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My Next Generation Cruising Entertainment System

praetorian

Posts: 44
Joined: 2007-09-24

Just before Christmas I was in the Apple store buying an iMac for my wife and kids. I happen to see the Apple TV and it got me thinking that this device could make my boats entertainment system do everything I ever wanted.

I want to be able to access my iTunes music library (and playlists) from my sundeck / salon / or bridge (and play each location seperately).

I want to have my entire library of DVD movies (say around 1000) available on my boat, but I don't want to clutter my boat with that many DVD's, nor do I want my kids losing them, not putting them away, etc.

Solution:

I'm putting an iMac on the boat to replace the TV/DVD player in my room. I'll also run VMWare Fusion on it and use that to run MaxSea Navigator when I need to. The iMac will be my media server and will feed both movies and music to each Apple TV node in the boat.

There will be Apple TV units on the bridge, sundeck, salon, fwd cabin.

The unit in the forward cabin and salon will be attached to the existing 20" LCD's and will play movies or music in their areas. I'll work out something so I can play 1 source music through each area if I want.

The sundeck will have a small 6-7" lcd that is big enough just to display the Front Row application so I can see the music playlists, song titles and cover art.

The bridge will use the Navnet 3D video input to display the Front Row screen and let me see my choices.

The trick is going to be getting my 1000 existing DVD's onto disk. This is the trick that's had me stumped on how to do it. I now have a program that should mount all the disks from a Sony autoloader that my brother is bringing over tomorrow. The Handbrake software should queue them all up and in a few weeks (or months), I should have my entire video library in iTunes.

I will have to manually update the movie titles and manually add the cover art, but it's still doable.

Add a wireless N network (the iMac can actually become a wireless N router itself), and all the Apple TV's get the movies/music from the iMac. I have a big inverter and battery bank so I can power this (not too big power draw anyway) without problems.

Total cost for this: 1 iMac - $1500, 3-4 Apple TV's @ $250/ea

when it comes time to sell the boat, I think the right buyer will pay for this feature. If they don't want it, i can easily remove it and keep it!!!

I'm probably going to get a couple more of these Apple TV units and put them in my house too.

If anybody is interested in finding out more or discussing this, let me know.

Submitted by praetorian on Sun, 01/20/2008 - 02:09.

Bruce_Dillahunty

Posts: 71
Joined: 2007-06-22

Sounds quite workable.

If you haven't already bought the VMWare Fusion (and it's a fine product and VMware makes some great stuff and I use it a lot at the office) you might want to look at Parallels. They sell a quite inexpensive Mac product (available for Windows and Linux also) to do the same thing. Works great, including a really slick ability to have your Windows application windows appear as regular Mac windows, instead of in a contained environment.

http://www.parallels.com

Just a satisfied customer.

Sun, 01/20/2008 - 21:50

praetorian

Posts: 44
Joined: 2007-09-24

I've got both Parallels and Fusion on my laptop, but prefer the performance and interface of Fusion.

I find parallels a bit slow. Fusion has the same ability to make your apps appear on the dock in inside it's own window on the Mac instead of the windows desktop. They call it Unity.

Fusion uses both processors in a duocore. 1 for Windows and 1 for Mac. I find that Parallels slows my system down too much if I've got lots of things open on both platforms.

Also, I'm VMWare certified so I use it more. I have an ESX server at home and I can run any of my VM images on my Fusion.

The cool part of this solution will be having my rather large collection of movies available on the boat without cluttering up with discs (and having the kids lose them or people borrow them and not return them). With this I can have the movies but not worry about people constantly coming to see what movies I have for them to watch (and then me chasing them down weeks later to get them back).

Now I can just tell them to get an Apple TV and move their boat within wireless range!

The real trick is going to be getting the movies from disc to MP4 format.

Mon, 01/21/2008 - 14:09

Bruce_Dillahunty

Posts: 71
Joined: 2007-06-22

Ah... since you have VMware/ESX experience, I see your point (I'm a VMware person at the office also).

Have you played with MythTV any? I don't think their is a Mac version of the server part (their is a Mac client), but I run it in place of Tivo and the like at the house (on a Linux box).

The reason I mention it is that it has DVD ripping and transcoding utilities that might be of interest. Some of these transcoding processes can take a LONG time, though.

Tue, 01/22/2008 - 23:11

Jazz

Posts: 5
Joined: 2007-08-20

I have done something similar on my boat with a PC laptop.

I have a large mp3 music collection, over 40000 titles, that I wanted on my boat. I have a Denon amplifier in the Salon and a pioneer with subwoofer on upper deck and flybridge. The laptop audio output is wired to the Denon and Pioneer so that whenever I switch to Aux1 on either, I get my playlists etc... The video is the same with the laptop feeding an A/B switch with the Satelite antenae. But, whatever I select on the laptop is the only one available to all at that time, in other words, only one movie at a time, but available to all 4 tv's etc... But I only have 96 of my 400 movies transferred to AVI format on a 500gig portable drive, my music is on a 320 gig portable drive so I can take both home for updates etc... (they are both rather small and quite portable.

Modern technology will catch up to us one of these days... :)

Fri, 02/01/2008 - 15:13