Of course at this point you may be questioning the need for remote controllers? In LinuxMCE jargon, these are called “orbiters”. Such orbiters can be your smartphone (Symbian or Blackberry) or dedicated remote control or an Internet tablet (such as the Nokia 800) or a Bluetooth/Wi-Fi enabled device. To use an orbiter, it must be somehow connected to your home network. Considering the capabilities of Bluetooth, I suggest you take a small walk inside your house: put one Bluetooth phone where you place the media center and make it discoverable. With another phone, visit all the rooms and see if you lose connection. If the connection works everywhere, then you will be done with a Bluetooth dongle. If not, you can consider using a Wi-Fi enabled device.
With all these features, I will not go into the details for viewing your photos, listening to music, watching your videos and watching TV. Have a look at the image and you will see what options are available. Needless to say they are plentiful. Ah, by the way, the screenshot is taken in a low-resolution setting. High-resolution brings alpha transparency.
When everything is complete you will have a stellar, and secure, automation center for the entire home. Let’s say you have two kids, one is 8 and the other is 17 years old, sitting in their own rooms with their own computers. You have lots of movies stored in the media center, or someplace on your network. You can define restrictions for your kids with their names or with their rooms. So, you will be able to restrict your 8 year old from watching “Teen” rated movies. It is easy to define all these restrictions inside the LinuxMCE Administration panel.
The bottom line is, with so many options, do not feel that LinuxMCE is for experts; all the menu items are intuitive and it is very easy for you to find your way around LinuxMCE, with everything being available through a point and click user interface. But as I emphasized before, you have to have everything defined properly before making such configurations.
Further uses are only limited to your imagination. Suppose that you want your lights to go dim when you start watching a movie. You can define an event under “Watching media” and add the appropriate commands (dimming lights in this case). Another option can be to turn on the lights when you enter a room. You can do that too by defining another event. Or have your sprinkler systems running in the garden for a specified period in time. Do not think that these are the only options, I am not a creative person and these are what pops in my mind first, you can obviously go further.
Finally, my opinion. If you are a do-it-yourself person, you can go all the way with LinuxMCE and automate your entire home through this distribution. If you decide to do so, I suggest you to start with the distribution’s website and take a look at the supported hardware. You wouldn’t want to go home with all those boxes to discover that a TV card is not working. But when you approach the end step by step, you will see that the efforts will pay in return.
In all I find LinuxMCE to be THE top media center for Linux, which serves many, MANY purposes. I only wish I could personally use LinuxMCE to build my own automation system (I can not do that in my country because it is unbelievably difficult, if not impossible, to find X10 devices.)