The Media Center probably represents the most expensive part of my home. Watch this video for a quick overview of one of the most awesome parts of this system.
The image you see in the video is, of course, created by this projector:
It may look kinda ghetto, but what you are seeing here is a very nice Viewsonic DLP Projector, resting on some books to get the angle right. Mounted to the side of the cabinet is a serial-based Infrared transmitter board. Snaking up from that is the IR LED, which issues commands to the projector over Infrared.
The IR control board is connected to the Media Center PC. This is a P4 2.4, a computer whose sole purpose is to play videos and movies, record TV shows, and play music. It is connected to my aging Sony amplifier, with speakers distributed throughout my home.
MediaDaemon
The main application that makes my Media Center function is the program I've titled MediaDaemon. It is an interface between my music and video collection and the rest of my home. It takes over Winamp and Media Player Classic, and controls them, using the features they provide to play music and videos.MediaDaemon runs entirely as a background, and has no visible interface. It is controlled by several other applications. MediaDaemon stores it's song data in a MySQL database, for speed and reliability.
Touchscreen
One of the "control" applications which interfaces with MediaDaemon is the Touchscreen, which provides basic music controls like play/stop/pause/next/previous, playlist editing, playlist selecting, and Love It/Hate It functionality. See the Touchscreen section (linked above) to learn more.AvKeyLinc
AvKeyLinc is a keyboard hook application I wrote for my other computers. Currently, I use it on 4 different machines simultaeneously, each one doing a different job. Let's start with my main workstation.
First, watch this video of AvKeyLinc providing an interface on the built-in LCD found in my Logitech G15 gaming keyboard:
Under construction... more to come