Migrating from LinuxMCE

I just found OpenHab and would like to know if anyone here has tried LinuxMCE. I was hooked after watching the video years ago that showed how easy it was and the “follow me” feature for media, but I;ve been at it for a while, even purchasing a Dianemo license, but it’s been very frustrating getting a system that works, lots of bugs.
I would like to do the following
-Insteon Lights
-Whole house Audio
-Distribute Video from central source to other TV’s in the home
-Integrate IP door phones and Cisco IP phones
-Control House remotely
-View IP Cameras remotely

I would also like to know if there are people working on a per project basis to get things running on a system. Right now I have a centrally located Server with Cat 6 going to each room, POE Cameras, and audio cables run from each room back to the location with the server.

Any and all suggestions are welcom.

I think, that this is all possible, but you will have to integrate much stuff.
openHAB itself provides the bus to let all parts communicate with each other, and you can use it’s UI to control things from web, tablet, phone and so on.

For multiroom audio, it depends on your requirements, for example I have an 8 channel amplifier with speakers in 4 rooms, this amp is supplied from an 8 channel usb audio card, connected to an odroid u3, and I use 4 instances of squeezebox-lite to play music from web or local logitechmediaserver and for openHAB there is the squeezebox binding. :smiley:

For video distribution I use yavdr which can be controlled via vdr binding.

Telephone here is an asterisk, but I did no integration beyond “last call” display (script at asterisk sends number and name to openHAB when receiving a call)

I don’t own IP cams (yet), but it is definitely possible to get the pictures and/or video streams to openHAB.

Thanks for the reply, Sounds similar to what i currently have for the audio, it’s just that I don’t know how to code, so I can understand most things, but getting into the code to make this all happen is what I am worried about. That is why I went with a Dianemo license, but found that even that was full of issues.

My suggestion is to learn to code or hire it out. Sadly, there is no product out there I know of that is going to do exactly what you want to do out of the box and the only way to make it happen is to get your hands into some code. You don’t have to be an expert or professional by any means, but without at least some rudimentary coding skills you will have to accept whatever the default capabilities and behaviors are of the products you want to control.

One thing to keep in mind regarding OH is that its primary focus is with Home Automation. As such Insteaon Lights and control house remotely it will handle quite well.

Whole house audio it will be able to support but it is going to take a lot of work on your part. It could also be expensive depending on what technology/approach you decide to take (e.g. Sonos is popular but boy is it pricey).

View IP cameras remotely it can do but not very well. Basically you can plop the MJPEG stream on your sitemap and see what it is currently looking at right now. You will be much happier with a CCTV product like ZoneMinder or ISpy. There are ways to get events at least from ZoneMinder so you can use motion detections generated in ZoneMinder to trigger events in OH.

There is no binding I’m aware of in OH that will do much for you in terms of integrating VoIP. There are some old tutorials on how one might interact with Asterisk on the wiki and I’m sure OH could be made to interoperate with other PBX systems that have an API. But OH itself isn’t going to do much for you out of the box. You will have to use other servers too.

In short, OH can play a role on all of your desires, but it will not be able to implement all of your desires on its own. In some cases it may only play a very limited role.

I’m at the point where I cannot devote hours of time to get a working system, I tried LinuxMCE, and have become so frustrated that I finally abandoned it.

Is there anyone in the community building systems that are “packaged” or are there people interested in working by project at a reasonable rate?

I’ve not found anything that I can interface with that will give me a working system, and it might be something that others would be commercially interested in.