Home Media Automation – Part 1

Feb 10

Home Media Automation – Part 1

Posted in: How to

Gadgets are men’s best friends, aren’t we all fond of them! We, men, always want simplicity in life. Somethings are in your hands, of which you can be proud of. Automating your home media is one way to achieve it.

Sexy and expensive home theater system are for the rich, but that should not mean that other should be deprived of it.

Here are list key requirements for home automation -

Most likely you have tons of mp3, photos, & movies on your computer.
You have a home theater system connected to your LCD.

Basic expectations -

Play music on home theater (probably 5.1 channel system)
Watch your movies & photos on your bigger LCD screen

Value add -

Able to control your media with a remote, irrespective of source & target

The solution here is only specific to Apple products, but you can look for other alternatives if you are not an apple fan.

Prerequisites Television and Apple TV

Tons of media
iTunes on your computer
Apple TV
LCD TV
iPhone or iPod Touch or iPad (Optional)
Wireless Router

Once you have all the prerequisites, all that you need is to configure them to work together.

The first thing to start with is setting up your Apple TV. AppleTV has an internal storage of up to 160 GB, so it can store your media from computer. It has ability to sync itself over the wire or wireless. I prefer wireless, after all who wants to see wires running between the system tv. I have given the sound output of Apple Tv to my home theater and Video output to my LCD

After setting up AppleTV, you should be able to see it in iTunes. One of the very interesting thing now you will notice is that at the bottom right of iTunes you will have multiple speaker option. You can now choose which speaker you want the output to – computer or apple tv. This is how you can listen to your favorite songs on the much better home theater system. Note that you can not stream video this way. But there is a solution to that too.

Now, the catch is that AppleTV can only play MP4 videos, but the good thing is that MP4’s are better then AVI’s in quality and you even get High Definition (HD) videos.

As I said earlier, Apple TV has up to 160 GB of storage space, you can store all your media on it. But in care you have much more, then this is not the suggested approach. Instead configure your AppleTV to stream all kinds of media from your computer rather than storing it.

On Apple TV, go to Settings—> Computers, select “Add shared iTunes library’, proceed as per instructions.

Once you have done this, you shall be able to see all you media [movies & music] listing in Apple TV.