orbiters<\/strong>. An orbiter is the user interface to control the system and with it your entire home. From a Nokia n810, over a Cisco 7970, a web based front-end, a windows front-end, to a regular IR remote using the TV and on-screen-orbiter, there are wide variety of control possibilities. All projects\u00a0 utilized by LinuxMCE are under a single coherent user interface. The user does not need to care, whether LinuxMCE is using VDR or Xine to play a specific media. For the user the interface is always the same.<\/p>\n LinuxMCE supports a number of different home automation systems and you can use multiple protocols simultaneously . You can use old X-10<\/strong> stuff, together with the latest Z-Wave<\/strong> products, because LinuxMCE is the big brother of all controllers. Apart from those two, LinuxMCE currently supports PLCBUS<\/strong>, Insteon<\/strong> and EIB\/KNX<\/strong>. To add support for additional protocols and controls, one needs to get have the protocol for the controller and a couple of weeks time.<\/p>\n LinuxMCE works best, if you follow the guidelines available in the Wiki (http:\/\/wiki.linuxmce.org<\/a>) regarding hardware recommendations. For the beginning, one should really follow the rules and install\u00a0 LinuxMCE the way it was intended to be used. That way you achieve a much better out of box experience.<\/p>\n LinuxMCE is freely available from http:\/\/www.linuxmce.org<\/a>. A friendly support forum is available at http:\/\/forum.linuxmce.org<\/a>. The IRC channel #linuxmce is carried on irc.freenode.net<\/p>\n Want More?<\/strong>\u00a0–\u00a0Follow us<\/a>\u00a0on Twitter,\u00a0Like us<\/a>\u00a0on Facebook, or subscribe to our\u00a0RSS feed<\/a>. You can even get these news stories\u00a0delivered via email<\/a>, straight to your inbox every day<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" LinuxMCE is of course a open-source media centre distro.\u00a0 But did you know you can use it as a home automation controller as well?\u00a0 Other…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"apple_news_api_created_at":"2020-06-23T15:44:16Z","apple_news_api_id":"48d17fff-6d7e-4e19-bc69-2b8b5525825b","apple_news_api_modified_at":"2020-06-23T15:44:16Z","apple_news_api_revision":"AAAAAAAAAAD\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/w==","apple_news_api_share_url":"https:\/\/apple.news\/ASNF__21-Thm8aSuLVSWCWw","apple_news_coverimage":0,"apple_news_coverimage_caption":"","apple_news_is_hidden":"","apple_news_is_paid":"","apple_news_is_preview":"","apple_news_is_sponsored":"","apple_news_maturity_rating":"","apple_news_metadata":"\"\"","apple_news_pullquote":"","apple_news_pullquote_position":"","apple_news_slug":"","apple_news_sections":[],"apple_news_suppress_video_url":false,"apple_news_use_image_component":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[20,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2615","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-linux","category-new-products"],"apple_news_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2615"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2615"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2615\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52241,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2615\/revisions\/52241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2615"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2615"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/automatedhome.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2615"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"LinuxMCE\"](\"\/images\/news\/linuxmce_2.jpg\")
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