Home Automation Info

A Different Kind of New Home Windows
Digital Home | April 04, 2008 | by Dan Tynan

You can have your Crestrons and AMXs, your Vantage Controls and Lutrons. Tyler Jennings will take Windows Media Center and Lifeware, thank you very much. President of Imperium Smart Systems in Herriman, Utah, Jennings is the winner of Microsoft's Windows Media Center Ultimate Install contest, awarded at last fall's Electronic Home Expo.

The winning installation featured 12 zones of audio, four Xbox 360s, Insteon lighting controls, DSC security, Aprilaire thermostats, and Exceptional Innovations' Lifeware automation software. But as with all of Imperium's custom installations, the heart of the system is a Windows Vista Ultimate Media Center PC. The reasons? Simplicity and cost.

"Systems like Crestron are beasts in terms of the time we have to spend programming, designing, and architecting them," Jennings says. "With Media Center and Lifeware it's a matter of hours instead of months. "Crestron also wants $11,000 for its media center box," he adds. "We charge $2,000 for ours."

Slowly, Microsoft is luring custom installers market away from powerful programmable systems and toward its own plug-and-play solutions. At last fall's CEDIA show, Alienware, Russound, Niveus, and even Crestron announced plans to ship products based on Windows Media Center in 2008.

Though Creston isn't shipping control systems built around Windows MediaCenters (WMC), its status as a Microsoft OEM partner means that dealers can integrate WMC PCs into a Crestron control environment, says company spokesperson Jeff Singer.

"A Crestron control system can communicate directly with a WMC so that a homeowner can access the WMC interface from anywhere in their home via a Crestron touchpanel," he says. "It can be the exact same interface that the user would see and interact with on their PC."

But vendors' enthusiasm for WMC isn't shared by all AV integrators. Dan Liberman, who was an IT guy before he started Infinite Sight and Sound in Fairfax, Va., says he's currently testing a control system based on Windows Media Center, and that makes him nervous.

"It uses embedded XP and it's very stable, so it's possible we could use it for a control system," he says. "But its very unlikely I'd accept anything Windows-based as a media server. I've worked with Windows for a long time, and I don't want to be answering support calls at 2 a.m."

Jennings says he doesn't get those calls, in part because he's careful to pare his WMC systems down to the essentials - removing extraneous software and installing top quality video cards and other components. He also makes sure each WMC box is set to optimize itself every day at 3 am, installing updates and rebooting to avoid memory leakage and instability.

Jennings says that though he still encounters builders who are skeptical of Windows-based home automation, the changeover is inevitable. "I think five years from now it will all be plug and play," he says. "You're gonna have to be a dinosaur to install systems that require programming."