Anyone tried pluto?

[Baloo]

Has anyone either bought in or made a pluto based system (http://www.plutohome.com). It all sounds very interesting but I'd like to hear what other peoples thoughts of it are before I take the plunge and buy in extra equipment.

[dpoulson]

Right, here's my thoughts after a week or so messing with this.

First impressions: Looks interesting, but lack of documentation for other equipment. They say it is easy to add support for other devices and to configure, but it definately needs some work on it. User documentation seems very sparse too. It is however all wiki based, so you can write the documentation yourself!

I haven't taken the plunge yet in buying any new equipment, simply re-using current kit I have lying around. Unfortunately, most of the stuff isn't supported yet, such as using my current MythTV frontends running on epia boards as Media Directors (Pluto frontends).

Controlling from my Symbian phone works well, once I'd figured out how to set it up (Pluto only autodetects nokia symbian phones it seems. Thought my panasonic was a WinXP tablet!). It does drain the batteries somewhat seeing as it is comunicating over bluetooth all the time.

Support from Pluto's web forums is excellent. All my questions have been answered very quickly, but then they are getting free beta testers and developers for next to no work themselves. They do seem to want to help people tho' and their software includes a remote admin utility to allow them to connect to your core server to aid in bug fixing over a secure tunnel. I've yet to have tried this, but plenty of people on the forums seem to get their problems solved.

Got a few things to do over the next week, so I'll probably leave pluto for now until the next release in a few days.

I've also got to read up on X10 and other home automation/security stuff. PBX's, MythTV, linux, etc are all old hat for me, HA is all new stuff! Anyone had experience with Dallas 1-wire/ibutton stuff? Looks interesting for home monitoring/climate control.

Anyway, hopefully the new release will be out soon, and I can put pluto onto a decent sized system (dual Athlon 2000) rather than the current poor Epia based system. Also will be able to try it with some freeview cards and Asterisk.

Cheers,

Darren.

[Baloo]

Originally Posted by dpoulson

Right, here's my thoughts after a week or so messing with this.

Great to see someone actually attempting it. I'm waiting on more hardware as I only have the one computer at home now after selling off all my old bits. As soon as they arrive I'll be having a go. The new release is due 'in a couple of days' so hopefully that will address some of the problems you mentioned.

The documentation on the website seems quite extensive if not lacking in detail so someone is obviously putting in the developing time on this one. The line count for the software they have produced is pretty impressive so this is no doubt a serious project unlike some of the other Linux solutions I have seen start with great enthusiasm and die a quick death.

It would be great to see a good rival to Media Center on Linux as I'm a long time Linux user and prefer to do everything with it although I admit to having Microsoft's Media Center on my one and only PC at the moment.

[dpoulson]

The documentation does seem good, until you're trying to do something!

To be honest, it does a very good job of describing how it all works and ties together at a high level, but there's very little at the lower level. This means, if something doesn't work, or you want to add an unsupported device, it can mean a bit of work.

The main things I'm waiting for are support for Grandstream IP phones, and support for Media Directors running on Epia boards. With the epia boards you could put together a decent MD for around 200-250 quid (network boot). There's also people looking at the posibility of using Xboxes as MD's.

I know what you mean about projects starting and dieing off (darwinism in action), but this definately looks like its got good momentum, and a commercial backing.

I for one am going to do a bit of PR for them. The more people using it the better!

As for MS Media Center, well MS products give me headache's! Doctors orders to avoid them for anything other than email and word processing! (which I only do at work. Home has been MS free for about 8 years now!)

Darren

[Baloo]

I've been trying to kick out Microsoft for 10 years now but it still comes back