Home Entertainment Center

 Philips Hue lights are known for the ability to program brightness, saturation, and hue using software. Most people use one or more cellphone apps to control their Hue lights. I've a history in computrer science and electronic technology and engineering, so took this up as a new interest. WiFi control of light bulbs' colors has interested me ever since I read aboout the topic some years ago. There happened to be seven Hue bulbs available from one eBay seller and for a reaosnable fee, approximately $20. A bridge device is used to communicate with the bulbs, so I waited for a good deal on eBay and got one. Philips has evolved a developer community and resources for those who want to explore the possibilities in lamp light control. The user joins the communnity and gets a temporary API key, formerly referred to as a 'username', good for one session. Then a browser or app, can be used to send commands to the bulbs. There are other avenues of communication. Python libraries...

 The Behringer PP400 arrived. The unit was a drop-in replacement. There is no hum or other intrusive noise. I have several 33 1/3 rpm LPs designed for testing audio stereo systems. The unit passes, though I had to turn up the volume quite a bit to here high frequency sweeps up to 10kHz in one instance. I would like to record one of the albums' tracks through each preamp, and if possible, without a preamp, hence RIAA bypass, and compare them. A Fourier transform might be revealing.  There was, I believe, a comment in the custom design that the board could be modified for reconfiguration of the RIAA filter. A switch alterable version might be useful in switching between different filters used in different decades.

 Up till now, a diy assembly preamp has been used with the B&O turntable. Yesterday, I decided to listen to some vInyl LPs in my media collection. There has always been a problem with hum and rumble in the preamp. I had problems in the assembly which may account for the noise. There weren't enough ground wires in the unit. I added a couple.  The noise varied with physical location and that points to shielding as the problem. In fact, there is no shielding, only ground wiring connecting the system. There were three possibilities of a solution: 1.) But a new unit ( Behringer Microphono PP400). 2.) Add shielding to the existing unit. 3.) Replace the existing unit's plastic box with a metal box connected to ground. The existing unit is supposed to be an excellent design so a new box is in order. However, I would like to listen to some music and also verify the source of the noise, hence a Behringer Microphono PP400 is on order and will arrive in a few days. A replacement box f...

 I have replaced the two boxless bookshelf speakers I was using with a Polk Audio center speaker module. I bought the unit from a Facebook-Marketplace seller. He wanted $20. I agreed. When we met, however, I noticed the back of the unit was scruffy and scratched. He accepted $15. The unit worked as soon as I plugged it in. Model: TL 2 CEN CH black. This makes a total of six speaker units. I could use a couple of small bookshelf speakers on the ceiling. Perhaps a couple of quality computer speakers would do.

   The hardware set is much the same. The most recent addition is the Surround Center speaker I constructed from two open back bookcase speakers.    I have moved the Asus X510UAR into the server position. There was a pixellation problem with some videos in VLC but help from a web poster gave me the tweak I needed to make the correction.    The server is Plex for Windows. I also maintain a Jellyfin server and may add simpleDLNA or miniDLNA for offline use. Both Plex and Jellyfin seem to require an internet connection to function.    I use RenameMyTVSeries to rename television series prior to adding metadata and adding to the servers' lists. Free software.    MetaX is the current metadata software. The app has problems but the functionality is unequalled by others, so far. Worth the ten dollar fee. I use the mkvtoolnix suite extensively, CMD and GUI. There is a grep alternative, ripgrep, that is much faster than the version in WSL Ubuntu l...

  There are additions to my speaker setup. A couple of Cerwin Vega HUD 203's are acting as Surround Side speakers. I screwed two open backed bookcase speakers together to use as a Surround Center speaker. Taken together with the Polk Audio subwoofer, that makes a Surround Sound 5.1 arrangement. The avr I'm using is an advanced and sophisiticated unit. I suspect the avr is fairly typical of the genre. I've had to do a lot of readng and studying of the owner's manual, with occasional trial and error changes to test for effect. In fact the software is a tweaker's dream. But can be a user nightmare. It seems that "Pure Direct" is the only mode of several that will play all the speakers without any modification of the sound. Another uses modifications tweaked by me in the setup program. All others are specialized, and not for the person who wants the real experience, as the movie director intended it. There are 'test' files in abundance on the web, espe...

    I decided to take a closer look at the idea of media metadata and have, for the last year, been working to acquire and install quality metadata in the few thousand movies in the library.    This required studying the nature of metadata, especially in regard to videos. Once I understood metadata, I chose to use the Matroska container format and proceeded to convert all movies that were not already in Matroska format. The major reason I chose Matroska was because of the extensive metadata capabilities therein. After I finished converting to Matroska, I began gathering tools and writing programming scripts to acquire, modify, and insert the data.    The movies are done. I'm now writing a simplified script to process incoming movies semi-automatically. That script is about done. The languages used are Python and Bash.    The metadata includes title, year, cast, director, plot description and some other things. An image is included that serves as a...