- [Announcer] Today's setup is sponsored
by Philips Hue.
- Yo guys.
Jonathan here and this color changing setup
blew my mind and I think it's gonna blow yours, too.
(electronic dance music)
So this stuff's been in the works for a couple
of 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, I'll give 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 Wade Logan.
It's clean, it's simple, it's minimal,
but more importantly does a fantastic job
of housing everything together.
In this case because the setup is centered around color
and lighting, I love the fact that you can see directly
through the front panels on the console.
It add this awesome layer of ambience.
Inside the console is the Mac Mini,
the greatest of all time, so if you missed
that video, definitely check it out,
an Asus external Blu-Ray drive, which isn't used
to play Blu-Rays back, but rather rip them
directly out of 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, there 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 setup, behind the TV
is one strip with four extensions.
Below that are two Philips Hue blooms,
those are kind of shooting up towards the TV
filling everything in.
Inside the console are two Philips Hue Gos
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 Trackpad2
and it's sandwiched together with his awesome
little Twelve South gadget that makes it perfect
to use on the couch.
Now all this is happening because
of the Philips Hue sync app, which just 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 and that's because
of copyright DRM.
When you try to play it, it thinks you're trying
to pirate the movie, so hopefully in the future,
those companies will work with Philips to make
that happen, but in the meantime, an amazing workaround
and setup is with Plex.
So to rip Blu-Ray, the setup is pretty simple.
I grabbed an Asus Blu-Ray player for about 100 bucks
on Amazon and I use that in conjunction with makeMKV.
If you caught my Mac Mini video, the time to rip
a Blu-Ray is 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've 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 amazingly
with Philips Hue Sync.
To give you 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 palates 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 and used a microphone,
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,
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.
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 that, once you have everything configured,
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 can do.
More than likely you're not gonna 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 all
be customized to your tastes.
So, yeah, that's the 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 in a physical media world,
it kind of brought me back to my inner geek,
which is really cool.
If you 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.
(20th Century Fox grand jingle)
♪ Da, da, da ♪