Cyfr wrote: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
I dont like consoles myself, but xb360 is more of a media center than a console.