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Home Media Centre

What is it?

A PC-based system for displaying still pictures, playing music and showing videos through a TV. An additional feature is that all content is delivered through an Internet server to a browser client thus allowing access from around the house via wireless LAN enabled laptops or desktop PCs.

Why was it built?

The Media Centre was built for two reasons. Since the purchase of a digital camera, our family had amassed over 3000 pictures in three years. For all the great things a digital camera can do for you, you still have the issue of how you show your pictures to family and friends (and store them effectively). Selecting a few for print out is fine, but to create albums usually turns into a fairly expensive procedure. My initial solution was to show the pictures on a laptop, but since the originals are stored on a large drive on a desktop PC for backup purposes, they have to be copied to the laptop first and usually deleted later on. It’s also a bit of a pain to crowd round a laptop and on a bright day it’s not very easy to see the screen. There was another issue which storing pictures in a file system couldn’t solve: how could you search for pictures?

It soon became apparent that this project could also solve two other entertainment related issues. Firstly like most people we have a number of music CDs that could potentially benefit from being categorised. Moreover, storing the whole CD collection as MP3 files on the hard disk and using a relational database to catalogue them would create a true random play capability across the whole CD library. Secondly, having created several home movies with a digital video camera, burning them to DVD can be a time-consuming (and an expensive process) and several videos soon fill a DVD. The Media Centre could also be used to play these MPEG files directly through the television.

What does it look like and how does it function?

When the system is accessed (you select AV2 input on the TV and switch the amp to the input from the PC – which is all done via a Philips Pronto) the television shows the front page in the browser. Here are some photos of the system in use:

The front menu

The results of a search

A screenshow in action

Playing a video (you would normally view the video full screen)

Selecting some music

Pictures

Viewing pictures

You have several options of how you want to find and display pictures. One way is to select the “View by date” option. This shows a date view in the left hand frame from which a set of pictures can be displayed.

Then, clicking on a date will start a slide show within the browser of the selected photos. Note the Auto slide show check box at the top of the screen. If this is checked then a slide show starts automatically once you have selected a date to view. Otherwise, as is shown here, you get to see thumbnails for all the photos and can choose which one you want to see full screen, or simply click the slide show button at the top to view a rolling show. One of the nice things about modern browsers is you can show them in full screen mode with no menus, window title bar or status bar. This means the screen is completely filled by the picture.

Alternatively, you can input some text to search on:

Here, searching for all black and white pictures of trees returns the results.

Another way to search for pictures is to do a keyword search. Clicking the View by Keyword button would yield:

From here, the user can select a set of words to search on. This search is useful because you know that one of the words must be associated with a picture because this list is built up from all the unique metadata attached to each picture.

The last way to view pictures is to use the Lucky Dip button. This simply selects about 60 random pictures from the database and displays them in a slide show. It gives a good “unique” album each time because it picks randomly from all the pictures in the database.

Another point to note is that whenever a slideshow is being viewed, a piece of music is downloaded to the browser page from the CD library and plays while the slide show is running.

Adding pictures

To get pictures into the system is pretty straightforward. The server has a directory structure that is: Year
Month + day
Month + day
…. So, for example:

You first copy the files from your camera over to the hard disk on the server. The next stage is actually to import the file names into the database and add meta data. Note: the pictures are left in the filing system. The database is used for metadata, not to store the picture data.

From the media centre you click on the “Add a set” button and you are presented with:

Here, you enter the date for when the photo(s) were taken and the directory they are in (which you can select from the “View directory” button). When you hit Save, the filenames are stored in the database and you are taken to a screen that shows all the uncategorised photos.

You can then start the process of adding keywords to the photos so that they may be searched later on. To do this, you simply click the Edit button on each photo, which shows the edit screen that you can then fill out:

Videos

Another function of the Media Centre is to play videos. You can upload your video files to the system and create new entries in the database to point at the files. You also create a small thumbnail for each video to make selection easier. From the front menu, clicking the Videos button shows this screen:

Clicking on the video will then play it, using whatever MPEG video player you have installed on the PC.

Music

Selecting the Music menu allows you to play either a track, an album or 20 random tracks from any of the albums via the Random play feature:

Again, all the music information (track, title, genre, audience) is stored in the database and the MP3 files from the CDs are stored on the hard disk. Clicking on the track or Album title will play the track or whole CD. The system creates play list files that are then sent to the windows media player so that multiple tracks can be played.

There are also a couple of filtering options – both on the Audience and the type (genre) of music. These are accessed from drop downs at the top:

Then, only the tracks that meet the criteria are shown and of course Random play will only play a selection of tracks that are within that set.

Speech recognition

The system can also be operated through your own voice. This uses the Microsoft Speech API that recognises your speech and converts it to text. The text is then matched up with various "command" words in the system. These can be, for example, "Pop", "Classical", "Easy listening" and so on. If the relevant command word is recognised, it is paired with an action. In the case of music it will be a URL that delivers a Windows Media Player playlist that contains the album or list of tracks that are to be played. You can also say "Movie Trailers" to bring up the Apple Quicktime movie trailer site. Alternatively, saying "Pictures" will deliver a slide show of randomly selected pictures from the picture library.
To select a particular album, since it is quite difficult to get the system to recognise a full album title, I have a printed card of all the albums on the system with a unique id for each (like "101"). You view the card, pick an album and simply say the unique number and off the system goes!

System details

To run this system, I bought a Shuttle Spacewalker SN41G2 nForce2 from Overclockers.co.uk:

This fits fairly neatly on the television glass shelf, just behind the Nintendo Gamecube.
Although the box is more than sufficient for the task, I found the onboard GeForce 4Mx - for some reason - output a duller signal than the TV or DVD inputs, so I added a Radeon 9200 graphics card that has a very good quality TV out.
The television is 32” Sony (KV32FQ75). The system is running Windows XP with the application served up using PHP (http://www.php.net/) and APACHE (http://www.apache.org/) is used as the web server.
The database for storing all the meta data is MySQL (http://www.mysql.com).

Connectivity

The Shuttle PC is plugged into the television via an S-Video cable. The audio output from the television is plugged into a Sony DAV S-300 DVD player (which has an integrated Dolby Decoder) and 5 speakers and a sub-woofer. Unfortunately this Sony player doesn't have an optical input although the Shuttle NForce 2 board does have an optical out so you can't get digital sound.

The system is controlled via a Logitech wireless mouse and keyboard.

Sony Playstation Portable

I have also extended the system to deliver content to the Sony Playstation Portable. Since the version 2.0 of the PSP's OS provides an Internet browser, this was pretty simple.
The media center already has a mode where you can select from a variety of albums and calling browser applications will show a random picture from one of these albums. Typically this might be a recent holiday or a set of favourite photos. Now with a PSP you can leave it around the house showing off pictures a little bit like an old-style printed picture in a frame.

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