It came to me today that my ideas on a Multimedia PC really falls under Home Automation. I think a lot of things I want to do with this PC are directly related to Home Automation and the media player portion of the tasks are a subset of the Home Automation device. So I am going to change the Namespace on my Wiki from Multimedia to HomeAutomation once I get a chance. This will make the wiki a little broader in it's content. I Think I will also change the Multimedia Blog category to Home Automation.
I have an old PC that isn't really doing anything so I decided to make it into a multimedia PC for my home entertainment center. I looked around a little bit to see if there are any freeware applications that will handle this application. I found Freevo and MythTV. Both of these applications are Linux based which is ok for some people but I am a .Net developer so I wanted a Windows .Net solution. I haven't found anything that is written in C# so I decided to start my own for now to see how far I could take it.
Here are some things I want to do
- Play MP3
- Play My Home Videos
- Slideshow pictures
- X10 Home control
- Speech and Voice recognition
- Record TV Shows
- Monitor Home Security
- Get News feed with speech
- Weather reports
- RSS Aggregator
- Internet Radio
- Home Wiki
- Audio/Text Message center
- Allarm clock
- Play Games
I started a Home Automation Wiki Wiki to keep notes on my progress.