Marcus Cake

Paul Webber released Linux Media Center on 17th March 2007. It was the culmination of five months work by two individuals full-time. He leveraged the Ubuntu Linux distribution and plutohome.com open source projects to deliver a “free” Linux Media Centre. It may be better than Microsoft’s Media Centre.

“LinuxMCE is a free, open source add-on to Ubuntu including a 10′ UI, complete whole-house media solution with pvr + distributed media, and the most advanced smarthome solution available. It is stable, easy to use, and requires no knowledge of Linux and only basic computer skills.” - www.linuxmce.com web site

Paul Webber’s work is significant because:

• it demonstrates the power of one individual to make a significant contribution to the world by leveraging free and open source software. (See The potential of collective innovation and open source to reshape our world needs to be demonstrated and The next four stages of online networks - from tools and solutions to new structures and economic development ).
• the Linux Media Centre appears to be superior to Microsoft’s products. Please see the video here.
• Media Centres are popular. The cost savings could be significant and make a significant contribution to the retirement of many individuals. See The average US citizen can double their retirement savings by committing to free software over their lifetime .
• It extends Ubuntu to deliver a “Media Centre edition”. Ubuntu also has a “Server” edition. The Linux community is moving from tools to solutions for the needs of different customer segments (see What does Linux want to be? Features and benefits for each customer segment? ).
• it not only manages media, it also manages security, home automation and telephone systems. The telephone system, Asterisk, is a commercial grade IP telephone product.
• two people have taken 3 million lines of “open source” code have made it “free” software free of the constraints of “open source”
• This media centre mau ultimately be made available in the Ubuntu repositories. Anyone using Ubuntu can simply state they want the software and it will be downloaded.
• this media centre will find its way to all Linux distributions
• The story was digged on the 20th March 2007. The servers crashed with ten thousand people trying to download a 600 megabyte file. Paul Webber stopped distributing the file and asked people to wait while he established bittorrent distribution for the file. The bittorrent was made available on the weekend. According to a note on the web site, the in three days before the 24th March 2007, LinuxMCE web site had one million hits and one hundred visitors per day. If this media centre works, those one hundred thousand people will tell their friends.
• Paul Webber has started the project and is calling for volunteers to help him further. I suspect he will be joined by a team of specialists that volunteer their time because they believe in his vision - “Most of all, I want to get LinuxMCE accepted into other Distro’s as a standard desktop option. I humbly think this is important for Linux to be a viable option for home pc users, like it already is for commercial servers because, in the home, everyone is starting to expect their pc’s to be media hubs”.

History of LinuxMCE, why I started this project and the goals by Paul Webber

Extract:

• At Cedia 2006, the biggest event in the U.S.A. for home audio/video/automation, I saw an incredible demo of Monster Cable’s new Einstein product suite. Cedia’s Technology Council wrote that out of the tens of thousands products at the show, this was the “the most important product” there, and “the most exciting thing to hit home automation”
• I learned the best part was that the company that developed it and licensed it to Monster, Pluto (plutohome.com), released virtually all the source code for free as open source. They only held back modules for DRM and some patented or licensed stuff. Yet even though it had a gorgeous user interface, tons of cool features, and even the industry experts I talked to said it kicked ass over Windows Vista and was the most promising thing to help Linux grab the market for living room media pc’s, almost nobody knows about it, and very, very few Linux users have ever tried it.
• As I started to to use it, the reason was clear. The software was very tightly intertwined with Pluto’s own custom distro which is single-purpose and designed to only run on a dedicated box, kind of like a Tivo. Thus it was almost impossible to make it work on a ‘normal’ Linux PC. Pluto said this wasn’t the intent, but that it had to be that way because their paying customers demanded closed-down black-box solutions which had to comply with rules regarding DRM. And, they said they were too busy taking care of their commercial clients to put much effort into the open source community.
• Fair enough, I guess. They already contributed over 3 million lines of code and this media platform. So I figured I’d branch off and work on building an open source community to take it from here. The folks at Pluto were helpful and supportive, and welcomed this fork, and even allowed me to use their build servers and svn to get it going.

I have tried numerous times to get Plutohome working. I could not get it to work. I am looking forward to obtaining the download on the weekend and seeing if it works. I expect a quality community will join this project and fix any issues quickly.