Whole house media distribution

One day soon we're going to start construction of our new house (looking like next spring ATM), I'm currently speccing various aspects of it and I'm stuck on how to distribute media housewide.

We use 2 x Squeezeboxes for audio and at the moment we have a single Sky+ with a "magic eye" link to our bedroom.

This is the kind of kit we'll probably have in the new house:

1 x HTPC
1 x Sky+ (maybe with Magic Eye)
1 x Dual tuner HTPC/audio server
3 x Squeezeboxes
2 x TVs
2 x PCs

We'd like to have the flexibility to allow location changes or system expansion, is something like this the way to go, or are there other/better ways of doing this?

http://www.smart-e.co.uk/cgi-bin/news/news_single_article.pl?35

I have Sky, FreeSat, projector-TV in lounge, bedroom TV, Bathroom TV.

All done on MythTV.
It's not that hard if you dedicate the boxes.

You're welcome to come and see... Reading just off J12.

David

I remember you saying the same last time I raised this. We're a lot nearer to starting construction now so might take you up on that, I reckon I might be able to do sometime in mid/late November, is that good for you?

(BTW thanks most kindly)

I was given some advice by someone who installed home automation systems a while back. He told me to always run in twice as much as you think. I think this is good advice because in bulk cat5 cable is cheap and easy to install when the plaster isn't on.

The systems you plug in will come and go, but you will still need that cable in the wall. I worked in one guys house that wired cat 5 to each light and mains outlet, just in case. His central comms room looked bonkers, but when I came to install his broadband it was all there waiting for me.

That looks like one impressive system, what sort of price bracket is that in?

Cheers

Cris.

Apart from being very jealous, I would think very seriously about putting fiber into each room. In my experience, the best and most reliable DVI/HDMI extenders are the fiber ones. Even if you don't need it straightaway, if you intend to live there for a long time it could save you a lot of hassle later on.

Last time I checked the price of CAT5 has rocketed in the last few years, to the point where it wasn't that much cheaper than CAT6.

Make sure that 'everything' goes in the apps room/basement. Nothing looks slicker in the living room than 'just' a Plasma/LCD or projection screen and nothing else.

Just echoing David's recommendation of MythTV. I've finally got work to let me build a MythTV off-air recorder. IMHO, MythBuntu is by far the quickest and easiest way to start out.

It's still cheaper to put it in before you need it, which was my point, installing cables after the fact is just a total mare. I used to spend hours trying to make a good job of wiring in new build houses when they hadn't put that crucial socket where they wanted it. I never was truly happy at the end of the job.

You can't beat having a bit of copper in the walls ready for use, it's more universal than fibre, you don't need so much kit on the other end and you can use PoE etc... or even just a simple RS232. I don't think CAT6 is worth bothering about for the whole house, and there is little point anyway unless the full spec is followed.

From what I have seen on andym's Myth system it look mighty impressive. I have never attempted it myself, but maybe freesat HD may be enough to tempt me. It seems a very powerful system, and seemed quite reliable for such a system.

Cheers

Cris.

Putting in a couple pull cords into each duct would be handy as well.

Some of the more advanced home automation systems will also need a cable running to most points so you can consider that as well in the future.

You can get wire bundles that have dual cat-5e and dual rg-6 all together. You can also buy more expensive bundles with fiber. Run that everywhere and you've got a lot of flexibility later on down the road.

Personally, I don't see much point in spending the extra money on cat-6, nor on fiber. Ethernet in its many forms is an excellent way of moving your bits around. Also, I think, if you really want, you can even do HDMI-over-twisted-pair. Not sure how well that works, though.

Things to think about are running cables not just to panels on the wall near the floor, but also to strategic places along the ceiling where you might wish to mount a wireless base station or other future gizmo (network-connected video projector?).

I've found you have to be very careful with pull cords. Unless the duct is considerably larger than the cables currently inside, it can get to the point where you've got the cable halfway along before it snags around other cables which can be very frustrating. It's all to do with the way the cable twist around each other as you're looming them together. If the duct is tight and cables are very close to each other then you'll run into problems.

Off the top of my head I'd probably run the following as a minimum to each room:

4 x CAT5/6
2 x CT100 (Sat frequency RF cable)

The four CAT5/6's should give you plenty of ethernet connectivity, but also serial and KVM as well. The two RF cables should give you the flexibility of running TV + Satellite or two separate satellite signals in each room.

Then in the living room/home cinema add:

1 x Pair multimode fiber
? x Speaker cables

If you give a stuff about decent picture quality, especially HD then I'd look at using DVI/HDMI to fiber converter boxes. I don't know how big you intend the house to be, but I wouldn't feel comfortable running HDMI over distances any greater than a couple of meters, especially if the route the cable takes goes across other services.

They don't, at least the expensive ones we bought at work didn't. We ended up moving to fiber, it was the only way to make dual link DVI and 1080p video work reliably.

Yeah. Yanking a piece of Cat5 through a tight duct would probably exceed the bend radius and snag it on everything. Still, its easy and cheap to put in now and you may want it in the future.

You can run video over Cat5 if you have the necessary adapters as well. Composite/S-Video + audio or RGB with no audio. I've got one of them actually on my Sky Digibox because it kept giving me ground loops problems.

The budget method would be to use something like a Loftbox but you're basically converting everything to composite so it will look bad.

We use BlackBox baluns which do S-Video + Stereo Audio over CAT5 for distributing our off-air signal to plasmas round the building. The quality varies from not too bad (15 meters) to terrible (150 meters).

EDIT: Should probably point out the few long distance screens we have that look okay are the ones connected over CAT6 instead of CAT5e...

The Kat5 units aren't baluns. They're active units.

Quality seems okay to me. Somebody I know has a long run with them feeding a projector and the picture quality is fine.

IMO it's a little bit sad that it's still necessary to run analogue cables (whether video or audio) from room to room in this day and age. Really there's no technical reason why all these devices -- cable boxes, satellite STBs, DVD players, CD players, Empegs, TVs -- can't just have an Ethernet socket on the back and sort all the streaming out among themselves using UPnP. I guess there's legal/contractual reasons in some cases, though.

Peter

I'll also start building my house next month. The planning of the media distribution has already been more than a nightmare.

I've pretty much got it covered now, except for regular TV. This would not have been a problem up to a couple of years ago, in the days of analogue TV. Then you simply needed a good amplified splitter and presto: TV in every desired room.

No more the case. Today there's digital TV. And while it also brings some advantages (mainly in image quality and number of channels) it's also a pain in the neck getting it distributed all over the house. I'm still not sure how I'll go about this...

For now I've planned it like so that every room in the house will have (at least) two Cat 6 drops. (Andy's made me doubt now, since he advises to run at least 4 cables to every room) Those cables are meant for internet access, data transfer and media streaming (both video and audio) and maybe also VOIP phoning. Aren't two Cat6 cables sufficient for all that? I can always use a small unmanaged switch on those cables if two cables don't cut it, right? But that's not really the problem. UTP cable is relatively cheap, so I might end up with four cables to every room anyway, I don't know...

As said, the main problem is the TV distribution. I have the choice between TV over ADSL (which I will not use since it's an inferior technology and -even more reason- I don't use ADSL but cable), digital TV via my cable provider - Telenet- (DVB-C) or Satellite (DVB-S). If I choose DVB-C, I need a proprietary decoder + smartcard from Telenet for every TV in my house. I don't really think this is a particularly good idea, installation-wise or cost-wise, since this would also mean I would have to pay a digital TV subscription for every TV.
DVB-C is still my preferred option, but knowing the aforementioned make it a difficult choice.

Another option is satellite TV, which I'm totally willing to install, but I'm not really in the know with. For one, is the coax cable used for connecting a TV to cable the same coax cable which is needed for satellite? In other words, if I run one of these cables to the room, will I still have the choice of connecting them to either a dish or cable? Or is this a different type?

So for both technologies, you need a set-top box. But my main question is: aren't there decoders out there which can distribute the TV signal, once received, to a number of TV's in the house? If this would exist, I would be saved. I mean, there must be some technology that does this? Or how do all those hotels with their dozens of rooms + TV's go about this? They also don't place a decoder per room? Or is that all still based on analogue TV?

Why of why do cable distributors require you to use their own set-top box hardware? This is like returning to the seventies when everybody who switched to cable also had such a box on top of their TV! Wouldn't it be a LOT simple if there simply was a smartcard slot in every Tv, in which you could then slide your smartcard, and then would be given access to all the channels? It probably is, but my guess is cable companies also make a lot of money on those set-top-boxes, even if they annoy the pants off of their customers. You also can't use a Myth box with digital TV, because all the channels are protected. (I'm guessing it does work with Satellite, which is another pro for that technology?)

Does anybody have a solution for me here? I'm hoping you don't mind the slight thread hijack Tahir, but I'm guessing this might also be interesting for you.

Do it now whilst the walls are open. If you want to add extra in the future then it will be a major job.


Have the set top boxes all in a central location and distributed out to the TVs around the house. You can get IR receivers to put into each room and then a small transmitter near the set top box so you can still change the channel. If you want to be able to have more TVs watching different channels then you just need to add another set top box.


You can send the output of a set top box to all the TVs or you can install a switcher so you can select the source you want.


The TV is special and has a built in receiver.


Its called CableCARD in the US. I don't think it exists in Europe.


If you can get a CAM + smart card and also have a receiver card then you can watch encrypted channels. Whether you'll be able to get that CAM is another matter.

It barely exists in the US, and only for cable, not satellite, and is supposed to be obsoleted before too long. The vast majority of people still have set-top boxes. And they're PCCard form factor, not smartcard.

Sending video around would be a nightmare considering the average home network. You'd need QoS as well and most home networking devices don't support that at all.

Yeah. Somebody I know bought a HD TiVo and still has to keep their set top box to watch OnDemand and PPV. Alledgely there is a newer revision of the CableCARD standard that would allow this but nobody uses it.

I know. No worries there, 'cause the walls have not even been built.


I thought about that scenario as well. I even found a way of distributing the TV signal over UTP cable. The only problems is indeed: this only works if you always only use one TV in the house at the same time, or watch the same channel on all connected TV's. Once you want to watch different channels on different TV's (not all that unthinkable if you consider the average home with parents + two children, which means at one time you will need at least 3 decoders!) It's exactly that scenario I'm trying to avoid, or am trying to find a solution for.

Yeah, that's what I figured. It would not be easy, but at least the technological possibility is there, which is not the case with DVB-C.

I'm very sure I'm not alone with this problem. There must be some solution for this?

Nope. Not much you can do about it. Buy more set top boxes or tuner cards + smartcards. The companies want you to buy more anyway. I don't know of any single device that will tune to all available channels, decode them all and then distribute them around the house. They do this in a hotel by having a stack of receivers.


Some DVB receivers have a CI slot to add a special PCCard + smartcard to enable decoding.

You'll still need multiple receivers and multiple cards however.

The RG-59 coaxial cable that was commonly used for regular television in many houses is a different grade than the RG-6 coaxial cable used to connect to DirecTV satellite dishes these days. I'm told that the RG-6 cable needs to be of a higher grade to carry power to the LNB of the dish itself, and that RG-59 will either not work or will melt through its insulation if you try.

Additionally, you can't just use a passive Y-splitter to connect multiple tuner boxes to satellite dishes, the way you could with regular TV cable. Instead, you need an active electronic device known as a multiplexer (sometimes mis-referred to as a 'splitter' by people talking about satellite dish installations).

And, of course, you need a receiver (tuner box) in each location you want to watch satellite TV.

Other than that, it's exactly the same as TV cable.

You'll need a dual or quad LNB if you want to distribute it because of the different bands and polarisations.

Yeah, that too.

Okay, time for show and tell....

The top photo shows what appears in each room. Please note I'm not intending to do A/V distribution in the house.

2 x CAT5e
2 x CT100 RF

Gives me two ethernet/serial/closing contact in each room. Also the ability to have a Sky+/Freesat PVR and terrestrial TV/Radio connection.

The dish and aerial outside, the bottom photo shows the quattro lnb.

Closeup and rear view of the RF plate. Note the back is completely shielded.

The bottom photo show the multiswitch and aerial amp power injector in the loft.

Mildly interesting story, when BBC Broadcasting House was undergoing it massive refit the boffins at R&D looked at how to replace the hundreds and hundreds of miles of audio, video and network cable and optical fiber which something more elegant. The answer was AES47 and ATM. The boffins loved the idea that only thing coming out of each studio was a pair of fibers (well two pairs actually for redundancy). On those fibers there was everything, programme sound, talkback, computer networks, automation and control, and in the case of a TV studio, video.

In the end, they went for the old discreet model of video cables, audio cables, CAT6, etc. As the cost of implementing it was huge. I worked on a project using ATM adaptors in PC's just for switching and control and the cost of the adaptors was quadruple that of the PC's that they were inside of, and they were just presented on RJ45, the fiber ones were even more expensive. Not that broadcast kit is cheap anyways.

tahir - I remember now
Yes, that'll be fine - PM me when you've got dates in mind and I'll check the calendar.

anyhow, more chat... with the caveat that I'm more interested in DIY than a top-end bespoke commercial solution

Two things here:
1. designing an A/V system that works on day one.
2. minimising the impact when things change

Throwing lots of wire in and then thinking about it is a bad approach IMHO.
Designing a system and *then* throwing in lots more wire - that's better

I renovated but I ran 50mm waste pipe down from the attic to the ground floor; this is an option I'd look at very seriously.
Putting big drainpipes in every wall going up to the roof space would be very valuable.
Seriously: the other 'simple' solution is to build a bungalow or make sure there's a suspended floor
No worries with *anything* then; wiring, plumbing... simple.

Another of the big things that I think is missing here is that getting the distributed signal (ethernet) around the house isn't the hard part; it's getting from the point in the room where the signal comes out into the (mainly) analogue components.

The 'spec' includes squeezeboxes - but they need mains power, an amp (mains power and speaker-wire) and speakers (speaker wire). Getting the amplified sound to 2/4/5/7 locations around the room is a biggy.

Video goes via HDMI/DVI so you need a local video engine. Of course you could be lucky (or clever) and locate node0 to be local to everywhere.
OTOH with frontends shrinking all the time - and the fact that you'll want to plug in one or more of an Xbox, Xbox360, PS1, PS2, PS3, Wii (that covers the last 3 years right?) in one or more rooms - and I'd think of having a discrete breakout/node1 in an appropriate place in each room.

Oh, and you need to rethink TV too.

I have zero interest in 'live' TV. It's there to test that channel changing works. Hard to believe - you will.

Sometimes, as a novelty, we watch a TV programme *whilst it's still being broadcast*.

Currently we have to choose from 1026 episodes/programs, using 1.9 TB (1 month 14 days 9 hrs 48 mins) out of 3.6 TB.

I'll have to do some install piccies though.

If he's already got Sky+ then you're preaching to the converted. I'm enjoying my own portable PVR now using BBC iPlayer on iPod touch.

The one thing the myth box at work will have to concede to a sky+ will be the encrypted channels like Sky Sports. Although I am looking at Dragon CAMs an the like.

Perhaps -- but even the Blu-ray bandwidth is only 54Mbits/s, so a normal Gbit switch would theoretically do the job so long as nobody else is saturating the Gbit link from the switch to the media server.

Peter

Modern versions of MythTV can do this for DVB-T/S/S2, at least for unencrypted channels. The only restriction is that you need as many tuners in the server as there are different multiplexes (not channels) being watched. Even that thing I lashed up can do it for DVB-T radio, though I never bothered trying to get video to work. It's all in UPnP AV v2.

[Edit on rereading your post] It doesn't "decode" them as such, of course; it distributes the raw, encoded MPEG2 stream around the house. But that's what you actually want.

Peter

/me wonders why he said that....
Ah, I think I was mainly answering Archeon and his subscription/TV...



I've been thinking about a Dragon CAM for *ages* too.

But no conceding here.... I record using PVR350 s-video capture so I already get encrypted Sky channels from the normal sky box. The problem is that the SD picture quality is *so* good - even on my 120" projector - that I can't really be bothered with the CAM

To be fair, I do get occasional artefacts - Strictly Come Dancing has so much fast movement, glitterballs and the rest that the picture changes radically every frame... makes capture/compression quite hard (even for the broadcasters).

In general though I can't fault it.

That's a true shame. I'm guessing everybody who switched to digital TV has this problem, 'cause about everybody has more than one TV set in the house these days. The company that can come up with a simple solution to this that truly works will make some serious money me thinks. All that would be necessary is a centralised set-top box (in which then all the necessary CAM modules/Smart cards should be plugged) with multiple HDMI outs which could be each send out a separate video stream. You should then use UTP or something for the remote control return path.

Hmmm... here's hoping!

Thanks for that Tony, that explains a lot!

Unfortunately, we don't have such a thing like Sky+ or Tivo over here. . But my channel provider (Telenet) provides a similar service. That's why I would like to be able to use the Telenet CAM card in a different CAM module, but unfortunately they don't allow that. They made it like so that you have to use their own (inferior) hardware. I'm really hoping that the market will force them to release that obligation at one time or another, but I'm not holding my breath since (on cable) they don't have any competition here... (which is exactly the reason why I'm expecting more from satellite)

Eh? They've made a CAM but it only works in their specific set top box? Thats a bit strange...

From what I can tell, Telenet just use Nagravision and you can buy non specific CAMs for that.

I know it's strange, but it's like that. You receive their card, and you need to use it in their own set-top-box (which you need to buy or rent). Even more, you cannot even swap your card into the decoder of eg. your neighbour which uses the exact same set-top-box (because, as said, telenet's the only cable provider in Belgium), that also doesn't work. They do this like so because you can subscribe to more digital channels. If the card would be swappable between set-top-boxes, you could 'rent' your card to your neighbour if you wanted to. That's their explanation at least, which I find total BS BTW.

Pairing the CAM and the box is fairly common. It just stops you from moving it around all the time. You should still be able to pair it with your own receiver card or box.

I've never tried it myself, but from what I've heard, it cannot be done. Telenet will refuse to mate your CAM with a different box than one of their own. It's just another level of 'protection' (read:income) I guess...

Specifically, the center wire in RG6 is substantially thicker than that in RG59, and the shielding is also usually better.

Cheers

I wouldn't say they were 'exactly' the same. I find the sat cable is usually more sturdy with a better jacket, usually at least double screened with a solid dilectric and much better RF performance. I've used sat cable all over the house.

If you use a multiswitch then the current carrying capability of the indoor cabling is less important as the voltage and tone is there purely to tell the multiswitch what you want instead of powering the LNB as that's what the multiswitch does.

I'd assumed you were referring to tahir since you addressed him at the start of your two posts.



Hmm, it's the whole decoding and recoding thing that makes the broadcast engineer in me recoil in horror.

Out of interest, where do you get your EPG data from? From what I understand, when presented with DVB-S MythTV grabs it's EIT data from the FreeSat EPG. Even if you have a DVB-S card in your backend, how do you get data specific to the Sky premium channels as I understand the Sky EPG data is encrypted.

I know <shudder>.
The PVR350 does a surprisingly good job though.You can encode at a fairly high bitrate (8<mumble-but-m-or-M>b[p]s) though.

[edit, actually it's worse - it goes from the sky box RGB output (and it is RGB) to a decent VCR (yes, a VCR) that has an s-video output - and that is what is recoded]

We may have a big^H^H^Hhuge screen - but it doesn't hurt that we sit a fair way back!


Radio Times has everything we need (and I was the one who wrote the original +1 offset code for the XMLTV rt_grabber to get fake +1 channels when RT don't publish them)

I don't know about film/sport channels though, we just want SciFi and Sky One

Wow lots of responses. I've never used fibre, what's the benefit? Is there any real benefit in cat6, 7 or 8 for my purposes?

And yes, the idea is to have only a screen in every room, we'll have a fairly large plant room for the MVHR (mechanical ventilation and heat recovery) system and the thermal heat store (big super insulated water cylinder)

It's a fairly large 5 bedroom house, mostly ground floor. These are fairly accurate plans (some changes have been made since)

Part of me says that, the rest of me says I really don't additional bits of kit in each room.

Very relevant for me. Where are you building, what kind of house?

Excellent. Ours si virtually a bungalow, there'll be 20mm between wall and plasterboard on all external walls, and a 100 mm ceiling void, we're all flat (grass) rooves son no loft space.

You've lost me with all your nodetalk

Same here, we had Sky+ as soon as it came out

It's home-automation-speak. "Node0" simply means "the cupboard with all the ugly kit and lots of wires coming out". ie it should be hidden but accessible.

And attached is a schematic of our hifi around the house.

All done through a single cat5 to each point. (I put in spare where I could)

Ta, gives me an idea or two.

I wish TiVo hadn't pulled out of the UK market. I bought one years ago and still use it albeit with some upgrades. It is only a S1 unit but I think the UI is vastly better than Sky+. Shame that its only single tuner and has to reencode everything.

Building near Bruges, Belgium. The house is a typical two storey building with a piramid shaped roof. This means straight walls on both levels, and as much room upstairs as there is downstairs. There's also a 7x7m attic, but that's entirely under the roof. (that 7x7 meter attic is the 'usuable room', meaning the room where an adult can stand without bumping his/her head. There also a bit more room beyond those 7x7 meters, since the entire roof is 13 x 13 meter. That 3 meter of 'crawlspace' around the usuable space is very handy to tuck wires in and to reach the level below through the ceiling with the obiligatory ventilation system. I'd have to look if I could find a decent .pdf file to put up here.

The house is entirely built from the ground up with energy saving in mind. In the ground plate there will be 15 cm of isolation (apart from the concrete ground plate which will be 20 cm thick) so the cold cannot get through the ground floor. In the walls there will be 10 cm of high-isolation plates. Below the room there will be 18 cm of isolating fabric. The house will be heated with a heatpump and ventilated with a mechanical ventilation pump with heat recovery fed with air that goes through a 'Canadian pitt' (don't know the term in English, but in essence this means that the air which is pulled into the house is guided through a 30 meter long 20 cm wide tube that is put under the ground 2 meter deep - the air that goes through this tube is thus pre-heated to the temparture of the ground, winter and summer 10°C-12°C - this has the advantage that in the winter you never draw in frozen air and thus can't kill your ventilation pump, and in summer this air can cool the house)

Also, the entire house will be run via home automation software. I've got the whole thing down, the only thing that is still bugging me is the aforementioned (digital) TV system. I also believe there is nothing cooler than seeing a nice larger flat screen TV on a wall with no cables coming to or leaving from it... but is seems this isn't possible with digital TV: you always seems to need those ugly set-top-boxes. Unless you put the box in a centralised storage room and stream the video feel over ethernet cables from there, but even then you need a set-top box per TV in the house, which I find ridiculous... I would need at least five of these stupid boxes...

You don't need 1 box per TV if you're willing to accept that you can't have every TV showing something different. If there is only X number of people in the house on average then you won't normally need more than X tuners/boxes.

Ok, scratch that. Currently it's just my wife and our son, but we plan on a second child. So that will be four set-top-boxes (eventually)
At least there's one bit of hope: our son is only a few weeks old now, and his sibling doesn't even exist yet. So by the time they both will want a TV in their room (say at least ten years from now), I'm hoping there will be a solution for this problem.
I'm guessing all I can do in the meantime is put as much future-proof cable in the walls as possible. I might even put in fiber, even though I absolutely have no reason or need for it now at all. But I'm guessing it might be useful in the future...

I must say I find it really stupid and maddening that all this is possible without a problem with 40 year old technology (analog TV), but new technology (digital TV) simply can't do this. That's not progress in my book. I wouldn't even care about this for the smaller TV sets in the house (eg. in the kitchen), but I don't want to risk putting those solely on analog knowing that in a number of years in the future, analog TV will dissapear completely. I can't imagine that those digital TV manufacturers haven't considered the fact that almost everybody has more than one TV set in their house nowadays. If they did consider this and decided they didn't care, that's just plain negligence...

Digital TV is available over-the-air for free, and without the restrictions of cable/satellite TV, in most regions. It's all a question of how strong the addiction is for specific channels.

Not in Belgium. In fact, the first (and only so far) company that provides Belgian channels via satellite subscription has only started their service three years ago or so.
But of course, to be able to receive these channels, you need their special smartcard. There are no Belgian TV free-to-air channels available, not even the regular channels. (I'm not even talking about specific subscription-based channels) I know, we live in the middle ages...

Train yourself not to watch live TV and just have 2-3 tuners/boxes to make your big PVR work. Most kids tend to always want to watch the same thing over and over and over and over again anyway. Add in a DVD library and you'll cover most of what you'd want as well.

That's a good point... I already have this extensive DVD library, but I do like live TV sometimes, if only for the news. And even if I use a PVR, this would still mean I would need to determine beforehand what I would like to view... and, afaik, there are still no digital TV PVR's available over here, unless you use the one offered by telenet, which has a lot of limitations (they've only just released a PVR model with HDMI interface, can you believe that? Before, you needed to connect your digital TV set top box to your TV via scart!) So again, that would leave me with analogue TV as the only option... (for this reason MythTV is also not really an option...)

You'd have to investigate the possibility of making a CAM have the serial number of your box I guess or you just accept the fact you're going to have to go digital -> analog -> digital.

It's not my house but what's the word on long term availability of bits of hardware that attach to the ends of the lines.

I'd kind of be worried about what to choose for the end point modems as well. Shouldn't that be considered when choosing the lines.

You can do that? Is there a way of receiving digital TV, and then distribute it in the house as an analogue stream? And also, can you use this up to 1080p? (I can guess the answer to this, but figure I'd ask anyway :))

Not the way you're thinking no. I meant set-top box analog output -> TV card in computer. You'd get SDTV out of it.

If you require a set-top box (that is, if the channels on the TV itself are useless) then there's not really anything you can do but have as many set-top boxes as channels you want to watch/record simultaneously.

Ah, that makes sense, yeah... but indeed not the way I would like to use it.


Indeed. That's what I've also gathered.
I really hope there will soon be a solution released for this...

I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a solution. It isn't in the cable/satellite companies interest to make it easy for you to make your own PVR or distribute all streams to all your TVs from a single box. They want you to buy their own PVR system (if available) or multiple boxes along with the associated limitations and fees.

The analog TV system works the way you want because there is a tuner inside every TV and there is generally no encryption or protection systems.

The US has the previously mentioned CableCARD system which would mostly do what you want but thats making the set-top box tiny basically. You still need 1 CableCARD per device.

Making a single set-top box that was able to tune into every signal available + decrypt + distribute and optionally do PVR duties would be incredibly complicated and expensive.

Except that that is exactly how I use MythTV

Look at the pdf I put up.
satellite dish->closed set top box->[scart]->VCR->[s-video]->MythServer

The server uses an ir transmitter to change channel. It works *perfectly*.

You do lose "interactive" TV.

The picture quality is good enough to project to 100".

As for the comments about wires etc - that's really nothing to do with full house multimedia; that's design and decorating

My projector screen hides behind the coving in the ceiling; the speaker wires were installed when I built the walls. I took the floor up in the room above to feed the video. I drilled through the floor and fed more speaker wire there; the centre speaker is ceiling mounted and the wire was *hell* to route!! The subwoofer phono wire is visible. The amp/PC are currently "on show" but I'll hide them if/when I build the extension...


Oh, and the bathroom wires are quite well hidden ....
http://empegbbs.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=s...true#Post306255

You tried the little dongles you can get that attach to RF2 to send the IR? I got one for my TiVo and it is much more reliable than when I was using a real IR blaster. There is a guide about using one with LIRC.


Wait. Is that supposed to be a disadvantage?

That's pretty much like ours, it's designed to the German PassivHaus standard, we'll have mechanical heat recovery, and a "labyrinth" (your Canadian pit), no ground source heat pump but we've got a lot of land so will be putting in a sizeable wind turbine if we get permission from the council.

I'll post some pics on a separate thread when I get the chance, our architect does stuff on paper not electronically.

Ah! Very nice! Our intention was not really to build a Passive House, but just be as independent as possible from external power/energy suppliers. As the house is drawn out now, we'll only require the electrical power company for electricity, and that's about it. And to minimize those needs also, same as you we also plan on putting a wind turbine in our back yard. (I forgot to mention that) The turbine we plan on should be able to deliver about 75% of our electrical power needs. With the ever increasing energy cost these days, I believe you cannot invest too much into this kind of stuff!

If you don't mind me asking, what will you use for heating? We chose the heat pump with bore holes (type ground/water) because we believe that type provided best value for money.

Looking forward to those pics, I try to read/see as much as I can about this subject.

???

Do they usually supply water, too?

Sorry, let me rephrase that: the only external company we'll need for any service will be the electrical power company. (and and ISP and cable provider ;))
(but yes, over here they do actually also deliver natural gas to the houses)

What about water and sewer? Well and septic tank?

Ah yes, forgot about that. We don't have to pay for the sewer/sepic tank (well, it's included in the communal tax - we don't have to pay for it separately I mean), and water we indeed have to pay, but that is about the only thing that is still relatively cheap these days. On the other hand, about 80% to 90% of the water used in the house (toilets, shower, bath, washing machine, ...) uses rain water, collected from the roof via the gutters into a special tank. Only the water that is actually used for consumption is tap water. (read: which is used to prepare food with). But yes, you are right: we still also need the water company's services... if only very little.

I've also looked into filtering my own waste water via special tanks etc, but that was too big an investment which I would never win back in my lifetime. Unless the price of a litre of water becomes at least 10 times as expensive as it is now, and even then...

The house is designed not to need much heating, they reckon we could get away with no heating, we're installing a small gas boiler to top up hot water (solar panels) and linked to radiant panels (a bit like underfloor heating in the walls) as a backup. The mechanical heat recovery/ventilation system should also help minimise heat requirements. We've been told by lots of people that ground source heat pumps can be highly inefficient, in order for it to be effective the system has to be designed very well.

The key to our house is insulation, walls, floor, ceiling all super insulated, all windows triple glazed.

There are a few of threads about it at www.aecb.net (you should join, a very useful organisation).

This is true for heat pumps that have not been properly configured, but otherwise heat pumps are very energy efficient. For every unit of power you put into the system, the system delivers 4.5 units of heat. But as said, it's very important that the system is fine tuned to your house, and that the heat pump is tailored to your house with regards to capacity (obviously not too little, but also not too big). All this is true with regards to your ventilation system also.

Agreed. Insulation is like covering your house with a blanket.

Very useful! Thanks for the tip!