**Setting Up My Home Entertainment System with Philips Hue**

I recently had the opportunity to set up my home entertainment system using Philips Hue, and I'm excited to share my experience with you. The first step was to create an entertainment area, which I accomplished by placing three lights in a row on the ceiling. I didn't worry too much about the height of the lights, as the focus was on creating an ambiance rather than aesthetics. With the entertainment area set up, I moved on to configure my murals.

**Configuring My Murals with Philips Hue**

The mural setup was surprisingly cool, and I was impressed by the video preview feature that allowed me to see how my animations would look in real-time. I was able to drag and drop devices onto a grid to create my desired layout, and adjust individual effects such as colors and static patterns. The video capture feature was also impressive, with built-in animations and customization options. I was able to choose from pre-set effects, or get creative with my own visuals using the plus sign option.

**The Philips Hue Smart Plug**

One of the products that has been difficult to find in stock is the Philips Hue smart plug. These plugs are super expensive, but they offer a lot of flexibility and control over my studio equipment. I have four of these plugs, which can be controlled through my Elgato Stream Deck. This means I can turn on or off entire sections of my studio with just a few clicks. The plugs also work with Bluetooth or Zigbee, depending on the version.

**Upgrading My Studio and Streaming Setup**

As part of my upgrade, I'm setting up high-quality music in the rock and metal genre using Backing Track. This is a community-driven platform that offers a wide range of music for streaming and download. The music is built by my community and my team, and it's available for free on backingtrack.gg. From synthrock to chip rock, there's something for everyone. I'm excited to share this music with my audience and create a more immersive experience.

**My Creative Space**

After setting up my entertainment system and studio equipment, I feel like I've finally created the creative space of my dreams. The room is filled with natural light and has a calming ambiance, perfect for meditation or simply relaxing. I'm looking forward to using this space to focus on my passions and work on new projects. With the help of Philips Hue and other smart home devices, I'm confident that I'll be able to create a more productive and enjoyable workspace.

**Conclusion**

As I look around my newly upgraded studio, I feel a sense of pride and accomplishment. It's been a long time coming, but it was worth the wait. From optimizing my stream alerts to setting up my murals and entertainment system, every detail has been carefully considered to create an immersive experience. I hope that you'll join me on this journey and check out my updated stream settings and creative space. And don't forget to be kind, rewind often!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthings have gone too far the people over at Corsair who I thought were my friends or at least Pleasant acquaintances on the business front they have swung too low they have said that my studio sucks and then it needs more I I think they might be right I'm going for the video rental store slash arcade aesthetic and I don't think it's quite living up to that yet so I challenge them to put their products where their mouth were and fix it like what are you gonna do about it like come at me bro and I didn't expect what happened next an arcade crossed with a video rental store it seemed like an easy enough aesthetic to match and in a smaller room I streamed from macadaro Department it was a tad easier to manage in this space a lot more is needed not just stuff I've got that covered but lights as much as LED lights and RGB you're maimed on these days they really help contribute towards the look I mean I'd love more real neon but the cost difference isn't always worth it I've generally always had the quantity of Lights though this space has needed more but I haven't had a way to control them every aesthetic vibe-filled scene involves me running in circles scrambling to turn everything on and I usually forget something Corsair has a new IQ feature that I think would be perfect for this setup murals the ability to take all of your IQ connected devices and apply Color effects to them no not like they already supported per device but across all of the devices you can map out all of your connected lighting kit in your room and apply gradients and effects spatially across them or have them react to your music or game sounds I know this just sounds like marketing copy but this is a huge deal I didn't realize how much of a big deal it was when I originally saw the announcement but playing around with it now oh boy this kind of thing would typically require thousands of dollars of DMX gear and complex wiring setups to control and none of my gear supports DMX in the first place except like my old analog mixer and you can just do it all right here in IQ if you have supported Tech I just want them to open the API a little bit more or to work with people like the atem devs so that I can set it up with atom to control through twitch alerts and things like that as I covered in my previous video on building like supercharging your stream alerts naturally since they are the ones that said my studio was crap Corsair sent over some of their lighting stuff so I could try out this feature well I thought that was all that was being sent what really happened was over the course of a week or two a substantial mountain of boxes filled my studio more and more what was inside I had to know some of it was the expected stuff Elgato LED strips I'm quite fond of those goofy light towers I've got some new Earthworks mics to play with a neat collector statue from the Discord partner team I finally got my halo infinite statue from my pre wait wait how long has that been anyway lots of cool stuff in here beyond the Corsair stuff they also sent out the new nanoleaf canvas smarter kit I haven't even used the nanoleaf product before uh not a triangle fan and some sick Philips Hue spotlights yeah this murals feature works with more than just coarse air lights I also received a few massive boxes that were really heavy when I carried them to the studio but when I opened them there was nothing in there just packing paper or in one particularly cruel prank packing peanuts dear gosh the evilness I was confused why the boxes were empty but I couldn't help but feel that something was released into my studio that day I haven't quite figured out what I got the wiring I had some immediate ideas for where I wanted lights to go I just posted a video over on analog dreams about building out the Art Channel side of my desk wall and while that setup is nice it is missing a lot of that color and vibe that I'm going for throughout the rest of the studio it's it's too clean it's too sterile I'm not a minimalist guy I'm a maximalist guy my first idea was to do something off book with the light towers they're cool enough and all but on their own they're just Towers but what if I had them going upside down from my shelves here it could add some nice color and look sick tried some command strips and they seemed to work at first but I wanted to wait a day or so before putting the towers on the bases to make sure it'd stick and nope fell right off the next day then I committed to breaking out the internet's least favorite tool the hot glue gun but buy some witchcraft the hot glue would not stick to the anti-slide rubber pads on the bottoms of these things it just fell right off I was worried that the rubber would melt and I would mingle them but I never expected this fine Corsair you'll you win I'll use them as towers for now instead I wired up most of the shelves with the Elgato LED strips and called it a day that's exactly what I wanted at least through this I also grabbed a few more on-brand LED signs a few USB extenders and a big USB power supply to add more background lights this neat little PC is from corsair's Vengeance gaming line I5 12600k RTX 3070 16 gigabytes of RAM and Whisper quiet seriously the quietest high-spec PC I've ever heard in my life it's got me rethinking how I've been building PCS all these years because what it's just silent I I don't get it I know people aren't big on pre-builds but I want someone to just build my PCS for me this quietly like it's modestly specked and it has a b660 motherboard which doesn't have the i o that I want for the most part like if I wanted to upgrade it based on this platform I wouldn't be able to use the motherboard it's a 75 750 watt power supply so if I wanted to throw off 40 90 in there wouldn't be a great idea but the motherboard has VGA out which means I'll also be able to use this to control my CRT monitors that I use for my set displays now there's some ideas despite the modest specs it's just fine for gaming in the studio here and looks a lot better than my falling apart test bench below the desk this will be the brains of the operation for the murals hell even courserver's desk mat has RGB now got a super clean gaming and testing setup going now and I've expanded my glitch art setup with some sweet Euro rack gear it's time to finish the lights the nanoleaf canvas kit provided some much needed lighting above the gaming wall these little panels are straightforward to install they come as a bunch of small squares with small chips to connect them almost like the boards for flash drives just arrange how you want attach the adhesive strips and go I wish I had a few more panels in the kit but for my first nanoleaf experience not not bad honestly gotta connect that up to Wi-Fi and add it to IQ I do need to get more of these little text displays they're addicting lastly I ceiling mounted these fill up spotlights they're meant for outdoor use but nothing about them wouldn't work indoors and I wanted some spotlights for areas in my studio admittedly they're not very bright you would think for outdoor lights they would need to be even brighter which is kind of why I sprung for them and they they do not get very bright I they're cool that means I'm not going to get blinded by them but I was expecting a little more and reviews online seem to reflect that let's configure all these smart lights in IQ plus I've got to figure out how to control the dumb lights more easily but we'll get to that I'm in the IQ software and we have updated to include the new murals feature which includes a preview switcher on the main Home tab as well as its own dedicated tab where you can map things out we'll get to that in just a moment don't get too excited yet we need to pair up our Philips Hue and our nanoleaf stuff I've already paired them on mobile but you go to IQ settings in the top right Integrations and we need to turn on these two so we're gonna go ahead and set up Philips Hue integration it's going to ask you to access your firewall I'm gonna close that you can see here there's a Philips Hue Bridge we're going to click Setup Wizard we're on Wizard ensure it's on and connected to the network we already did that now we have to go run and push the button it's that easy click next click next click finish you can turn murals on and off by clicking the murals indicator that's fine all right under Philips Hue oh if the tab is still empty I haven't created an entertainment area that may very well be possible let me take a look all right I'm in the Philips Hue app I thought this studio garage thing was my entertainment area I can turn the lights on or off uh uh three dots add new room or Zone maybe we need a Zone we'll say office yep that's fine add Studio garage lights done okay now we have a room and a Zone neither of them are called entertainment areas we're gonna do nanoleaf Setup Wizard canvas see that one just detects automatically I gotta hold the on off button for five to seven seconds easy all right and we are ready to go with the canvas if we go to our mural yeah we can just drag that straight on here and for the most part that works we can make it ooh I'm not entirely an idiot the entertainment areas are buried for some reason if you go to settings on this bridge entertainment areas I don't know why that's not with the the rooms in the zones but here we go that's not shown in corsair's tutorial how will you use your entertainment area for my monitor sure that's fine yep choose all of the lights in the room position your lights uh we are we on the ceiling that's fine I truly don't care height there we go yes on the ceiling does not matter for the three lights we have that's fine done all right we now have an entertainment area so we come back in here to our Philips Hue there's our entertainment area all right so now we go to murals it shows up as a light from Phillips but if I drag it on there those lights sure are flashing now we can look at the actual UI for the murals so the mural setup here is actually pretty cool you've got a video preview for whatever animation or video you want to sync to you have your devices and then you can drag them to fit wherever you want and so your effects you have individual videos you have specific colors that you can just map everything to a rainbow that you can map everything to it's just static ideas there's the interstellar effect there's an abstract kind of lava lampy effect which I kind of dig another abstract kind of liquid effect these just kind of show off what you could do the video capture one is pretty cool because if you double click well if you go to colors and settings here they have some built-in uh video effects that you can also choose more customized stuff from here so you can actually just click the plus and then you can choose between videos images static Colors audio reactivity wave color spectrum ambient lighting based on your monitor which is all the rage these days you might want or a gradient so with video capture there's a lot of built-in animations you've got like pink colors and you can kind of get the preview in the background there got a little green red thing going on so you got some baked in stuff but I'm I'm a glitch artist I can I make visualizations let's go make one hello foreign piece to the puzzle that I picked up almost exactly a year ago today and still haven't used the Philips Hue smart plugs I have four of these these have been very difficult to find in stock I'm even looking at it right now and if you order it on Amazon you gotta wait like most of the month to get them they are super expensive Phillips offers two different versions of these one only works through Bluetooth with the app the other which is the one that's hard to get also works with zigbee which works with the Philips Hue Hub which you can then use with the Elgato stream deck meaning I have four Outlets or power strips you know with whatever's plugged into them then I can control through my stream deck so for signs like my neon signs and other things that I have to climb around shelves to get to in order to turn on or off typically when I want to stream I can flick them all on This Way theoretically I could even turn on my whole CRT wall with this I don't really want to put the CRTs through that whereas lights and things like that are kind of built for it so I'm gonna install these while you're watching the beauty that is me setting all of this up to upgrade my studio and my stream setup you should be upgrading your stream setup with some high quality music in the Rock and metal genre if that's your thing we have that for free over at backing track.gg this is built by my community with my community manager and I we we wanted to change the game away from just being Lo-Fi stuff to being some good music that you would actually listen to on the regular we've got rock we've got metal we've got synthrock we've got chip rock coming soon the New Slayer Wars album is dropping any minute now is some good stuff and you can stream it for free you can play it for free you can go download it for free use it in your videos use it in your streams tag us when you do if you want no requirement though go check it out backing track.gg it's the music used in this video as well over stimulating to some but this is what I always wanted every time I walk in here I feel a little at peace I feel at home you might think there's too much to look at but I feel like I could just sit in the center and meditate aside from my new collection of cardboard that I can only slowly filter out with our bi-weekly recycling pickups I'm getting very close this is turning into the creative space of my dreams 2023 will be the year of renewed creativity and doing more stuff I care about rather than what I feel obligated to do it will be the year of Vibes and of art I hope you'll join me for the ride I hope you'll click this video to see how I just optimized My Stream alerts to take over my whole studio and I hope you'll remember to Be Kind Rewind all right I I think of the picture I I think for once we got a desk we can stick with I think I'm happy with it but I think we should go biggerthings have gone too far the people over at Corsair who I thought were my friends or at least Pleasant acquaintances on the business front they have swung too low they have said that my studio sucks and then it needs more I I think they might be right I'm going for the video rental store slash arcade aesthetic and I don't think it's quite living up to that yet so I challenge them to put their products where their mouth were and fix it like what are you gonna do about it like come at me bro and I didn't expect what happened next an arcade crossed with a video rental store it seemed like an easy enough aesthetic to match and in a smaller room I streamed from macadaro Department it was a tad easier to manage in this space a lot more is needed not just stuff I've got that covered but lights as much as LED lights and RGB you're maimed on these days they really help contribute towards the look I mean I'd love more real neon but the cost difference isn't always worth it I've generally always had the quantity of Lights though this space has needed more but I haven't had a way to control them every aesthetic vibe-filled scene involves me running in circles scrambling to turn everything on and I usually forget something Corsair has a new IQ feature that I think would be perfect for this setup murals the ability to take all of your IQ connected devices and apply Color effects to them no not like they already supported per device but across all of the devices you can map out all of your connected lighting kit in your room and apply gradients and effects spatially across them or have them react to your music or game sounds I know this just sounds like marketing copy but this is a huge deal I didn't realize how much of a big deal it was when I originally saw the announcement but playing around with it now oh boy this kind of thing would typically require thousands of dollars of DMX gear and complex wiring setups to control and none of my gear supports DMX in the first place except like my old analog mixer and you can just do it all right here in IQ if you have supported Tech I just want them to open the API a little bit more or to work with people like the atem devs so that I can set it up with atom to control through twitch alerts and things like that as I covered in my previous video on building like supercharging your stream alerts naturally since they are the ones that said my studio was crap Corsair sent over some of their lighting stuff so I could try out this feature well I thought that was all that was being sent what really happened was over the course of a week or two a substantial mountain of boxes filled my studio more and more what was inside I had to know some of it was the expected stuff Elgato LED strips I'm quite fond of those goofy light towers I've got some new Earthworks mics to play with a neat collector statue from the Discord partner team I finally got my halo infinite statue from my pre wait wait how long has that been anyway lots of cool stuff in here beyond the Corsair stuff they also sent out the new nanoleaf canvas smarter kit I haven't even used the nanoleaf product before uh not a triangle fan and some sick Philips Hue spotlights yeah this murals feature works with more than just coarse air lights I also received a few massive boxes that were really heavy when I carried them to the studio but when I opened them there was nothing in there just packing paper or in one particularly cruel prank packing peanuts dear gosh the evilness I was confused why the boxes were empty but I couldn't help but feel that something was released into my studio that day I haven't quite figured out what I got the wiring I had some immediate ideas for where I wanted lights to go I just posted a video over on analog dreams about building out the Art Channel side of my desk wall and while that setup is nice it is missing a lot of that color and vibe that I'm going for throughout the rest of the studio it's it's too clean it's too sterile I'm not a minimalist guy I'm a maximalist guy my first idea was to do something off book with the light towers they're cool enough and all but on their own they're just Towers but what if I had them going upside down from my shelves here it could add some nice color and look sick tried some command strips and they seemed to work at first but I wanted to wait a day or so before putting the towers on the bases to make sure it'd stick and nope fell right off the next day then I committed to breaking out the internet's least favorite tool the hot glue gun but buy some witchcraft the hot glue would not stick to the anti-slide rubber pads on the bottoms of these things it just fell right off I was worried that the rubber would melt and I would mingle them but I never expected this fine Corsair you'll you win I'll use them as towers for now instead I wired up most of the shelves with the Elgato LED strips and called it a day that's exactly what I wanted at least through this I also grabbed a few more on-brand LED signs a few USB extenders and a big USB power supply to add more background lights this neat little PC is from corsair's Vengeance gaming line I5 12600k RTX 3070 16 gigabytes of RAM and Whisper quiet seriously the quietest high-spec PC I've ever heard in my life it's got me rethinking how I've been building PCS all these years because what it's just silent I I don't get it I know people aren't big on pre-builds but I want someone to just build my PCS for me this quietly like it's modestly specked and it has a b660 motherboard which doesn't have the i o that I want for the most part like if I wanted to upgrade it based on this platform I wouldn't be able to use the motherboard it's a 75 750 watt power supply so if I wanted to throw off 40 90 in there wouldn't be a great idea but the motherboard has VGA out which means I'll also be able to use this to control my CRT monitors that I use for my set displays now there's some ideas despite the modest specs it's just fine for gaming in the studio here and looks a lot better than my falling apart test bench below the desk this will be the brains of the operation for the murals hell even courserver's desk mat has RGB now got a super clean gaming and testing setup going now and I've expanded my glitch art setup with some sweet Euro rack gear it's time to finish the lights the nanoleaf canvas kit provided some much needed lighting above the gaming wall these little panels are straightforward to install they come as a bunch of small squares with small chips to connect them almost like the boards for flash drives just arrange how you want attach the adhesive strips and go I wish I had a few more panels in the kit but for my first nanoleaf experience not not bad honestly gotta connect that up to Wi-Fi and add it to IQ I do need to get more of these little text displays they're addicting lastly I ceiling mounted these fill up spotlights they're meant for outdoor use but nothing about them wouldn't work indoors and I wanted some spotlights for areas in my studio admittedly they're not very bright you would think for outdoor lights they would need to be even brighter which is kind of why I sprung for them and they they do not get very bright I they're cool that means I'm not going to get blinded by them but I was expecting a little more and reviews online seem to reflect that let's configure all these smart lights in IQ plus I've got to figure out how to control the dumb lights more easily but we'll get to that I'm in the IQ software and we have updated to include the new murals feature which includes a preview switcher on the main Home tab as well as its own dedicated tab where you can map things out we'll get to that in just a moment don't get too excited yet we need to pair up our Philips Hue and our nanoleaf stuff I've already paired them on mobile but you go to IQ settings in the top right Integrations and we need to turn on these two so we're gonna go ahead and set up Philips Hue integration it's going to ask you to access your firewall I'm gonna close that you can see here there's a Philips Hue Bridge we're going to click Setup Wizard we're on Wizard ensure it's on and connected to the network we already did that now we have to go run and push the button it's that easy click next click next click finish you can turn murals on and off by clicking the murals indicator that's fine all right under Philips Hue oh if the tab is still empty I haven't created an entertainment area that may very well be possible let me take a look all right I'm in the Philips Hue app I thought this studio garage thing was my entertainment area I can turn the lights on or off uh uh three dots add new room or Zone maybe we need a Zone we'll say office yep that's fine add Studio garage lights done okay now we have a room and a Zone neither of them are called entertainment areas we're gonna do nanoleaf Setup Wizard canvas see that one just detects automatically I gotta hold the on off button for five to seven seconds easy all right and we are ready to go with the canvas if we go to our mural yeah we can just drag that straight on here and for the most part that works we can make it ooh I'm not entirely an idiot the entertainment areas are buried for some reason if you go to settings on this bridge entertainment areas I don't know why that's not with the the rooms in the zones but here we go that's not shown in corsair's tutorial how will you use your entertainment area for my monitor sure that's fine yep choose all of the lights in the room position your lights uh we are we on the ceiling that's fine I truly don't care height there we go yes on the ceiling does not matter for the three lights we have that's fine done all right we now have an entertainment area so we come back in here to our Philips Hue there's our entertainment area all right so now we go to murals it shows up as a light from Phillips but if I drag it on there those lights sure are flashing now we can look at the actual UI for the murals so the mural setup here is actually pretty cool you've got a video preview for whatever animation or video you want to sync to you have your devices and then you can drag them to fit wherever you want and so your effects you have individual videos you have specific colors that you can just map everything to a rainbow that you can map everything to it's just static ideas there's the interstellar effect there's an abstract kind of lava lampy effect which I kind of dig another abstract kind of liquid effect these just kind of show off what you could do the video capture one is pretty cool because if you double click well if you go to colors and settings here they have some built-in uh video effects that you can also choose more customized stuff from here so you can actually just click the plus and then you can choose between videos images static Colors audio reactivity wave color spectrum ambient lighting based on your monitor which is all the rage these days you might want or a gradient so with video capture there's a lot of built-in animations you've got like pink colors and you can kind of get the preview in the background there got a little green red thing going on so you got some baked in stuff but I'm I'm a glitch artist I can I make visualizations let's go make one hello foreign piece to the puzzle that I picked up almost exactly a year ago today and still haven't used the Philips Hue smart plugs I have four of these these have been very difficult to find in stock I'm even looking at it right now and if you order it on Amazon you gotta wait like most of the month to get them they are super expensive Phillips offers two different versions of these one only works through Bluetooth with the app the other which is the one that's hard to get also works with zigbee which works with the Philips Hue Hub which you can then use with the Elgato stream deck meaning I have four Outlets or power strips you know with whatever's plugged into them then I can control through my stream deck so for signs like my neon signs and other things that I have to climb around shelves to get to in order to turn on or off typically when I want to stream I can flick them all on This Way theoretically I could even turn on my whole CRT wall with this I don't really want to put the CRTs through that whereas lights and things like that are kind of built for it so I'm gonna install these while you're watching the beauty that is me setting all of this up to upgrade my studio and my stream setup you should be upgrading your stream setup with some high quality music in the Rock and metal genre if that's your thing we have that for free over at backing track.gg this is built by my community with my community manager and I we we wanted to change the game away from just being Lo-Fi stuff to being some good music that you would actually listen to on the regular we've got rock we've got metal we've got synthrock we've got chip rock coming soon the New Slayer Wars album is dropping any minute now is some good stuff and you can stream it for free you can play it for free you can go download it for free use it in your videos use it in your streams tag us when you do if you want no requirement though go check it out backing track.gg it's the music used in this video as well over stimulating to some but this is what I always wanted every time I walk in here I feel a little at peace I feel at home you might think there's too much to look at but I feel like I could just sit in the center and meditate aside from my new collection of cardboard that I can only slowly filter out with our bi-weekly recycling pickups I'm getting very close this is turning into the creative space of my dreams 2023 will be the year of renewed creativity and doing more stuff I care about rather than what I feel obligated to do it will be the year of Vibes and of art I hope you'll join me for the ride I hope you'll click this video to see how I just optimized My Stream alerts to take over my whole studio and I hope you'll remember to Be Kind Rewind all right I I think of the picture I I think for once we got a desk we can stick with I think I'm happy with it but I think we should go bigger\n"