Landchark

Preface: after hooking up the magicjack and subsequently cancelling charter phone and cable TV, we were only recieving OTA HDTV, which was fine with us, since we didn’t watch much of the cable TV anyways, and we have netflix so we can stream as much Law & Order as we like if we feel we need a fix.

anyways…

There was an old antenna in the attic, so I ran a coax to a boster splitter in the basement, one line to the HTPC, and one to the upstairs TV. 

we got all the local channels in with good signal strength, 90%+, but one channel, FOX seemed to want to bounce around the 55%-85% range.  this would cause some irritating dropouts during programs.

i figured it was the signal strength, so i added another booster up by the antenna. this helped a bit, but dropouts were still fairly common. 

so i happened upon a couple “how to build an antenna” posts on youtube and avsforum and figured i’d try to build my own.

we didn’t have any wire coat hangers, so i got 4 3 foot wire rods at home depot for $1.88 each, for a total cost of $7.52+tax. i had the washers, screws and a 2×4 laying around the garage, so that’s all i needed to spend.

here’s some photos of the final result:

 

and believe it or not, it actually works. now i’m getting all local channels at above 90% signal strength, CBS, PBS and ABC all at 97%. no more dropouts for us.

the wife thinks it looks like some sort of junk art, but it’s in the attic, so who cares what it looks like, as long as it works.

p.s: you can see the old antenna that was there when we moved into the house in the background of that middle photo.

another p.s.: I know that there’s no such thing as an “HDTV” antenna, or a “digital” antenna.  an antenna is an antenna. but it just sounds cooler to say i built an HDTV antenna

Tags: , antenna, diy, hdtv, home theater, htpc by chadd
8 Comments »

in my hunt to reduce monthly bills i found magicJack and at that price i figured it was worth a try.
currently, we have the unlimited phone plan (along with the TV, internet bundle) from Charter.

i should preface this by saying that i’m not a company shill, have no affiliation to any voip service, yadda yaddda yadda. i did work for a bigger telecom company for a few years a few years ago, but that can’t be relevant apart from giving me some inside info on how the telecom industry works.

anyways…

ordering was easy on the magicJack site.
it did put on the pressure to get a multi-year contract upfront, but at this price, i can afford to waste that offer if i do want to renew after the first year.

got the unit in less than a week from ordering.

i tried it first with my main desktop just to see if it works, and yep, it did. plugged it in using the provided usb extension cord, pulled out the phone line (that goes to all the jacks in my house) from the charter phone modem thingy and plugged it into magicJack and instantly had a dial tone.

color me impressed.

made a few calls, got a few calls, everything seemed to run well for a couple days.

magicJack doesn’t offer a local area code for us so i took a nearby city, and then signed us up for a grandcentral account to forward to the magicJack number.

i also set up another gmail account for us to get grandcentral voicemails, i also send all magicJack voicemails there, so even if the mj vm is unstable, as i’ve read it can be, we should be covered by grandcentral.

then i tried to remote desktop into that computer from out of town and magicJack ground to a complete halt. couldn’t even get a dial tone.

i figured this was a bandwidth issue, because remote d is a huge hog. and since i have been looking for a reason to replace my current router, a netgear FM114P, because of wireless slowness, i used this as an excuse to go router shopping and make sure i get one with QoS so i could prioritize the  bandwidth.

upon recommendation from a network expert type person friend of mine, i got a DLink DIR-625.  works great once i got all the wireless settings configured. get just as fast of speeds on the laptops via wireless as i do on my wired desktop. very nice.

so the 625 has QoS built in and with some router magic can autoprioritize voip packets or something. i’m not going to pretend i know how it all works, all i know is that it does.  you can set your own QoS rules, if you want, that assign priority to machines (and ports) on your network but i haven’t had to do that yet as the built in auto-QoS seems to work just fine.

once i got that router installed, i could log into remote desktop and magic jack still ran fine. sweet. bandwidth problem solved. voice quality was about “cell phone in a moving car” quality.

i figured it was time to move magicJack to its permanent home, the jukebox we use to listen to mp3’s and watch divx/netflix movies on.
general specs: xp sp2 (up to date), athlon 2800+, 1gb ram.
the only bandwidth usage on that machine would be the streaming movies, which we’d have to pause anyways when we get a phone call, so it shouldn’t be an interference.
and getting the popup on the screen when a call comes in would actually be a nice feature so we don’t miss calls in case we are watching a movie at blast your eardrum volume.

so i ran a phone line to that computer and plugged in the magicJack.

everything worked fine, but call quality was “very choppy”.

so based upon some of the tips read on the dslreports.com magicJack forum, i ditched the provided usb extension cord, updated all usb drivers, and set the magicJack process in my task manager to be high priority.

when i called the test number, 909-390-0003, voice quality was very good (this was at about 5pm, in case that is relevant). so it would seem that those tips fixed the “very choppy” issue.

next thing i experienced: my voice to the external person is crystal clear. but, the external person sounds intermittently choppy to me.   that happened on both incoming and outgoing calls.  it wasn’t a constant choppy, just seems like randomly throughout a call, the incoming voice got a little bit of a stutter once in a while.

i’ve messed with the QoS on the router, enabling and playing with the QoS rule settings, for the source ip and port range (my computer) so i think that’s why my voice sounds great to external callers because those outgoing packets are prioritized.

after reading about how people set up QoS with tomato, i did some hunting through my server logs to see what IP was getting used when i was on the phone.  not an exact science and not really perfect but i found IP addresses in there for chicago and atlanta.

so i added those addresses to my destination QoS rules, and also added the minneapolis IP just to be safe.

exact settings, for the DIR-625 QoS:
checked: QoS enabled, autoUplink
unchecked: dynamic frag, auto classification unchecked
Rules:
priority 1
source: magicJack machine IP, UDP protocol, source port 5060-5070
destination: proxy1.Chicago.talk4free.com – vms1.Chicago.talk4free.com (use the ip’s), all ports 0 – 65535
added a rule for every server i might be hitting with magicJack: chicago, atlanta, mnpls

once i rebooted the router, i tried another call and BLAMMO, calls were crystal clear, both voices incoming and outgoing are fine with no stutter. it was as good as our line with charter.  sweet.

i don’t know that i need to give those rules priority 1, because that may be overkill on the choking off of other bandwith to the house, but based on our usage while on the phone we haven’t noticed any slowdown of our other bandwidth so i’ll leave it for now. if it starts slowing things down, i can always lower the priority until i get to a sweet spot of bandwidth speed and call quality.

for a load test, while making a call, i had my wife stream live365, and on my desktop, i turned on a radio stream and loaded 12 youtube videos at once.  call quality stayed the same and the radio streams never buffered and i loaded all the videos. don’t know that was the most scientific test ever, but it was a good practical test and magicJack passed with flying colors.

in case anyone wondered, i ran a voip speed test and pasted the results below.

Speed test statistics
———————
Download speed: 10499000 bps
Upload speed: 983296 bps
Quality of service: 99 %
Download test type: socket
Upload test type: socket
Maximum download pause: 38 ms
Average download pause: 1 ms
Minimum round trip time to server: 18 ms
Average round trip time to server: 89 ms

VoIP test statistics
——————–
Jitter: you –> server: 2.3 ms
Jitter: server –> you: 3.6 ms
Packet loss: you –> server: 0.0 %
Packet loss: server –> you: 0.0 %
Packet discards: 0.0 %
Packets out of order: 0.0 %
Number of supported VoIP lines: 6
Estimated MOS score: 4.0

overall, i’m very pleased with how magicJack works. it installed and worked well directly out of the box, especially for the price.
to get it to work with the same call quality as our current phone line did take a bit of tinkering and research, but it wasn’t that bad, and again, for this price, i’m willing to put in some tinkering.

we’re going to give it a week and if things stay stable, we are going to drop charter phone service. worst case scenario is if the thing craps out on us, or if the company goes belly up or something, and we have to get a phone line from charter  again.  in the meantime, we’ll save about $50/month, so it seems worth it to me.

hope this helps out someone who may be considering getting magicJack or having choppy voice quality issues of their own.

Tags: , htpc, magicJack by chadd
11 Comments »

subtitled: Let the music play

sub-subtitled: home bar jukebox and media computer – part 3

After getting the HTPC mounted in it’s built-in sliding shelf (shoved into a hole in the wall) and getting the computer running the jukebox software and running the touchscreen, the last thing that needs to be done is to build and mount the touchscreen into some sort of enclosure on the wall.

I wanted to have something that would take up the corner above the HTPC, a wasted corner space, and something that could be lit/backlit and display some sort of signage with the ‘k2 lounge‘ name in it somehow.

The general idea we (my dad & I) came up with was to hang a plexiglass “door” in the corner, with the touchscreen mounted in the middle of the door.

now, on to the construction:

first, my dad made a frame for the touchscreen. It was basically a standard picture frame, but the inside of the frame has to have some fancy edges in order to accommodate the wires that make the touchscreen work. these are different for every touchscreen, so you can see the photos for an idea of how we did this.

Next step was to cut the hole in the plexiglass where the touchscreen will be mounted. I used a sheet of 24″x48″ plexiglass that is .220″ thick.

After cutting out the window, I used an orbital sander (80 grit) on both sides of the plexi to give it the frosted effect.

The outer frame is the easiest. Just cut a hole out of a sheet of leftover ply (from the middle of a poker table i built before) to make a one piece outer frame.

Next, we put it all together just to make sure it all fit.

Success! Time to move it to the basement and re-assemble.
The outer frame was hung with a few 3″ hinges.

I pre-assembled (not pictured) the touchscreen, screen bezel frame and plexiglass to make it easier to mount to the hung door as a one step process. Then took this and screwed it to the back of the door.

This hinged door gives me easy access to the back of the door and the monitor. The outlet that the monitor is plugged into is split, with the left 2 outlets constant hot and the right 2 outlets are switched. I’m using the right outlets for the HTPC power outlet, and the right 2 for the monitor and backlight power outlet. This gives me the ability to easily turn on and off the monitor and backlight via external switch.

The monitor VGA and USB cables go into the wall and down to the HTPC below.

Well, that’s about it. Next i turned it on and there it is.

I still have to get some type of decor to put on the plexi that says ‘k2 lounge’ and some type of backlighting for the jukebox, but as a temp fix, i mounted a blue fluorescent light behind the plexiglasss.

The ‘door’ itself is quite solid, with very little wiggle when you tap the touchscreen, but at some point I want to attach some sort of latch to hold the door solid to the wall.

Tags: , basement bar, htpc, jukebox by chadd
3 Comments »

subtitled: home bar jukebox and media computer – part 2

when i last left off, i was going to build a jukebox by building an enclosure for my touchscreen.

well, I haven’t got that started yet, so i thought i’d take a detour into the story of how i got the jukebox running on my newly enclosed pc.

Jukebox Software

I began by doing some research at the jukebox forum at arcade controls. They have a fairly active board and lots of friendly nerdy types all too eager to offer an opinion.

I started to go through the list of PC jukebox software that they have compiled and i installed demo’s and did a lot of trial and error. I ended up going with AlbumPlayer.

The touch screen interface is awesome and works great with my 15″ ELO touchscreen purchased off eBay.

screenshot of albumplayer user interface in action:

Album player has a nice built in music database that allows you edit all the song/album data including all the basics: genre, artist, year, album cover, etc.

The extensive database collection editor allows you to create custom collections that you can use for grouping, browsing, playback, etc.

You can browse/search albums grouped pretty much however you can think of based upon album artist.The search functionality is complete and works really well, but it isn’t too pretty. This is supposed to be upgraded in the next version, so I figured I could live with that one con to the software.

My biggest selling point was that Album player is the only jukebox software I could find that was playlist based. I wanted to be able to load a pre-built playlist and then allow my guests or myself to add tracks to the ‘queue’ and then go back to the playlist.

I got albumplayer to do this really easy by creating a custom collection, then in the random play options, you can choose what custom collections are in the pool for randomization.

For example, I wanted rat pack music to play randomly and continuously when nobody is picking music. So i created a ‘rat pack’ custom collection and added all my rat pack albums to it. I chose this collection as the random play collection, and now it plays random songs from those albums continuously. Users can still browse through all the albums on the jukebox and choose anything they want, and it will be added to the cue as the next song. once all the user’s chosen music is done playing, it automatically picks a song out of the random pool (rat pack in this case).

The random play adds a song to the queue whenever it starts the last song in the queue.

You can choose multiple collections to be put into the random pool, as well.

Importing music into the jukebox was really simple. Just hit the “scan for new music” and it scans the chosen directory for anything that hasn’t been already added to the albumplayer database. Then you can import anything new. Albumplayer gets album/song information from whatever source you set, filename/directory structure or mp3 tags. The cover is automatically found and added from either amazon or whatever local location you set. You can always go back and edit any of the album info. There’s even a handy google images link to help look for album covers.

Here’s a screenshot of the album info edit interface from my install:

I’m not going to get into all the rest of the features here, read about them on the albumplayer site. Or, better yet, since the demo is free, you can install and play with it yourself. I’ll just say it does everything i can think of that i would want a jukebox to do.

I always choose to import my music based upon the mp3 tags since I spent a good amount of time going through all my mp3’s and making sure they all have the correct tags attached to all the songs/albums. The best tool I have found to do that is called Tag & Rename. It allows mass mp3 tag edits, adding tags automatically from directory names and file names, and mass renaming and reorganizing of files based upon tags.

So now i have monitor one as the touchscreen displaying the jukebox interface. but, i can’t just let monitor 2, which is actually hooked up to the projector, just sit idle, now can I?

luckily, there is a plugin for album player called CD Art Display which gets a feed from album player and displays the album cover along with other player info like song title, artist, album name, time remaining, etc. All the normal mp3 player display info.

There are a lot of pre-made skins that you can use with CD Art Display, but i’m a picky type and wanted to go along with the vegas theme in the k2 lounge.
I ended up with the following screenshot taken from my projector:

The album cover takes up a huge portion of the screen, and has that nifty reflection that is all the web 2.0 rage these days. The song title, artist, and album info all show up in the sands sign marquee to make it look like that is currently performing artist, which it is. pretty slick, eh?

well, it gets better.

CD Art Display has a play time progress bar that fills in as the song progresses, so I made the progress bar look like one of the neon tubes going along the bottom of the sign that gets filled in as the song progresses. the time remaining is displayed just below the marquee.

I can already hear the masses screaming “holy crap! how did you make that look so awesome? and can i have the skin you made?”

I didn’t actually make a skin, all i did was use the built-in skin editor on the default skin that came with the app.

Here’s a quick step-by-step:

1. Start with an awesome photo
   
2. work some photoshop magic to make it into a wallpaper size image
3. work even more photoshop magic to erase the names in the bottom marquee and move the frank sinatra, dean martin, etc names down to the bottom. then stretch out the top marquee so you can fit the mp3 info in there.
4. save that image and use it as your wallpaper
5. mess around with the built-in skin editor to move all the elements around till you have them where you want
6. change the colors/font in the editor so that the album info matches the sign marquee letters
7. change foreground/background colors of the progress bar to match one of the sign marquee’s neon tubes
8. bask in your high level of awesome

another fun little feature of albumplayer is that it has last.fm functionality built into it, so it automatically updates your profile as you play music. Fun way to keep track of what is being played on your jukebox. Check out what is hot on my jukebox at my last.fm k2 lounge profile.

Well, that’s how i have my jukebox set up.

Next up, the physical jukebox enclosure for the touchscreen…

Tags: , albumplayer, bar, basement bar, cd art display, htpc, jukebox by chadd
4 Comments »

After having many parties down in the k2 lounge, i decided that i probably shouldn’t impose my musical tastes upon everyone that shows up. Although, why someone would object to listening to the rat pack, is beyond me.

I had just replaced my main desktop computer, so I decided to build a jukebox out of my old machine.
Somehow, this simple goal turned into a monster project that now includes building an entire media pc that we can watch movies from.

home theater PC

To begin this project, I took my main desktop that i had just replaced, and moved it over close to the entertainment center.

Specs overview: athlon 2800+, 1 gig ram, radeon 9600

Nothing fancy, but enough to listen to mp3’s and watch divx movies on.

The radeon vid card had a VGA, Svid, and DVI output, so i was set there. I got myself a sound card with digital optical out, and i’m set for surround sound.

Once I got the system working well through my sound system and projector, it was time to make it look a little more presentable.

First things first, hide the media PC.

Decided to build the jukebox control screen out of a 15″ ELO touchscreen that I got off ebay. I was going to build an extension off my “water main closet” to house the touchscreen, more on that later, so I needed to house the pc somewhere close.

After many precise measurements using empty beer bottles, i figured i could put the PC inside the water main closet and run all the cords inside. So that’s what i did.

and here’s the step by step:

first cut a hole in the wall

then since i’m not really that great of a woodworker, and i’m kind of lazy and didn’t want to have to add all new studs, etc to do a cabinet door all proper like, instead of framing the hole, I put black duct tape around the edge. It actually looks pretty darn good and keeps everything flush to the wall. i have to credit my wife with that idea. thanks honey.

next i screwed in a stud going back from the floor stud to act as a center support for the drawer pull. attach the drawer pull to the center support stud and to the shelf itself and presto, you’ve got a pull out shelf.

next came the door.

for this i used a sheet of plexi, cut to size, to cover the hole. slapped some hinges on there, and a fancy schmancy cabinet handle and i had myself a nice clear door.

once that was all done i loaded in the computer, pulled the wires through, and turned on the beast with all it’s blue light goodness and sat back and admired my handiwork.

with beer from my tap in hand, obviously.

here’s a few shots of the finished product, with and without flash.

next step, build the enclosure for the touch screen….

Tags: , bar, basement bar, htpc, jukebox by chadd
6 Comments »