'Digital home'

[Cyfr]

Anyone have any experience with this, basicly I want to put speakers in all the rooms in the house and have them linked up to some sort of pc/media centre so we can listen to music in whichever room, theres prolly other things I can do like link it up to the tv for recording, playing dvd's and whatever, but for now, how do I go about the speaker/media centre thingie?

[Quinlan]

Anyone have any experience with this, basicly I want to put speakers in all the rooms in the house and have them linked up to some sort of pc/media centre so we can listen to music in whichever room, theres prolly other things I can do like link it up to the tv for recording, playing dvd's and whatever, but for now, how do I go about the speaker/media centre thingie?

All you need to do is have 1 stereo or 1 home cinema set. You have a set amount of speakers you can connect normally but you can always split them and put other sets of speakers in other rooms. You could even use a computer for it. If you want to spend some more cash just buy remote conn for the speakers and no need to hassle with cables

[Xest]

Anyone have any experience with this, basicly I want to put speakers in all the rooms in the house and have them linked up to some sort of pc/media centre so we can listen to music in whichever room, theres prolly other things I can do like link it up to the tv for recording, playing dvd's and whatever, but for now, how do I go about the speaker/media centre thingie?

If you're wanting to set it up so you can have different music/movies in different rooms of the house as oppose to the same media in every room it gets quite expensive and complicated.

The best software is a copy of Linux and setup MythTV on it, MythTV allows recording of TV shows to hard drive in MPG format from analog, digital, satellite or cable connections, but it also offers a hell of a lot more than that - it can do MP3s, live weather reports off the net, plugin consoles like the old SNES, NES, Megadrive, normal movie files, normal DVD playing and more. The other advantage of Myth is you can set it up as a server and then get it to dish out media to Myth clients on other PCs around the house - 802.11g wireless should provide enough bandwidth to do it also which is the other bonus.

You essentially need a MythTV server somewhere with the TV going into it and plenty of data store for all your media, then you need some basic terminal machines around the house (they can even boot off the network so don't need hard drives), this means your terminals, which will ideally have:
- Flat screen
- Sound card
- Network card/Wireless (duh!)
- Speakers
- Some kind of input - either touch screen, keyboard, mouse, remote control, all are decent options, remote control is probably nicest and relatively cheap unless you can afford touch screen

Can then play any kind of media from your Myth server and can play it individually around the house on each terminal pulling it from the central Myth server upstairs - in the lounge you could just have music playing, in the kitchen you could have a web page with a list of recipes on, in the hall way you could have weather reports, in the living room you could have TV recorded from a show you missed last night, one bedroom someone could be playing the classic Mario games on the old NES emulator and in another someone could be watching a DVD or a downloaded MPEG/AVI. It's all interchangeable too, swappable by each person on each TV, of course in reality to do all of that at once 802.11g most likely wont cut it but also in reality I doubt you'll be doing it all at once.

The rest of the hardware in the client terminals can be pretty low end, the only time it needs to be higher is for decoding say DivX/Xvid videos on the fly but even then a few years old hardware will cut it, or if you want a silent solution look up the VIA Nehemiah MII's.

As for the hardware in the server you'll want it to be higher spec, ideally with RAID and a ton of hard drive space - the more the better, I'd seriously recommend a backup solution for it too or you could just make sure you use a RAID setup that will carry on rolling when one drive fails. For TV input you'll want a DVB-T card for Freeview really, no point getting an analog card in the UK, or if you have Satellite a DVB-S card or whatever the cable cards are for cable You don't need a monitor for the server, only when setting it up so that cuts the cost there. You'll want multiple DVD drives if you want different DVDs throughout the house, or you can just setup your client terminals with DVD drives so they can be played from there instead.

Becoming somewhat more illegal, you can record pay-for channels, they still come down as MPEGs along DVB-T at least but are encrypted, there are then programs to break the encryption on them but not in real time, it has to be done offline but I wont go into detail about that here.

Software is all free and open source, overall for a few thousand, maybe £3000 you can setup pretty much all the important rooms in your house with a system like this. MythTV is NOT easy to setup though I'll say that, expect to spend weeks on getting it all up and running, maybe months, in the end though it's most certainly worth it for a true digital home

[Ankh Morpork]

....or he could wait for Xbox 360 and get a great multimedia machine with a nice design and impressive games

/Ankh

[Xest]

Yesss but it doesn't easily distribute to every room in the house does it ?

[Ankh Morpork]

[quote="Xest"]Yesss but it doesn't easily distribute to every room in the house does it ]

Well, it has usb ports and wireless network...so it might be

/Ankh

[Cyfr]

Nobody buys Xboxs for they are consoles, and hence shit.

Thanks xest and Quinlan, i'll go show my dad all the techie details now

[Ankh Morpork]

[quote="Cyfr"]Nobody buys Xboxs for they are consoles, and hence shit.

Thanks xest and Quinlan, i'll go show my dad all the techie details now ]

You really dont know much about xbox 360 do you? I dont like consoles myself, but xb360 is more of a media center than a console.

/Ankh

[Shi]

[quote="Cyfr"]Nobody buys Xboxs for they are consoles, and hence shit.

Thanks xest and Quinlan, i'll go show my dad all the techie details now ]
Couldn’t be more wrong m8
I bougth Xbox as a multimedia device 1st place, console secondary as tbh I prefer PSX and Nintendo.
I made it chipped by a pal and it's one of the best toy I ever bought.
I can use it to see pictures, dvds, but most of all all divx, mpg format without worrying about codecs and updates, as it’s easy like nothing to keep it updated.
If sb asks me what dvd should he/she buy, I say anytime, buy a chipped xbox.
It's the most functional toy for the purpose.
Add to it the fact you can simply putt a new HDD urself in, let's say 250GB and you put a shitload on it
Well, now as Ankh says the new xbox is coming soon, and it will prolly have even more possibilities, like wireless net etc.
Ofc MS doesn’t want ya to access all those possibilities thus ya need chip it, but hey, screw MS, no?

[Ankh Morpork]

Actually, it does it has usb2, wireless controls/lan and everything you usually download and put in your chipped xbox is already in it..among with a bigger hd too ofc

Edit: Oh, and add incredible graphics too all that! To bad the only kind of games I personally play on consoles are fighting games

/Ankh