Smart Home Cinema (SHC) – an immersive experience
A blog on smart home cinema, because we love both movies and smart home
This blog is dedicated to the immersive experience of home cinema, which is cinema but at home, and how this activity can be embedded in a smart home environment. It will cover all the words of the title.
Notably, SHC will cover topics dedicated to the main constituents of movies (and series):
- the best and worst moments of actresses/actors, script writers, music composers and directors
- how the performance of actresses/actors, script writers, music composers and directors changes with years
- rank actors/actresses, script writers, composers and directors according to their impact, performance and fame.
My microscope will be focused at the spectator’s eyes, i.e., the movie fans that regularly evaluate movies, and whom I want to be visitors of my blog.
My approach will be ‘smart’. I will use ‘hard numbers’:
- Firstly, I will use data from the biggest database, the International Movie DataBase, IMDB, which is freely available online at www.imdb.com, and reflects the opinion of us, the cinephiles.
- Secondly, I will use the online Ngram tool. Ngram produces a graph in which the y-axis shows how many times a phrase occurs in a corpus of books (making up about 6% of all books ever printed; Lin et al. 2012) relative to all remaining phrases composed of the same number of words (i.e., relative frequency) during the same time (x-axis).
Blog posts will be published at least twice per week
There will also be three regular ‘columns’ related to movies:
- Memories of a cinephile
- Who is more famous, and
- Greatest Of All Times – Movie Scenes (GOATms).
SHC will cover a variety of topics related to ‘smart’ aspects:
- operational e.g., easiness of installation, battery duration, frequency of device firmware and software updates, customer support, waf factor, user friendliness of the app supporting the devices, direct support for smart assistants, existence of IFTTT channel) and
- aesthetic ones,
for the plethora of smart devices, existing or arising, and their software applications, that can be used in a home cinema setup and elevate the immersive experience.
Such devices include:
- lights and led strips, plugs, wall switches
- remote controls
- sensors and buttons
- Alexa, Google home, Smartthings, Home Assistant and other smart home platforms
- cameras, locks, shades
- speakers, amplifiers, projectors and TVs
- computers, which form the backbone of any home cinema setup
- streamers
- network attached devices (NAS)
- dedicated media center software
- other related software
- gaming consoles.
Given my multiyear involvement and dedication to these issues as a hobbyist, I will primarily present my views and preferences. Such views have been set by trial and error. They will often be atherosclerotic and obsessive but not technical.
My approach is addressed to the average hobbyist: things must be easily setup and operate in a set-and-forget way. For highly technical issues I will direct readers to the appropriate sources on the internet and the YouTube.
I hope that SHC will provide stimulus to home cinema hobbyists for turning their systems smart, so that the whole experience will be elevated, without doing the mistakes we do when we start something from scratch.
All posts appearing in the blog will be regularly revisited and updated if required
Revisit posts from time to time
The posts related to the smart aspect of home cinema will cover the following, among other, issues:
- Smart lighting
- Smart remotes
- The basics of home cinema (HC)
- Setting up a HC PC as the heart of the home cinema: the hardware
- Setting up a HC PC as the heart of the home cinema: expanding the HC experience with a NAS
- Setting up a HC PC as the heart of the home cinema: expanding the HC experience with streamers
- Setting up a HC PC as the heart of the home cinema: Plex
- Setting up a HC PC as the heart of the home cinema: Kodi
- Setting up a HC PC as the heart of the home cinema: Media players (MPC-HC, Madvr, Lav filters, etc)
- Fine tuning the hardware: the small extras (Switchbot and other)
- Adding voice control: Alexa, Google home, Siri, Home Assistant
- Expanding the HC experience: Smartthings
- Expanding the HC experience: Home Assistant
- The first HC automations
- Expanding the HC experience: Smart amplifiers, smart speakers
- Expanding the HC experience: Smart stores
- Expanding the HC experience: The cheap but valuable NFC tags
- Expanding the HC experience: Folding smart phones
- Expanding the HC experience: Gaming – PS4, PS5
- Expanding the HC experience: Gaming – Xbox.