Gadgetory

today's setup is sponsored by philips hue your guys johnathan here and this color-changing set of blew my mind and i think is gonna blow yours too so this subs been in the works for a couple weeks now I've almost lost my mind trying to perfect it but I think I got it now before I hop into the how-to giving you a quick rundown of the setup the star of the show is an 85 inch monster 4k HDR TV from Sony it's not OLED so it's not the latest and greatest but for the price it looks amazing and more importantly it fills the wall beautifully the console is from weight Logan it's clean it's simple it's minimal but more importantly there's a fantastic job of housing everything together in this case because it set up a senator around color and lighting I love the fact that you can see directly through the front panels on the console it adds this awesome layer of ambience inside the console is the Mac Mini the greatest of all time so if you miss that video definitely check it out an asus external blu-ray drive which isn't used to play blu-rays back but rather ripped them directly onto the Mac Mini and then run into a plex server next to that is an Xbox one X project Scorpio edition and finally on top of that which is kind of hard to see is an Apple TV 4k now the heart and soul of the audio setup is the Martin Logan motion vision X it's a little pricey but oh my god it sounds incredible yes those are two home pods left and right in stereo they don't sound better than the sound bar but they're also about half the price which is pretty impressive and I think for the most part if you just want to listen to music it's kind of the go-to option but definitely for movies the sound bar is the way to go now as far as the Philips hue set up behind the TV is one strip with four extensions below that our two Philips hue blooms those are kind of shooting up towards a TV feel and everything in inside the console or two Philips hue goes and on the back of the Media Console is one more Philips hue strip which kind of rounds everything out now as far as how I'm controlling everything it's an Apple magic keyboard with Magic Trackpad too and it's sandwiched together with awesome little 12 South gadget that makes it perfect to use on the couch now all this is happening because of the Philips hue sync app which is dropped recently and the more and more I've messed with it the more it blew my mind you will need a computer to run this and it will work on both Mac and PC it's not gonna work on Apple TV or any kind of streaming box or stick now this won't work with streaming services like Netflix Hulu iTunes that's because of copyright DRM when you try to play it it thinks you're trying to pirate the so hopefully in the future those companies will work with Philips to make that happen but in the meantime an amazing workaround and set up is with Plex so to rip blu-rays the setup is pretty simple I grabbed an ace whose blu-ray player for about a hundred bucks on Amazon and I use that in conjunction with make MKV if you count my Mac Mini video the time to rip a blu-ray it's only about 20-25 minutes so it's not bad at all way less time consuming than I ever would have imagined now if you want to get into 4k blu-ray ripping it's possible but it's a lot of work you got to get these custom codes so more trouble than it's worth for me right now but I'll drop some resources down below if you want to do that yourself so as you can see my Plex collection it's not amazing but it's steadily growing and it's also created this new sick addiction more importantly though it works amazing with Phillips you sink to give us a quick rundown of the software there are four modes scenes games music and movies there are four intensity modes subtle moderate high and intense honestly as cool as it is to use this in conjunction with movies music is amazing when you're using this in conjunction with music you have five color palettes to choose from I think four is probably my favorite it has a ton of Blues and as you can tell I like blue if you've used third-party apps in the past to get this effect use the microphone and it always felt a little laggy a little slow but this responds in real-time and it is crazy impressive now once you have the hue sync app installed on your computer next you want to head over to the hue app on your phone or tablet's hop over to the settings section and then select entertainment areas this is where you're gonna set every light that you want in that section and what's awesome is you can actually see how that looks in the environment and move the lights so they best react to the scene you can see the TV the couch so in my case everything is pretty heavily centered around the TV but more importantly you can fine-tune everything so it works perfectly from there once you have everything configure it is time to enjoy the light show now the one question I've seen pop up a ton is is this distracting while you're watching a movie and honestly it can be at first especially when you're kind of looking for those lights to perform but the more and more you get used to it and actually focus on the movie it almost becomes a secondary enhancement that you would definitely miss if it was gone in this case it is definitely exaggerated on the extreme side of what you do more than likely you're not going to need this many lights or this many colors if you want to though it looks amazing or you can tone it down the beautiful part about this is it can't be customized to your taste so yeah that's a setup it's way way more fun than I ever thought it would be and as much as I thought I was in this kind of streaming not a physical media world it kind of brought me back to my inner geek which is really cool he missed my Mac mini video that's kind of the centerpiece of this setup and how everything runs that video is here and I will catch you guys later you