First Post

I've decided to start this blog as a way of documenting my never ending quest to make a customised media centre and home automation system.

After trying a few different systems (LinuxMCE, MediaPortal and XBMC) I've decided to base my system on XBMC and Eventghost.

I went with XBMC as it is highly customisable, both in its looks (there are many skins available) and there are loads of plugins and scripts to add extra features.

I have installed the current stable build called Dharma, but there is a test build called Eden, which offers more features but still has its bugs.

I have also installed the MQ3 skin as it provides "the look" I want for my media centre and has some nice display options for TV shows and Movies. The great thing about this skin is it can be used with Dharma and Eden so it will make upgrading less of a pain when the time comes

I'm using EventGhost to handle the automation.

Again customisation is the key here. EventGhost allows pretty much any event which occurs on your PC to be captured and trigger macros and actions.

In its simplest form I'm using it to translate remote presses to actions in XBMC. Then there are also more complicated macros and scenarios activated by events such as an RFID item showing up on my Mir:ror RFID scanner (more on this in a a later post). One of these activates a morning scenario which turns on the TV, lights and set top box and sets the channel so I can watch the morning news.

The potential with EventGhost is huge, and my config file continues to grow. This too I will go into in more depth in a future post.

The next series of posts will hopefully bring this blog upto date with how my system is at this time.