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My Next Generation Cruising Entertainment System

praetorian

Posts: 45
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: 73
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.Â

Sun, 01/20/2008 - 21:50

praetorian

Posts: 45
Joined: 2007-09-24

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

I find parallels a bit slow.Â 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.Â They call it Unity.

Fusion uses both processors in a duocore.Â 1 for Windows and 1 for Mac.Â 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.Â 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).Â 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.Â

Mon, 01/21/2008 - 14:09

Bruce_Dillahunty

Posts: 73
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.Â

Tue, 01/22/2008 - 23:11

Jazz

Posts: 7
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.Â 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...Â The video is the same with the laptop feeding an A/B switch with the Satelite antenae.Â But, whatever I select on the laptop is the only one available to all at that time,Â 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

praetorian

Posts: 45
Joined: 2007-09-24

I have now installed what I think is the ultimate multimedia entertainment system on the water. I tried the iMac solution as I'd written last year but converting movies to a format playable on the Mac proved to be too time consuming.

I ended up going with a Vista Media Center computer in which I'd simply ripped all my movies to. I use AnyDVD to rip the movies (you can download it for under $50 and it rips BluRay movies too). The most notable downside to this solution is the amount of disk space required. I have a few thousand movies on the boat and I'm using about 10 terabytes of disk space.

My Vista media centre machine has AnyDVD and MediaBrowser (free). Blu-Ray movies are played with Arcsoft's Total Media Theater (~$80).

In addition I have all my music stored in iTunes on computer.

I also have smaller computers in each of the cabins, all connected with an inexpensive ethernet switch which allows all the computers to access all the movies and TV shows.

For my music, I purchased a Sonos system (www.sonos.com). These are a bit pricey and lack the ability to play satellite music and they're AC powered, but the remote has a display and touch screen. It lets me play music in the salon, sundeck and bridge independently (either different music or the same music at different volumes, which is extremely nice). The Sonos can access all the music in iTunes, including the playlists, from the salon's Vista Media Center.

I also now have the same system at my house also, it's that good!

Admitedly this is not the most inexpensive system installed, and it does use some power, but if your boat is big enough and you're interested, there isn't anything better.

It occupies the kids extremely well when the rain comes!

PS. One of the media center's is an XBOX 360 (Microsoft made these media center extenders so they could play any movie from a Vista media center).

There are others ways you can do this, but I looked at almost all of them and many have drawbacks. I looked at using an ipod touch with itunes to play music. The limitation was that the ipod touch program won't control volume well.

If anybody wants more information, let me know and I'd be happy to help.

Mon, 10/05/2009 - 20:10