Home entertainment network setup.

[Fred_G]

I am a bit lost on this one. I can build PC's setup a network. Guy calls me wanting to setup a home entertainment server with multiple sound cards to play movies in one room, and mp3's on other sound cards, movies and sound galore. plus wireless video as well in 3 rooms.

I have come up with an alternative setup. He wants video/sound in 3 rooms plus wireless from one computer. Speakers and amps will be in each room, wireless will be laptops.

I am thinking an inexpensive AMD quad core setup with 3 or more Gigabit NIC cards, and a wireless N router. Toss off a cheap box in each room needed for wired media via Gigabit NIC, and use a wireless router for the rest.

I am thinking a quad core, maxed on RAM for the 'server'. 3 hard drives, one for the OS and basics, one for video, one for music.

The only bottleneck in my setup that I can see would be the hard drive transfer rate.

Any ideas or suggestions?

 

[MHCG]

You're not going to be able to stream more than one HD signal across wireless.

 

[joe3k]

Wireless video... haven't heard many good reports on that yet. Will be interesting to hear how it pans out for you. You could be walking into a hornets nest with the wireless video... dropouts etc. Don't have enough experience on it to advise though unfort.

 

[Methical]

You're not going to be able to stream more than one HD signal across wireless.

Agreed. It would be hard enough to stream one HD video signal perfectly via wireless let alone 3.

 

[Fixedathome.com]

Wireless video... haven't heard many good reports on that yet. Will be interesting to hear how it pans out for you. You could be walking into a hornets nest with the wireless video... dropouts etc. Don't have enough experience on it to advise though unfort.

I've been streaming Video via wifi for a few years without any issue. I have a Windows 2003 Server hardwired to my router in my office which is upstairs. This has all my movie/tv show downloads on. I have a Media Centre PC connected to my TV downstairs and basically watch all of my stuff on here. Never had any issues with dropped frames. Most of the stuff I'm watching is in Xvid or Divx format though so I'm unsure how well full HD stuff would work.

 

[Menaice]

this may help you out

check out the screen shots and demo video

http://linuxmce.com/

linux media center

 

[joe3k]

Wow, that linuxmce stuff looks powerful. Looks complicated too but I'd imagine it'd be a great setup. Do you use it yourself Menaice?

 

[Menaice]

nope but i have been looking at it all this week, i think it would be a great side project to try out. Just imagin if you could make everything work like it should and its relaible, you could definitly expand a computer business into doing full home media setups with security intergrated in. Probably good money in it. The "wow" factor is pretty good.

 

[joe3k]

Yeah I briefly thought that when I first saw it. I'd say there would be a decent market for it. Although you'd have to ask yourself... do you really want to move into this field and in effect move away from the true "I.T. field" that we work in? I guess if it kicked off, you could hire someone else to do it full-time for you, but what if they leave, setup on their own blah, blah.

I would like to put something like this in my own home. It's total overkill and I don't need it, but it looks interesting and pretty cool.

I've currently just got a region free dvd player and use a chipped xbox as my media centre. Not the greatest setup, but it does my job and plays everything I need. Oh and I stopped watching divx and Xvid a long time ago. I just can't stand the loss in quality. My mates think I'm too picky but hey for an extra hour or 2 downloading the proper dvd quality film on a high speed broadband connection, I think it crazy not to. Unfort my tv ain't HD else that's what I'd be downloading. Mind you I don't get an awful lot of time to watch tv anymore anyhow... always on the pc or laptop :-/

 

[Menaice]

well i still think it would fall into the "IT field" you would still have to do the networking for it. I beilve if you pulled this off in your own home and your friends seen it word of mouth would sell it. It looks so convenitent. I think it would just sharpen your skills into an ever evolving technolgy driven world where your clients demand more. Iam mean what tech hasn't been in a situation where you fix a computer then a friend or client says "hey you are good with electronics can you look at this for me?"

 

[purple_minion]

One word, Mythtv. Try the mythbuntu installation as it's easy and quick, much better then customizing a fedora installation like I used to have to do. It does DVR, video and music streaming as well as other things like show weather info, access netflix queue, etc. I haven't tried linuxmce myself so of course my opinion is biased, but I love my myth. I have tried BeyondTV and SageTV before hand and well, windows isn't stable what can I say. It would crap out after I installed everything months down the line for no reason, I didn't touch a thing. With mythtv and linux once it works it works until the hardware dies. I just setup another myth frontend which does only the actual displaying of media and it's working perfectly right now. Very simple, just install mythbuntu and point it at the IP of the backend server.

I will admit that linuxmce sounds nice, and I may give it a try. Right now I'm in an apartment but someday would like a smart home. According to the wiki it seems to rely on kbuntu 7.10, which is a year behind the current release. Perhaps this leads to greater stability, I'm not sure. However my experience with ubuntu is that newer releases generally fix more issues and support more hardware without being unstable (unlike fedora with the old way of mythtv).

Whichever way you do decide to go, I would love to hear about your experience. I myself wouldn't try to stream over wifi due to reliability issues as others mentioned, and nothing pisses you off more then when you want to watch tv or a movie/etc. and it doesn't work. Also you would be future-proofing yourself when you get super-duper-virtual-reality-HD.

 

[Menaice]

super-duper-virtual-reality-HD.

Ladies and gentalmen we have a new buzzword!!!
I havn't tried any of the above you have stated minion, since i havn't gotten into this area, but i think its worth a try. The other options you mentioned may also be viable, Iam just going off of the video demo of Linux media center.

 

[Fred_G]

Thanks for the replies. Very nice link Menaice, thanks. Most of the wireless would be for MP3 files, maybe some video. This guy is one of my favorite customers, because he does go for overkill. He is pretty a pretty hard core Windows fan, but I really like what I read on the LinuxMCE.

There would be one or two laptops on the home network, all the rest would be wired. His home theater is going to be upstairs (we are talking about one with theater seating, projection screen, old popcorn machine, I just love overkill!) I could always wire a wireless router to the downstairs area.

I just talked to him and got more info. He is going to have wires for speakers and CAT5 to the 2 other downstairs rooms. He wants to be able to watch a movie in his theater, and have the ability to listen to music or whatever in the 2 other rooms at the same time. Kinda kills my idea of a killer server computer and a couple of basic boxes to play the music.

And to add a layer of complexity, he wants to be able to control the output in the two downstairs rooms with a wireless laptop via remote desktop.

Well, any ideas are greatly appreciated. I am off to google for a while!

 

[purple_minion]

Ladies and gentalmen we have a new buzzword!!!
I havn't tried any of the above you have stated minion, since i havn't gotten into this area, but i think its worth a try. The other options you mentioned may also be viable, Iam just going off of the video demo of Linux media center.

Well you know that eventually we'll have holodecks, it's only a matter of time (if we don't destroy ourselves.) I tried the two windows programs I mentioned, and paid good money too BTW which failed me. Also with regard to sagetv, I do not respect any java program since. Write it natively or not at all.

I have seen linuxmce before, and it looks good. There is also Freevo, GB-PVR, MediaPortal, and Orb.

 

[dhrandy]

With this setup you would definitely be on his speed dial. Good luck with it. The problem with most HTPC software is that it takes a lot of time to work out all the kinks.

 

[thor999]

Oh you really really should run cat 5e for this setup.... You could always "try" the wireless setup w/ a few xbox 360's... If someone approached me w' this idea, I'd prob setup a home server for EACH intended HD video signal, connect a few Popcorn Hours, and hope they (servers) could maybe also provide some streaming audio as well. FWIW I can play FLAC audio on my PSP, output to 3.5 mm.

 

[l337]

I've been streaming Video via wifi for a few years without any issue. I have a Windows 2003 Server hardwired to my router in my office which is upstairs. This has all my movie/tv show downloads on. I have a Media Centre PC connected to my TV downstairs and basically watch all of my stuff on here. Never had any issues with dropped frames. Most of the stuff I'm watching is in Xvid or Divx format though so I'm unsure how well full HD stuff would work.

your typical Divx/Xvid is 480x272 where as your typical hd video is 1920x1080 and you can thus see how differnt they are. you would have a heap of trouble wirelessly streaming a single hd vid but everyonre else has already stated this. im just showing the difference

 

[MHCG]

FYI, I recently built a mythtv box. I was using an analog SD tuner in the box, but now my cable company is converting to digital HD. I purchased an HDHomerun box and tried to stream two digital HD signals across 802.11n wifi connection. It would not work reliably. You can get one HD stream to work without dropping, but as soon as you start streaming that second signal, you get about a 25% dropped frame rate or more.