It is already doing home automation, home security, VOIP (asterisk running in the background for voicemail and routing), Media Center / media player via the TV.
Here is the sweet thing with this. It is very similar to MythTV in that it runs a backend, or what they call “core”, and that core serves up stuff the way the myth backend does. I’m still not sure on all the details of this, and I don’t exactly know how it handles scheduling and controlling other computers with encoder cards, but it looks pretty interesting because the backend does some other cool things myth doesn’t.
For example, it serves up a network boot image to the “front end” computers, so one minute you can be using windows or linux or whatever as a desktop, and then hit one button on a remote, and it reboots and uses a network image to come up as a front-end for watching TV or movies.
Home automation and security built in. Auto-discovery of UPnP devices like IP security cameras, asterisks built in for VIOP and voicemail, and control widgets / applets for windows, symbian OS phones, windows CE devices, and linux, all right out of the box. And it looks like they try to simplify installation beyond what even Ubuntu has done for setting up mythTV.
Also, another great feature, is that you can have a bunch of front-end video players going, and you can walk from one room to another carrying your bluetooth phone, and the video players will connect to the bluetooth phone, and re-route whatever you were watching to that display. Too Cool!!!!
Anyway, this is basically what I’ve been looking for for a while in terms of automating my house from a single point, and serving up media, and doing VOIP. Now I just need to figure out what the hardware requirements are for some of the various scenarios I would like to incorporate into my home, and buy a HUGE NAS appliance (or build my own NAS with a RAID card).
The one thing I’m not clear on yet is how it all works with the backend. For example if a myth backend is not doing any of the encoding itself it can run on almost no CPU power, and it just does scheduling and stuff, so my original plan was to run it on a really low powered computer that would double as a NAS box for me. Well, with a giant budget this could be an interesting build-out for automating my house, but since I’m still limited to pretty low-end hardware this will mostly be an exercise in discovery for me.
Worth a look if your interested in building your own media-center or distributed media-center type of things for your home.