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I actually don't need video capability that much. It's really more of an intellectual exercise. Let me take that back. I do need video capability. It's just that, as I mentioned before, the kind of video capability I need, I'm just not going to get. I have a small DVD library, and I think it would be cool to rip all those DVDs to the disk and be able to browse them from a menu. When my kids were younger, and watched the same DVDs over and over, it would have been nice. Of course, if I were to rip my DVDs and put them on a media server, I would be in a legal gray area. Well, ripping a DVD will actually put you in a DMCA legal black area, as it's technically illegal to break copy protection, no matter how perfunctory it is. But, excuse my French, but that's bullshit. It is not immoral to media-shift or format-shift content that you have fairly purchased. Do you know what is immoral? Expecting people to pay a second time for a movie or song, just because you want to watch or listen to it on another device, or store it in a more convenient manner. And that includes ringtones made from songs you own.

And it would be wonderful if all of the TV shows and movies that my DVRs are constantly recording were stored centrally on one array, ready to be retrieved and played back on any video-capable device I own. It would be nice if I had the option to replace my overpriced satellite television service with pay-per-use IP-TV if I were an infrequent television watcher. If I had real TiVo brand DVRs, at least I'd be able to network them and swap shows between them, which wouldn't be centralized or efficient, but would be more convenient. Probably the main reason why I have historically wanted to watch video files on my TV is when I've heard about a great show, I've missed the first few episodes, so I download them from Bittorrent until I'm caught up. Thanks to the TV networks finally getting a clue, that's less necessary now, as many of these shows are now available on network-sponsored web sites like Hulu.

New gadgets, such as the Apple TV and the Roku are giving a glimmer of hope to this reality, as they allow you to either download from a wide selection of overpriced non-HD videos from iTunes or select from a pathetically small selection of non-HD video from Netflix that's free if you're already a Netflix subscriber. So close!

But whether it's Hulu, AppleTV, Roku, or Windows Media Center, it involves hooking up yet another specialized computing appliance directly up to your TV, and if you have multiple TVs, you have to buy multiple appliances. Well, enough grousing. Let's just declare the video aspect of our "Home Computer" project to be a partial failure. Let's move on to audio.

Let's just start by saying that audio has been a great success. The TV and movie industries have been somewhat successful in making convenience illegal, but the music industry has abjectly failed. Hooray! Many years ago, I ripped all my CDs to MP3 and put them in boxes that are now mouldering in storage. Yes, we're all philistines because the compression we inflict our music to has ruined it. True audiophiles can't even let their precious ears be sullied by CDs, and spend thousands of dollars on faith-based technology like fancy cables and power conditioners while the rest of us suffer in our ignorance, dancing to our overly-compressed files playing on our shoddy stock iPod earbuds. We're so deprived and we don't even know it! We love it for the convenience, and most of us would never go back to CDs, for all the better fidelity.

Case in point: our audio setup. It was inexpensive, and it's not just convenient, it's space age. A large repository of music files is stored on our media server. We're using iTunes to manage it. The sharing feature means that I can browse and play any file from this library on any of the other computers in the house. Even better, I'm using Apple's Airport Express to stream audio files from iTunes to an amplifier that's connected to speakers that I've built-into the house. What's compelling about Apple's solution isn't just that iTunes is widely used, integrates fully with the iPod/iPhone, and is relatively feature-rich and dependable. The most exciting thing about the setup is the iPhone/Touch app called Remote. I can pull out my iPhone, and use it to browse my entire music library and play what I want, while lying on the couch. Words can't express how cool that is. The best part is that whole-house audio has been big business for many years, and many cool systems are on the market to make it easy to play music from a central library in your different rooms. These systems all cost a lot of money; thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars. My system? I spent a lot of money on nice speakers, but removing them from the equation, I spent under $100 on the Airport Express and used an old amplifier I had lying around. I already own the iPhone. Even if you had to buy an amp and an iPod touch to do the same setup, it's still much less than your typical whole house audio system.

My system does have some shortcomings. I used a push-button switch built into the wall to control which areas of my house should have the music streamed to it. If I wanted that to be controlled automatically, there are a few ways of doing this, including using the A/B speaker outputs on the receiver, or using multiple Airport Express units. To control the receiver, either to turn it on or change speaker outputs, you'd need to use its remote control, and be able to see it. I got an IP to IR converter from Global Cache that should allow me to send IR commands to the receiver from my computer, and if I get the right kinds of scripts set up, I'd be able to do some important things, like not have to manually turn the amp on and off when I want to listen to music. It's such a daunting task, I haven't attempted it yet. I'll report back.

The next area I've been hoping to have my home server fill in is in the area of surveillance. Our project sponsors at Smarthome and Geeks.com provided some surveillance cameras, from big, LED-studded ones intended for outdoor nighttime use to tiny, hide-able ones that I think would be excellent ones to use to bust my kids when they're sneaking messy snacks down to the home theater. (How did I know?)

I ran specialized structured wire throughout the home during construction that carries an RG59 cable for video and a two-conductor power cable to likey locations for surveillance. So I have the cameras, and I have the cable. I even have a video card for my home server to receive four surveillance camera inputs. There are a variety of software programs that will receive these feeds and record them 24/7 to the hard drive. I can set the feeds to auto-delete after a set time, say, 48 hours, so if anything happens, I can retrieve the feeds and use them to figure out which of the neighbor kids broke my window. If I were really cool/paranoid, I would mirror all those feeds to an offsite fileserver to prevent a burglar from thwarting my surveillance by stealing my home server.

On the subject of the monitor we embedded in the wall, the idea was that this monitor could be used to display various information that's of interest to the household. If music is playing, it would display the iTunes visualization. A "dashboard" of weather, stock quotes, news ticker, or other news could be displayed. Perhaps if a movie is showing downstairs, it could be mirrored to this display. Or the surveillance cameras could be piped to that area. Perhaps when the doorbell rings, the front door surveillance camera kicks in. And by default, a slide show could be displayed, for some digital picture frame action.

Success on this front has been hit-or miss, mostly because of the limitation on Windows managing what's displayed on a second monitor. What I'm looking for is software that will allow two separate Windows user accounts to each display on a separate monitor, so someone could be browsing the web on one monitor, while automated scripts could be running in the other account, displaying the results in the other. If any readers have any ideas, we'd love to hear them.

The final frontier for the home server is one of the perennial favorites of geek homeowners: home automation. There are many fine software packages, commercial and open source that interface with the various home automation devices and protocols in the market. In fact, though there are different kinds of specialized devices for doing home automation, using a PC is surely the easiest and most flexible. The most straightforward and common kind of home automation is lighting control. Because lighting control has a history of being expensive, unreliable, complicated, and quirky, it has had limited penetration outside of the geek and ultra-luxury subcultures. But there have been great improvements in technology in the last few years. Other aspects of home automation that are interesting are controlling thermostats. I particularly would like to be able to set the thermostats throughout the house back to 50 degrees or so when we're out of town to save energy, but be able to tell them to turn back up the day before we come home so we don't come home to a cold house. I have also installed an electrical water main cutoff, so I can set water sensors in likely areas around the house that will automatically cut the water supply if there's a leak or rupture. We'll follow up with more information on our home automation initiative in a later article. Suffice to say that our home server will also be pulling duty as a home automation server.

In conclusion, our experiment at making a personal computer the nerve center of the home was only a partial success. Legal restrictions on media stand in the way of many conveniences, though the proliferation of hardware available to support our centralized system is mind-boggling, there are still some holes to be filled to bring my vision to reality. (TVs with gigabit ethernet that enable video streaming, for example). But even if our home server only ends up handling file server duties, audio, surveillance, home automation, and digital picture frame capability, it is still a wholly worthwhile enterprise. At this point, the software configureation required to make this all work is pretty daunting. However, it would not be a huge project for someone, maybe one of the home automation software vendors, to create an omnibus home server software package that included all of these capabilites, pre-configured. To make our "home computer" dreams become a reality, we're 90% there with the hardware, 70% there with software, and 10% with the legal framework. I think it's safe to conclude that we could easily have everything we want from a software/hardware standpoint at any time, but the legal issues might stand against it ever happening.

1. Home Computer, Page 1
2. Home Computer, Page 2