Home Media system

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sk15

I am about to move into a new home in two weeks and I have been trying
to plan how to set up the audio visuals on a low budget.

My main problem is I am married and with all women they hate wires, so
I need to do this with as few wires as possible.

To start with I have no Sky, just Freeview. I have a PC, laptop, 28"
Wide Sony tv, Tosh HD Recorder and a Teac separates system.

What I would like to have is all three of the bedrooms able to watch
TV & DVD's, listen to music and surf the internet. I believe this is
leading me to Windows Media Centre, but that seems too complicated. I
have also seen Hauppauges goods which may be viable.

I would like to use my existing PC with some upgrades to act a central
server, feeding independent sessions to each of the rooms, preferably
wirelessly.

Can any of you good guys out there give me some possible solutions or
ideas to investigate?

Thanks
-K
 
sounds cool

whats your budget like?

do you want do watch different content at the same time?

do you want to control the server remotely

depending on the distance ethernet is the best choice hands down.

it also depends on what sort of display your gonna use in the bedrooms and
what inputs and outputs you got.

you could get one of those "cheapo" things that broadcast sky round your
house wirelessly( i haven't tried one personally), plug that into the
central server, then using a something like a pda and vnc control the server
via wifi from anywhere in house. Thats the best i can think of. However you
might have issues with interference with the video, and quality issues.

The tradtional media centre concept is more a "living room centric" sort of
thing, there are lots of prebuilt boxes that do it(wired and wireless) but
they will cost you.

hope that was helpful, i'm sure someone will come up with a better idea
 
sk15 said:
I am about to move into a new home in two weeks and I have been trying
to plan how to set up the audio visuals on a low budget.

My main problem is I am married and with all women they hate wires, so
I need to do this with as few wires as possible.

To start with I have no Sky, just Freeview. I have a PC, laptop, 28"
Wide Sony tv, Tosh HD Recorder and a Teac separates system.

What I would like to have is all three of the bedrooms able to watch
TV & DVD's, listen to music and surf the internet. I believe this is
leading me to Windows Media Centre, but that seems too complicated. I
have also seen Hauppauges goods which may be viable.

I would like to use my existing PC with some upgrades to act a central
server, feeding independent sessions to each of the rooms, preferably
wirelessly.

Can any of you good guys out there give me some possible solutions or
ideas to investigate?

Thanks
-K
Click to expand...

If your main server is going to be equipped with a built by ATI Radeon All
In Wonder of some flavour and all of the other PCs have ATI Radeons or
higher (they don't have to be All In Wonders) then ATI have just the
solution in their "Eazyshare" feature which is built into Multimedia Centre.
This allows you to "share" the TV Tuner on the All In Wonder over the
network so remote users can control and view its content. If you have a read
of the latest Multimedia Centre manual, downloadable from ATIs website, you
should get plenty of info on it there. If you're main "server to be" isn't
at least a high end P4, you could run into problems attempting to run MCE
2005 - its fairly CPU intensive. ATI's MMS requirements however are a lot
less demanding (and would be cheaper). A high speed (modern) wireless
network should be fast enough for this but a wired one would be much better
in the long run. Given that your moving in and have likely yet to put all
your furniture etc in position, now would be the best time to put in network
cabling (just make sure your wife's out at the time).

Paul
 
Thanks all for your feedback so far. I am off now to have a look at
Eazyshare. As an update to the questions asked:-

budget - 2 to 3K (Did I say LOW?)

content - Would prefer to be able to access different content, for TV
I may just have to buy a number of freeview boxes. Could you have
multiple freeview boxes atached to seperate TV cards, sending out on
different sessions?

Remote Control - Remote control of server is not necessary. Once up
and running it would be nice to leave it that way.

-K
 
i know us geeks are defensive about our tech,

but if you got the funds you could get a "pro" to do it for that kinda cash,
alternatively if your like me and like to mess around then fair enough.

sounds pretty complicated, but i think

if you get two freeview boxes with a dual tuner card like a pvr 500, or two
cards, you should be able to get it to work.( or two freeview cards, lol).
 
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