HTPC system by Teknogeekz

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Without a doubt XBMC is the most complete and versatile Home Theater PC platform on the market, and its free. Unfortunately for many people free is a very good price but brings on some complications. As it is software that you install on a PC it does not just work with all bells and whistles out of the box.

Configuring add-ons, remote controls and networking the way you need it can sometimes overwhelm the novice user and what can start as a simple project evolves into months of reformatting and reconfiguring.

We at teknogeekz.com now ship XBMC based Home Theater PC Systems pre built to Mexico USA and Canada . We provide easy access to multiple repositories built in as well as our systems are pre configured to access files from our own servers for updates and new features. We also offer forums where users can share information with other users and get help that relates specifically to their system.

Find more information about our HTPC systems here.

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Here is what I did on a Mac G4 with no IR …

I bought an IR receiver for a Macbook Pro on ebay , connected it to a USB connector by matching up the colors on the wires with standard USB color coding (changing only yellow for white). See..  USB pin-out .

I believe what I bought on Ebay was for a Mac Book Pro and from what I have seen, you want to make sure it is from a MacBook PRO and not just a MacBook. If you buy one with the cable attached it will help you to identify the pin out of the IR receiver, and make it easier to solder as the board contacts are tiny.

It works great on XBMC on a G4 Mac Mini but I have never got it to work in Frontrow , using native Apple Drivers in OSX 10.4 or 10.5. I suspect Frontrow for PowerPC is not IR enabled.

Apple IR Sensor from MacBook Pro

Apple IR Sensor solder side

As my old Samsung ML-1710 had died, I had my eye on lower end color laser printers and really liked both the Samsung and HP offerings. Not long ago I helped a friend to configure an HP CP-1215 on a Mac . After doing so it made a wonderful Cross platform printer although it was no longer available and I would not want to have to configure it on multiple Macs as it was tie consuming.

The newer HP and Samsung offerings offered built in network interfaces. I see this as essential for my environment. However one day while at the local office supply store I found a new contender and the price was so low for the Xerox Phaser 6125N that there was no ignoring it. It was less than half the going  price and the last one.  bThis printer was clearly intended for higher volume printing.

Xerox Phaser 6125N

A search around the web indicated that I could get a full set of replacement toners for about $50 US Dollars, and that is for all four! I have read some complaints about toner life but the biggest cost factor in a color laser is the cost of the toner .

DRIVERS:

Window and Mac drivers were a no-brainer and were included on the installation disk, however I always download the latest.

Linux driver on the other hand were a bit of  problem but not un-surmountable. Apparently the FujiXerox C525 uses the same printer language, and RPM drivers for Linux,  and with some work the Xeroxphaser 6125N was printing from Linux.

Now if you are running Redhat or other system that uses RPM based installer simply install the FujiXerox Docuprint C525 here in RPM.

For .deb users I have posted the Alien converted DEB version here.

After installing you need only add the 250 Sheet Paper tray and set this as the default source

I have tested and tried Android printing. Many of the solutions seem convoluted such as the Samsung  Android and iThingy (heretofore referring to iPad, iPod, and iPhone) utilities. Although I see it as insanity that I have a network direct Xerox Phaser 6125N and a Samsung ML-1675 connected to a print server I did not like the fact that the Samsung utility would not run on the older PowerPC Mac-Mini. In fact I should not need it running on any computer AT ALL!  The Xerox Android  and iThingy print utility “Printback” runs on Windows and Intel Macs only, and apparently does not support anything other than Xerox Printers anyway. The Samsung utility “Mobile Print” only seems to support Network direct Samsung printers, although I did see the Samsung printer via CUPS on Mac Mini  OSX 10.5 in the Samsung Mobile print utility.

First I must scold Xerox for making such a lame utility that does not even allow true network direct printing from Android or iThingies to network direct Xerox Phaser 6125N

One interesting thing struck me while looking at Android print utilities though, one package said it would print to ANY printer connected to a shared from a Mac. This was Called PrinterShare (Ithingy and Android) and allowed the use of a “generic” driver to a Mac. It appears that this reminded me of the olden days when I printed from a classic Mac to a convoluted Ghostscript configuration on a Windows machine, but this was in in reverse. In other words printing Postscript to the Mac OS X CUPS server seemed to do the job.  The Mac seems to happily receive the postscript and reformat it for the configured printer. It appeared this “generic” driver sends postscript. Unfortunately Printershare seemed high priced at $12.95 and the free version only prints a test page. The good news is that testing on another network showed me that Printershare printed just fine to the HP CP-1215 on a generic multi-protocol print server, DIRECTLY with no intermediary, at least the test page anyway.

There are some other print utilities and most of my remaining testing was done with PrintBot From Zenofx.com. PrintBot is unique in that it allows you to manually configure the printer. Most of these utilities, like EFI’s PrintMe Mobile, and Printershare will so far not automatically recognize printers connected to Ubuntu 10.10 but will recognize Mac OS printers shared with CUPS. I think this may be due to Bonjour advertising. Some of the utilities will allow manual configuration via LPR or IPP to the CUPS server such as Ubuntu or Mac OSX.  I registered Printbot but immediately refunded when I realized that I could not name the printers. That’s almost as lame as Xerox requiring me to use a go between for a network direct printer from Android. I do however believe that PrintBot and Send 2 Printer are the most versatile of these utilities as they allow manual configuration of printers, and in many cases may be the best chance of attaining network direct printing without an intermediary CUPS server. So our intermediary CUPS server allows us to print postscript from Android or iThingy and the host CUPS server reformats the print job for the corresponding configured printer. All we need is almost ANY of these iThingy or Android apps with a generic postscript driver and viola!

iThingy users see here: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2362451,00.asp

Now for Windows users this is also doable as I had indicated in the beginning of this post that I used to use a windows print server from a Classic Mac. I sent Postscript from the Mac and Windows and Ghostscript via Redmon took over to reformat the job for the configured printer. I believe there is even CUPS for Windows.

EFI PrintMe Mobile seems to consistently provide the best quality however will only seem to recognize Mac OS CUPS Printers and not Ubuntu CUPS printers. It is therefore useful only in an Android to Mac environment or with their proprietary print server software, which I believe is for windows.

________EDIT_____________________
There is more information at the links below for setting this up in Windows, however I can not seem to find more up to date information for Windows 7, nor good information on CUPS for Windows , although CUPS I can assure you is not necessary. Also noteworthy I have seen somewhere references to a Microsoft Postscript interpreter which may be an alternative and more integrated to Windows 7.

Creating a virtual Postscript printer in Windows (older but complete)

Configuring a Virtual Printer Using RedMon 1.7 on Windows 7

Also noteworty is that is you go into Add remove windows components there is an LPD printer server option, meaning that once the virtual postscript printer is configured, you can  Share it via LPD/LPR which will work with many of the Android apps and some of the iThingy apps.

________EDIT_____________________

There you have it , so print away from your handheld.. I imagine that one could even use XBMCbuntu for this as well. One remaining question is whether I can configure print services and CUPS on jailbroken Apple TV 1.

What resulted was adding this piece of code which should be added not only to the index.php but ideally index.php of each directory, such as /admin, while changing the “my.domain.com” to your actual domain or subdomain name. Simply add it before any code on the page.

<?php
if ($_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"] != ‘my.domain.com’) {
exit(‘<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC “-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN”>
<html><head>
<title>404 Not Found</title>
</head><body>
<h1>Not Found</h1>
<p>The requested URL was not found on this server.</p>
<hr>
<address>Apache/2.2.14 (Ubuntu) Server at foo.com</address>
</body></html>’);}
?>

For extra security it is advisable to NOT use accurate reverse DNS lookups that resolve to the hostname that has access to the pbx. For instance some datacenters may issue default hostnames like “ABC-XYZ.hosting.com”. Leave that as is, and add your own hostname from your domain like “asterisk.mydomain.com”,  so that an attacker has no way of resolving the hostname that has access.

With most of these kinds of systems the index.php is always accessed for most any page which means that with this code, an attacker can not even submit a user/password without knowing the domain name!

I suggest this piece of code be added to all of these types of installations by default.

_________

edit

Also should be added to config.php in the aforementioned directories

_____________________

The day has arrived however we still buy DVDs that are PAL or NTSC specific. Aside from Regions for Blue Ray and DVD which for the sake of this article we will avoid, as well as country specific transmission formats. I want to discuss ONLY the video encoded onto DVDs and pose the questions as to why it has not changed?

PAL DVDs are typoically 720×576
NTSC DVDs are typically 720×480

In the NTSC world, content can be progressive or interlaced. Frame rates can be 23.97FPS (24P) or 29.97FPS (30 FPS)
In the PAL world, Content can be progressive or interlace2d. Frame rates can be 23.97FPS (24P) but are typically 25FPS

In the PAL world they almost do not bother with the “HD 720P format” because it offered so little improvement over PAL

Over 3 years ago I bought a new DVD player. Within a mattewr of hours I had it working “region free” and even played PAL DVDs. The DVD player itself had no issues with the PAL DVD and transcoded to NTSC. On that same DVD player I could select “PAL” output, or “Auto”, aside from the “NTSC” that it was set to. AT that time I had a stand alone TV tuner that connected to a VGA monitor. The VGA monitor and tuner were also “PAL compatible”. I was lucky. Recently while shopping for an LCD TV I came to realize that they were not making sets that were designed for 50/60 hz (25/30 FPS). Leaving my multi region DVD in “auto” mode would not work on a newer flat panel display! What? Why? Multisync monitors haver been around for a very long time and do not represent a substantial cost difference for such a small range of frequencies.

IN fact, My old DVD olayer would even output upscaled 24P via component or HDMI. I was then able to see a 24FPS DVD at 24FPS without pulldown. I now play all DVDs on XBMC anyway, however I still have the issue of the available frequencies on the monitor. With XBMC you can change the frame rate to match the source content , effectively replicating the “auto” mode on my old DVD and since all content is upscaled the frame size becomes a moot point.

So to make my point, why then are the DVD players not ALL capable of converting 24FPS to a 25FPS output? It would seem this is easy enough to attain as in NTSC the pulldown is often done in the DVD,. Even if a 24FPS DVD was played back at 25 FPS that  coule be attained on the player itself. Why do our new digital TVs not work with 25FPS when many work with 24 FPS and 30FPS they just skip past the 25FPS. Why you might ask, foirst because it is not that complicated. Second the same master coyuld be deployed in all regions offering the benefit of the higher PAL resolutions in NTSC regions. O)f course from a manufacturer standpoint this might be counterproductive from the sales pitch of HD.

Again we are permitting manufacturers to limit our abilities. It used to be that the consumer demand drove the manufacturers. Now we have allowed the manufacturers to beat us into our respective corners of the world with no compatibility between them.

I thought HD and digital was going to give us more universal video formats so the world was more unified. Instead manufacturers and movie studios are using it against us in the name of “content protection”

and denying uis the ability to have higher resolution SD while pitching HD that is sometimes only slightly better than SD PAL.

Manufacturers listen up….
I do not hesitate to buy PAL DVDs and play them on XBMC. I currently am playing a PAL DVD of “Stargate Universe” as I write this,  which never looked so good on NTSC If only I could buy retail what I have worked so hard to build!

Why carry a digital signal 2 feet to a flat panel display when good quality coaxial cables can carry analogue component or RGB several meters without degradation?

When HDMI came along we already had VGA, DVI, RGB and Broadcast component resolutions that exceeded current broadcast HD standards. Many of those same resolutions could easily apply to consumer Component video. Why was VGA or DVI not defined as the standard? Why did consumer electronics manufacturers never define a 1080P over component standard when it was feasible and already had been shown in the broadcast world years before?

Truth is that companies like Sony/Paramount only wanted a method to protect content at the expense of consumers. This kind of corporate slavery where consumers are the cash cows for “new technology” which not only is unnecessary, but provides benefit only to large corporations at the consumers’ expense should be dealt with severely by consumers. Not to mention then consumers fall victim to things like the HDMI cable scams, where a $100 Dollar is sold and claimed to be “better” than the $10 dollar cable.

So now we transcode all video to HDMI and that makes it “better”? It was all about protecting content and was forced on consumers by big corporations. It is the old slight of hand while they offer you something that they say is better, they really are slipping you something you were unaware of.

The Cyberdata Door intercom sells for about $400 US Dollars

After having installed a Cyberdata SIP intercom system posted here, I recently had a need to replace my own door Intercom system, and began to look for alternatives. I did not want to use the Cyberdata because of its prohibitive price, around $400 USD, which is far too much to spend on a single intercom station, or even SIP for that matter.  This idea struck me because I had recently installed some Grandstream phones in a clients office as temporary replacements while we awaited the rest of their Polycom order. Before the Polycom’s arrived client complained that on more than one of these Grandstream units, the handset failed. What to do with Grandstream phones with non working handsets?

Below are the details of how I hacked a Grandstream  BT102 into a fully functional SIP door Intercom.

First I want to clarify that this is a hack. I accept no responsibility of you fry something. Use this information at your own risk!  This hack does not compare to the Cyberdata unit as it has no remote contact closures nor alarms. For basic SIP communication from your door to wherever, you can see the value it offers. This should work for any BT 101/102. The Grandstream BT 101/102 phone are identical except for the number of LAN ports. I imagine this same hack will apply to all versions of both models but I have not confirmed this. Please note that Ethernet requires only four wires (two pairs) theoretically one could use an additional pair for power, and the remaining pair to trigger a relay as a remote door opener.

The Grandstream BT 101/102 makes a great alternative to overpriced door intercoms

Before continuing, consider how you will deliver power to the device located at the door. Something like “The Poor Man’s POE” should work fine if cable lengths are not too long. I personally would skip the adapters and wire the Ethernet cable directly to the power to save space.

In my case, I reused the old intercom housing, as I did not want to deal with the complexities of changing the box. If you are doing a new installation , you will need to spend some money on a custom housing, otherwise you may be able to work from an old intercom housing as I did. The nice thing about a hack is that you may even extend it on to something like a full speakerphone with numeric keypad. The ribbon cable seems well marked on the keypad board, thereby facilitating even more hacks to make something like the one pictured below.

With some additional work, it may be possible to hack a door intercom with dialer. Leave a comment if you have success with this.

I never liked the Grandstream Budgetone series of phones much. They always seemed to reek of cheap Chinese Plastic. There was never anything special about the voice quality and the speaker phone is quite basic. This basic spekerphone functionality however  is quite useful in our hack.

Grandstream BT101 or BT102 that has working speakerphone functionality. Handset case or other buttons may be broken, as long as the Speakerphone function works and you have access for programming the phone.

What you will need:

Weatherproof box- either new or from Intercom to be replaced as in my case.

Soldering Iron

Grandstream Budgetone BT-101 or BT-102, even if some number buttons do not work or the handset is broke. If the speakerphone can answer a call, it will probably work.

Electrical tape

Tools

Miscellaneous low voltage wire

Single Pole Single Throw, Normally Open momentary contact switch (Call button)

Stand-offs, or mounting hardware

A toothpick

If locating the unit outside- Weatherproof 8 ohm speaker, such as polypropylene rated to 1/2 watt, appropriately sizes to fit the box you will use.

Before continuing

You need to program and test the Budgetone for your particular use. I did this with the unit fully assembled, and established IP Address auto dial calling from the Budgetone to a Zulty’s ZIP (to be used as the Indoor station) . I then established the same from the Zulty’s to the Door phone. Because this hack involves using  only the speakerphone button from the Grandstream, you will have no opportunity later to adjust ring volume etc, so do it before the unit is dismantled. I set the Budgetone to be modded to “auto answer” as well.Also in my test with the Zulty’s in my initial test set up, the Zulty’s would not stop ringing. Because this firmware looks much like Leadtek and 8×8 firmware that I had seen this issue with before, I switched the indoor station test unit to a Grandstream Budgetone BT202, which proved to stop ringing after about a minute. ( this is also an option in these Grandstream phones that you may have to enable) . Also worth noting is that Grandstream’s docuementation here , seems to be inaccurate when configuring IP dialing. and when considering autodialing an IP address. I found that I had to put the other phone’s (destination phone)  IP address in the SIP server field of both phones, then I entered  “1″ in the auto dial field. Of course if you use Asterisk/Trixbox/Elastix/FreePBX this does not apply. With Asterisk you have the added benefit of sending to multiple destinations such as your cell phone which means you could answer the door when travelling and the person at the door has no clue you are not there, unless of course you tell them.

Now to the hardware

Opening the Grandstream

First we open the Budgetone by removing the four screws. Once opened we can see that there are three boards on the inside. One for Display, one for buttons and another for the core system. This core system board is the one that interests us, as well as microphone, ribbon cable and the speaker (if our intercom will be located indoors).

Ribbon Connector on Board

If you have tested and are ready to get into it, remove the main board and cut the ribbon cable at roughly the half way point, or more towards the keypad board. We will separate out only four conductors, one pair to activate the speakerphone and another pair to connect the speaker.

Ribbon Connections Close Up

The toothpick is used to keep the hookswitch in the on-hook state.

Toothpick on hookswitch. Push the blue part down and you will see a space in the side. Insert the toothpick there.

You now need to prepare your board mounting hardware to your box, and test for fit.

Next we need only four wires separated from the ribbon cable. (See Images), to connect speaker and momentary contact switch.

Once the board is mounted and your Call Button and speaker are connected you can test the unit before putting it into actual service.

It is a good idea to test the unit at various stages in the hack. That way if something goes wrong you could hopefully undo you last move.

I am interested in hearing comments about this hack particularly if someone uses it with a numeric keypad.

Our HTPC systems offer a substantial amount of on – line content from recent releases of movies to TV series and sports. For more information on the content, please click here.

These HTPC systems connect to your TV via VGA or HDMI and offer resolutions up to 1080P  for a true HD experience.

HTPC systems can play media from your computer network, so all downloaded files and files stored on a Network Attached Storage (NAS) can be made available to your HTPC. We feature stand alone XBMC systems as well as Windows based solutions with full remote control, and many options are available from BlueRay to hardware HD decoding, WiFi and much more.

the XBMC HTPC is fully controllable via remote control

The remote control is a key feature of the XBMC HTPC that negates the use of a keyboard or mouse.

HTPC, with DVD in Standalone or with Full OS Windows or Linux

For a more robust system, we offer systems that may be based on Windows or Linux Mint , that allow full use of a PC connected to your LCD big screen display. Whether you choose Windows or Linux, XBMC offers the same features, and integrates to the OS,  meanwhile you can access the integrated DVD/CD drive to play music or DVDs.

XBMC Confluence Skin

Meanwhile XBMC servers as the core of your media center reproducing full quality video up to 1080P resolutions. XBMC offers a wide variety of plug ins that do everything from retrieve movie data to warching live video streams.

Let us offer you the opportunity of enjoying your digital media collection in a way you never thought imaginable.

HP CP1215 overall is a great cross platform color laser printer!

Upon reviewing the box in the store however we noted What!? NO MAC DRIVERS! This seemed unusual for HP who most always had Mac, Linux and Windows support. My friend was quick to whip out her iPhone and do a quick Google search that yielded some results for installing foomatic printer drivers on her (Original Link gone) OS X to be able to print from her Apple Macintosh (New Link ) here Being somewhat of an Ubuntu geek and having dealt with CentOS , Redhat, and others I was comfortable with what I read and confidently offered to make it work.

Imagine my surprise however after registering on the apple developer site and performing the download suggested on the post that the OSX 10.5 package I need was no longer available! I attempted what was there and after downloading a few gigabytes of an installer, I found that  it would not run on OSX 10.5 . On a whim I did some googling and discovered that the Apple software I needed was on the original OSX disk, thus negating the need for a huge download. After following the instructions the install went off without a hitch!

Not often however do I really get to install linux software on OSX and I soon realized that OSX used CUPS printing , just like linux.  With my Ubuntu machine nearby I connected to the network fired it up enabled discovery of network printers in Ubuntu, and was printing from Ubuntu to the HP Color Laser connected to the Mac.

___________________UPDATE  May 17, 2011____________________

Since originally writing this,  we have connected this printer to Mac OS 10.5, Mac OS 10.4, Ubuntu 10.04 PPC, Ubuntu 10.10 PPC,  Ububtu 10.04 x86,  Ubuntu 10.10 x86 (Mint 10) , Windows, 7 Starter, Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows XP, all via two different print servers. With Android, PrintBot stopped working after a PrintBot software upgrade BOO! The HP android print utility will not recognize the current configuration nor any previous, I think because it requires Bonjour.

___________________UPDATE November 5, 2011____________________

We have now also installed this to Mac OS X 10.6 , however it required updated Ghostsript which worked fine.

Still no printing from iThingies (iThis, iThat), despite testing several apps including HPs own. I guess that HP does not like that we are using a generic HP protocol print server (Same problem on Android with HP app). The one app that I thought might work did not have the driver.

___________________UPDATE April 12, 2012____________________

I have now found a program that will allow printing from android to this printer directly. Because the same program exists for the iThingies (iPhone, iPod, iPad) , it probably will work for printing via a print server as well as a serparate solution for printing through a Mac or Linux computer as a CUPS server. See the link below.

Andriod and iThingy printing- To any configured printer on Mac OS, Linux, and maybe Windows