I have a front projector in one room and a flat panel display in another. Instead of purchasing separate sets for components for each display, I'd rather just use a HDMI distribution box so any source could be routed to either display. Unfortunately, this is turning out to be an impossible dream.

Most of the devices available are HDMI splitters, so they can display the same source on both displays. However, they can not display different sources on different displays and this is the functionality I really want. A HDMI matrix switch is required to do this. The Gefen 4×4 HDMI HDTV Matrix Switch will perform this task but there are two problems. The first is that it is expensive: $2000 list price. The second problem is that it doesn't support the HDMI repeater bit, so can't be installed between a HDMI source device and a Audio/Video Receiver.

The HDMI Repeater Bit - yet another way to prevent HDMI from working: A HDMI switch/matrix device can't be placed between a source device and a HDMI Audio/Video Receiver if it doesn't support the bit. There are also problems if the source device (DVD player, cable box, etc.) doesn't support this bit. So, if this bit is not supported by any device in the chain, you can only connect the source device directly to the display. Here are a couple of links to related discussions on the Gefen forum. John Caldwell wrote an article describing the symptoms.

To summarize: you can't use a HDMI switch, an HDMI matrix device, or even a HDMI A/V Receiver if you have components that don't support the HDMI repeater bit. The HDMI source device must be connected directly to the display if the repeater bit is not supported.

The DVI interface was great; it allows for low-cost splitting and distribution of the signal. But the movie industry forced HDCP Digital Rights Management into the HDMI specification, driving incompatibility into devices and thousands of dollars of cost into signal distribution. I've been a long-time supporter of purchasing your content as opposed to downloading it for free. I really want to continue to purchase and own movies legitimately. However, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to do so when the industry producing the content has no regard for the needs of their customers. Hopefully, someone will release a device that removes the HDCP from a HDMI signal so I can distribute the content I've legitimately purchased.

I recently discovered that X10 Wireless Technologies Inc was trying to post false customer testimonials on my site. Upon further investigation, I also discovered that they "The X10 Gang" has been trying to game Digg.com as well.I found 8 users that I believed to be part of The X10 Gang. I looked-up the Digg and Submission history for these users and found 25 total stories. Of these 25 stroies, 23 either pointed to an X10 website or to a story about X10. These users only dugg stories submitted by one another — but didn't digg any submissions by any other users. Furthermore, there are two users who have dugg only 1 story each - the same story - and it had only 4 total diggs, all of which were by the "X10 Gang". (The story details and user names are included below.)

I'm not sure how many actual people comprise The X10 Gang. It might be a group of X10 employees, it might be a single person with several accounts, but I think it is probably a combination of the two.

Luckily, Digg.com is based on the Wisdom of Crowds, and The X10 Gang isn't big enough to qualify. The most diggs any of the stories received was 5 - not nearly enough to make it to the front page.

I found similar submissions by the same user names at reddit.com, but none of those stories had more than 1 vote and couldn't tell if there was a conspiracy or not.

I think it is great that X10 Wireless Technologies Inc. is submitting news stories to Digg. But I think their cross-voting collusion is unethical, especially when it is being used for marketing purposes and the users are paid by the company being promoted.

Read the rest of this entry »

I recently wrote a short review of the Harmony 1000 touch panel remote. Yesterday afternoon, that post received a suspicious comment entitled "Screw Harmony, the iconRemote Rocks!" from someone using the name illuminati and the e-mail address illuminati939@hotmail.com. The problem is that the comment was posted by an employee of X10 Wireless Technology Inc and they did not divulge their affiliation. I'm not making baseless claims — I have proof and can share it if necessary. In my opinion, this is deceptive marketing and is in violation of the marketing code of ethics.

The comment told the story of how the person purchased a Logitech Harmony remote control for their mom and all of the problems they had programming it — and the problems their mom had using it. Their poor mom allegedly couldn't press the buttons or read the text on the LCD screen. The Harmony Remote was supposedly too difficult to program or use. (In my opinion, the Logitech Harmony remotes are the easiest to program of any remote out there, given the level of functionality they produce.)

The comment went on to describe how they received a special e-mail from X10, allowing them and 100 other lucky customers to pre-order this new, soon-to-be-released remote. The commenter said they received one and it was supposedly far superior to the Logitech Harmony remotes. And their mom loved it too. Aww, how nice.

I did check out the pre-launch page for this new remote (of course, the link was included in the comment.) It includes even more "customer" testimonials from respected reviewers such as Dave G., Jay D., and Bill Z. I'd bet these people don't even exist. Unless X10 can offer proof that these guys are real, non-affiliated customers, I'm going to assume that they are also falsified.

The commenter implied that the Harmony Remotes lose their memory when the batteries are replaced - this is false. Based on the content of their web page, the new X10 remote does lose its memory when the batteries are replaced - but don't worry, it's not a problem because "Mom" said it was really easy to reprogram the remote. The Harmony remotes use Smart State technology to automatically set each device to the proper power state and input state. If a component somehow gets to be in the wrong state, there is a help button on the Harmony Remote that will walk the user through fixing the problem. The X10 remote has no such features, plus the macros have to be manually programmed. These limitations were never mentioned.

Because of the lacking feature set and the deceptive and unethical practices of X10 Wireless Technology Inc, I maintain my recommendation of the Logitech Harmony Remotes — over the X10 universal remotes and pretty much any other.

Here is the full text of the comment:

I found an interesting article related to my 1080P Does Matter post (as well as my Home Theater Calculator.)  It gives some additional perspective on the resolving power of the human eye.  One key difference I noticed is that it states the resolving capability of our eyes to be 0.01 degrees, where as I've used a figure of 0.0167 degrees (0.6 arc-minute vs 1.0 arc minute.) This is not a huge difference; both are estimates based on the average eye.  I'm just glad that the values are so close.

The figure I found most interesting was the total resolution capability when taking everything (eye, eye movement, field-of-view, time, the processing power of the human brain).  The figure is astounding: 576 megapixels of image data.  No, this doesn't mean that high-def video needs to have even higher resolutions; this figure has nothing to do with looking at a home theater screen playing video.

Read the entire article: Your Eye's "megapixel" Resolution

I think Ultimate Tag Warrior is one of the most useful WordPress plugins available for Serach Engine Optimization. For those who are familiar, it allows authors to add descriptive tags (keywords), helping search engines categorize the content and ultimately increasing site traffic. This feature is so useful that there are a bunch of people who believe it should be incorporated into the core of WordPress. Unfortunately, to be so popular, I find it surprising that the two latest versions are causing serious problems with the WordPress search feature.

Versions 3.1415926 and 3.14159265 have incorrect table joins in the search function. So, if a post (or page) doesn't have tags, it will not be returned in the search result. My site had this problem for at least a couple of months before I accidentally discovered it. I spent the next hour troubleshooting, thinking I had plugin conflicts. Turns out, it was just a problem with UTW — one that was reported about 2 months ago in UTW forum and still hasn't been fixed.

This is a great plugin but it needs to be "open-sourced" so multiple authors can contribute to the project and push future releases. I tried fixing the code in latest version but became frustrated, gave up, and deactivated UTW. So I'm tagless for now and hoping for a new release to resolve the issue.

I haven't found a better solution than Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition for playing movies / videos in my home theater. I'm getting ready to upgrade my Home Theater PC from MCE 2005 to Windows Vista. While this is still my plan, it looks like there may finally be a viable non-Microsoft alternative: Linux MCE. I'm running Ubuntu on my desktop PC / file server, I'll give this a try and see how close it is to Windows on features, ease-of-use, and reliability. Because of the Digg effect, it appears the linuxmce.com site is temporarily down; if so, the home page can be accessed through digg mirror.

There is a demonstration of Linux MCE on google video highlighting all of the features, which do seem quite impressive. The interface is fast and uses screen real estate well, it has nice transparency effects, it controls external devices (lights, television, VCR), it works with bluetooth mobile phones and other remotes, and it integrates with network home automation devices. See for yourself:

However, I can't believe it's as easy to setup as the narrator makes it out to be. Also, I'm a little disappointed with the biased comparison with Windows MCE. Despite what the video states, Windows MCE can be configured to play all sorts of media from network locations — I prefer the way it separates network shares into different folders (so television DVDs and movie DVDs are not required to be combined into one view.) Also, Vista Media Center is much more whole-house centric than the comparison suggests (and it works very well with the Xbox360, not just other Vista Media Center and Media Center Extenders.) These complaints aside, Linux MCE appears to be a very full-featured application with lots of future potential.

Story from digg story: LinuxMCE is a free, open source add-on to Ubuntu including a 10' UI, complete whole-house media solution with pvr + distributed media, and the most advanced smarthome solution available. It is stable, easy to use, and requires no knowledge of Linux and only basic computer skills.

Let's face it, the thermostat that is installed by default in most dwellings is pretty basic. If you have a digital display that's the "upgraded" version; and all it does is replicate the functionality of the old rudimentary mercury switch / rotary knob designs. An advanced thermostat with scheduling features can save quite a bit on your energy bill, but can also be an interesting gadget to occupy your time. Since my energy company is offering a rebate for anyone who upgrades to a scheduling thermostat, I decided to pull the trigger. The features I identified as necessary for a new thermostat are:

• Scheduling of temperature based on time of day and day of week.
• Automatic switching between heating mode (temp not to fall below lower set point) and cooling mode (temp not to exceed upper set point)
• Capability to display a remote (outside) temperature

I've researched some of these thermostats recently and here's a summary of the information I've found.

Level 1: Scheduling Thermostat

The Aprilaire 8570 (shown above) meets all of the basic requirements for which I was searching and has a large display that makes it easy to program. For basic scheduling, auto heat/cool mode switching, and outside temperature sensing, this is the best thermostat I've found. Price: about $120.

Level 2: For those looking for even more features:

The Proliphix NT20e offers all of the features of the Aprilaire but includes Ethernet network integration, which opens up an entirely new set of capabilities. For example, you can connect to an embedded webserver on the thermostat and configure all of the settings and schedules from any computer on your local network. The thermostat can update its time over the web, so you never have to set the clock. It can also send e-mail / text page alerts if the temperature gets too high or too low. In addition, you can connect to the thermostat when you're away from home through a free account on the Proliphix website. If you have an advanced home automation controller, it can send commands over the network to change thermostat settings. Price: about $260 (Note: the NT10e does not include remote temperature sensing, but does include everything else is a bit cheaper.)

Biggest Disappointments:

The RCS X10 was my initial first choice, but after preliminary research, I found that it has no scheduling feature! Sure, you can raise and lower the temperature from an X10 remote device, but it doesn't have any built-in automatic scheduling. I you are one of those people with advanced home automation system, you can use that to automate the thermostat settings. For me, this is a complicated and potentially troublesome combination. I'd rather have the thermostat itself taking care of all of the scheduling, not a computer or external controller. I think the Proliphix is a much better option and it can also be controlled over the network (many home automation controllers are capable.) I'm glad I didn't purchase the first thermostat I found. Price: about $200.

The Aprilaire 3020t Communicating Thermostat has most of the features of the Proliphix NT20e, but it requires a central control until. The thermostat cost about $200. . . but the controller unit is another $800. This is way to expensive for my needs, and offers many multi-zone control features I'd never use. But if you have a multi-zone system, this may be a pretty descent option.

I use Windows Media Center 2005 to play back video over my network. Mostly I play the original VOB (mpeg) files from DVDs. But occasionally I have an Xvid file AVI file. It will play if FFDshow is installed, but there is no way to fast forward or rewind and there is no support for "post processing" - which can greatly improve image quality.

I found out about a plug-in for Windows Vista Media Center that apparently solves these problems and add even more features, such as support for MKV files (the replacement for AVI), subtitles, and bookmarks. I'd be even happier if it supported Media Center 2005, but I'm going to upgrade to Vista on my Home Theater PC before long anyway. The Media Control plug-in is available from http://damienbt.free.fr/ . I look forward to trying it out.

That little ticker is going strong. It's always a little nerve-racking just before a doctors visit, but everything is perfect. In 3 weeks, we'll know the answer to the boy/girl question.

I'm a long-time Philips Pronto user and I've been somewhat frustrated by the unresponsiveness of the Pronto development team. I noticed that Logitech just released the Harmony 1000 remote. Since they are are much easier to program than the Philips Pronto remotes, I decided I may want to purchase one, and I started researching. Unfortunately, the Harmony 1000 remote has two substantial shortcomings that are causing me not to buy it:

1) You can't configure "soft" buttons to be on a specific screen. So you may have to scroll between screens much more frequently because the two buttons you use the most are not displayed at the same time.

2) There are no hard buttons (below the screen) for fast-forward, rewind, pause, play. If you have a TiVo or other DVR, you'll be stuck activating the screen, looking for the soft button, and pressing the correct one each time you get to a commercial. This really sucks - it much easier to press a hard button without having to look at the screen. They should have included 4 hard buttons below the screen (with on-screen labels along the bottom edge) that can be programed to perform any function. Without these 4 buttons, the remote is a pain for DVR users.

The Philips Pronto has a lot of limitations and shortcomings, but at least those remotes have these basic issues addressed. I'm sticking with my Pronto. For now.