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Best Options for a Home Entertainment Network?
Vultan asks: "Now that I'm finally a proud homeowner, I'm looking to integrate my video, audio, and computer hardware. Specifically, I'd like to be able to listen to Internet radio throughout the house (or at least through my main stereo unit), and transmit video from my computer to my home theater in a separate room. I've done my share of googling, and I'm drowning in options. Wired vs. wireless, RG6 vs. CAT5e, digital vs. analog, line level vs. speaker level (for audio), etc. What kinds of technology do Slashdot readers use or recommend?"
If you can, go wired. It has the bandwidth you need for video and with a switch you can handle several servers and clients simultaneously each with it's own 100Mbit connection where with wireless you share bandwidth.
"Computer Scientists can count to 1024 on their fingers" (non-mutant, non-mutilatated, human computer scientists)
My Thomson VS530C works great for transmitting video and audio from my computer to my TV set via WLAN.
Run CAT5 all over the place... in addition to Ethernet, CAT5 has an impedance of ~ 100 ohms which makes it perfect for both balanced analog audio signals and digital AES/EBU if you want to do that. You want to go balanced if you're doing long cable runs otherwise you could pick up hum.
I use a 2.4gz tv sender hooked up between my pc's sound/video cards and the tv in the kitchen. To let me watch videos from the computer in the kitchen and to play mp3's with visualisations. Works pretty well except for when the microwave goes on, but then it is only a few metres. However i've had the thing work well at 100.
If you are concerned about security, you might consider that even if you have WEP enabled with wireless, CAT5 will always be more resilient to eavsdropping on your network streams; simply because it hard to hack into CAT5 physically. Also, as another poster postulated, you have a dedicated 100mb throughput for each device or computer hooked into the LAN. With wireless, it's shared. CAT5 rocks for bandwidth! I can stream straight .VOB (DVD) files from my host computer to the living room computer and it plays just as if it were from a set-top, stand-alone DVD player; no skips or nothing. So you could have video playing over the LAN for one device in one room, and have plenty of bandwidth to spare for a couple of other devices in other rooms. Ultimately I guess it's how you plan to use it that determines the best implementation to use.
>>>>>> Chewie, take the professor in the back and plug him into the hyperdrive.
I can't stress enough how i h@te the name of their program. I never can remember it when most needed and I always have to search irc logs for it.
... the works. Even server capacities, XML tv program retreivel, ...
:-)) VERY nice.
besides that I've seen a demo on FOSDEM in Belgium and it is all you want : tv, dvd, mp3, mpeg/avi/..., photo gallery,
it is modular and you can choose form programs you want to play your mediums with.
The dvd player has fully support for the remote control (what it also supports
it also has server thingies. You can connect clients to it to setup in several other rooms.
When my house is more ready I'll use it!
http://davedina.apestaart.org/content/
is tha site!
It isn't perfect, but here's a quick list:
l t p://freevo.sourceforge.net/
Audio/Video:
- Kenwood THX Receiver ($400)
- Infinity 5.1 Surround Speakers (no they aren't dipole)
- Toshiba 3109 DVD player (older)
- Toshiba 50H81 16:9 HDTV-ready
- Digital cable with 5.1 dolby
- Mistubishi SVHS VCR with SVideo in/out
Conversion Computer (upstairs):
- Athlon 2000+, 512MB Ram, 4x80GB drives (manually mirrored with rsync weekly)
- ATI Wonder TV
- 100baseT network
- Mitsubishi SVHS VCR for Playback/Recording
- RH9.0 Linux
- MEncoder, vobcopy, mplayer, Freevo and custom scripts for conversion from analog and DVD to DivX 5.0x
Here's where to get the software: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/design6/news.htm
http://www.divx.com/
http://lpn.rnbhq.org/
ht
- mod_mp3 for streaming audio files
- Apache web server for Streaming video inside the house
Playback Computer (near TV):
- Compaq Armada E500 (900MHz, 256MB Ram, composite video out, stereo audio out)
- DLink 802.11a PCMCIA adapter (in turbo mode I see 72Mbps)
- VLC is used to stream the video from the server upstairs
Plug the laptop into the AUX input for the Receiver and use the Toshiba's aspect ratio and zoom controls to fill the screen completely.
Works best with DVD conversions. I've converted some favorite VCR tapes too and lots of home videos from 20-30 years ago. There's nothing like being able to have family over and laugh at them as kids going down a slide and landing on their butts at the bottom or seeing Mom in kat-eye glasses.
Also works great with WinAMP for MP3 and other audio format playback. If WinAMP's video would stream, I wouldn't need VLC
It isn't a perfect setup. It needs a remote control, a cleaner look downstairs, but for watching a full length movie, it is great - no more switching DVDs or hunting for the DVD . They are all safely away in a closet.
There are lots of other choices for the Linux software, but for one reason or another, they wouldn't work on my system. Mostly due to dependencies. RPM sucks!
Could I be first?
i tried streaming an 800MB divx file from my wired desktop into my wireless laptop, and it lagged alot and dropped alot of frames.
One of the best sites around for this sort of information is http://www.avsforum.com/
Do your research in their FAQs and then post any questions you have to the board. The site is ass-ugly, but it's great information!
SL33ZE - Artificial Intelligence is No Match For Natural Stupidity -
Whether or not MP3 reduces the sound quality of any given source (which obviously it does), you can tell the difference between a production quality set of technics speakers and the 5watt multimedia speakers that shipped with an mmx-era tiny: in just the same way that a decent car will still handle well on a poor quality road, decent hardware will make the most of whatever sound you feed it.
With a few exceptions - notably headphones - this isn't the case. There are certain lines of sennheiser headphones, for instance, which sound dreadful when fed a 64kbps mp3 of classical music; however, even on a 160kbps mp3 feed, my pair of Sennheiser HD500s sound positively wonderful, especially when the music has as few channels as possible. This difference in headphones is mostly due to the fact that headphones aren't designed to playback recordings made for speakers - which your body naturally perceives accoustically due to the multiple, far-distanced soundsources and diffuse reflections off environment and shoulders. Even the most expensive headphones still find it extremely hard to compensate for this; the best solution is to use a binaural recording, made generally by a set of microphones embedded in a plastic or polystyrene fake head, such that playback sounds as realistic as possible.
In short, hardware DOES make a difference - even to a 128kbit mp3 feed. But what would sound bad on good hardware at that bitrate would sound bad on any set of speakers - and if you're really after audiophile sound quality, you won't be feeding a set of expensive speakers with a low-rate mp3 file.
Remember also that most recordings are now made digitally - it's extremely easy to get hold of even mp3 recordings of extremely high quality (256kbit mp3 files are practically indistinguishable from cds to the lay person's ear; with ogg vorbis, the compression artefacts drop vastly in occurance and this applies to an even greater degree)....
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you
This is the way I did it a couple years back....still working fine.
My experience reflects this too. While theoretically and actually practically (when doing large file transfers) the speed is enough, you get dropped frames as the data does not flow as a steady flow. Even a modest 1.5MBit/s divx is far from perfect when watching it being transfered from a (fast) file server to a (fast) computer. It's ok for short clips, but watching a movie is out of question. I prefer to copy the movie to disk and then watch it. Yet, I can move about 600kByte/s data on the 11MBit/s wireless LAN.
Here a Tom's Hardware Guide to Music Across Your Home Network
. Here are some reviews of the AudioTron Phataudio, DesignTechnica, Cnet and WhiningdogDesignTechnica gives it a 9/10.
Congrats on you new home.I bought an Audiotron recently and hooked it up via a Linksys wireless bridge to my network. All of my mp3 files reside on my linux server and are accessed via samba. I use iTunes on my Powerbook to rip my CD collection and manage the mp3 files.
I've had it probably for a month and it's been great. The unit is stable and the wireless network is great. I don't notice any performance problems with the wireless, despite what others are saying about it.
Originally, I wanted to hardware the unit thinking that it would be a problem, but running cable is such a hassle in my house and I figured I would just try out the wireless option. Since it works, I'm happy. Music never skips or pauses or whatever.
I've saved a huge amount of space in the living room where all the CDs used to be and have also really reduced the visual clutter.
I also looked at the slimp3 player that someone else mentioned, but decided I wanted something "appliance-like" that wouldn't have me digging through perl server code in the middle of a party when I want to be listening to music. The other reason is that the Audiotron supports streaming Windows Media which I use to listen to a radio station in France and this was a must-have for me.
Fyi, if you go with the Audiotron, you should check out my Whirlycott Audiotron TOC Generator which builds table of contents files for the Audiotron to read. This makes scanning your MP3 collection a task that takes just a few seconds (I have around 5000 files) versus 10 minutes.
www.amphony.como m
www.dalco.com
www.adventaudio.c
Looked for some way to get cable signal to my computer without putting a hole in the wall. And how to get computer signals downstairs to the TV.
Not gonna be able to move the cable TV signal wirelessly. The line level signals are possible though.
Run CAT5 or CAT5e, either will do fine. Forget wireless for the computers. I have that network too, and its bandwidth is certainly more than enough to watch streaming programs, but it sucks when you want to move around said files in whole. Plus lots of things can degrade the signal. Suffice it to say wireless does not like to go vertical, it does, but it looses a lot of power.
Now that you have run the proper flavor of CAT5 (www.dalco.com), you are going to need a computer right next to your stereo. As for running audio video signals this is the preferred order of formats
1. digital
2. high voltage
3. lower voltage
This means that running speaker wire is your last resort, run line level if u can, and of course digital is WAAAAY better. The higher the voltage, the less your signal will degrade on long runs, this is why the voltage the power companies send out is SO high for the long runs, but stepped down when it comes into your house.
I ended up giving up the computer audio thru the stereo because of my house setup, maybe next time though. Currently I use Advent's wireless speakers. They work on 800MHz and dont interfere with my 802.11 network. Plus I have headphones for them as well. But they do pick up quite a bit of the occasional statis. Works best for stationary speakers, the headphones I have when I cut the grass do not work nearly as well. But they work. Also check out the products of www.amphony.com. Note though that this is the same frequency as 802.11 wireless network and the 2.4 GHz phones as well. You wont really *hear* any interference I don't think because they are digital I believe, but you will just get smaller bandwidth when the phone / speakers are running. In my Advent's 800MHz speaks, I occasionally hear the neighbors on the telephone because they are not digital. Thisis basically a wireless way of sending a line level signal thru the house. I also have a receiver I can put on my stereo if I want to send signals to the stereo from the computer. Though anyone in their right minds would prefer the SPDIF, and it will not go across the wireless I assume, havent tried.
Simply connecting things together wil not necessarily cause a ground loop problem, but connecting devices on different power loops probably will. Houses will generally have different loops for different floors (each with its own fuse), and quite possibly different loops for different rooms on the same floor.
If you do any PA work outside, you'll realise how easy it is to get a ground loop - it can literally be quite shocking! Although we had a generator, we would wire earth to a foot long copper spike, which was hammered into the ground behind the stage.
Another thing I've found: check your power cables, especially the connections inside the plugs, as these can come loose with time.
-- Steve
To be completely wireless you'd have to wait at least for the 100 MBit WLANs, and then you'd still have to share them between all nodes. So better put Cat5e (to be ready for Gigabit) in your house, connect them to a 100 Mbit switch, optionally add a wireless AP (for notebooks or else).
.rm and .mov :-) on my TV and listening to MP3s in the living room I bought a modded Xbox and stream the audio and video files from my server (with RelaX). This way I can add "radio appliances" everywhere there's access to the network.
For watching all kind of video (yet except
To record moves or shows from TV, put a DVB card in a PC for having the best quality.
Come on that's like a joke.
I have wifi in my apt and I use it, but there's no way in hell I would ever think about making my AV setup wireless using current technology.
Do you have any idea how the reliability of a wire compares to that of a WLAN? There's a reason every PC doesn't ship with a wireless keyboard, and it's not cost...
It's reliability. My keyboard sits in the same place all day and so does my computer. If I never move them or unplug them, I could basically expect that connection to outlast the keyboard. No batteries to mess with, no interference (unless you have some seriously illegal RF equipment), complete immunity from casual snoping.
Guess what? My TV sits in the same place all day too. Besides, show me one piece of wireless eqipment that transmits video as well as a set of 75ohm component video cables.
Go with wires. For everything. Use wifi for your laptop.
The real decision is what wires to run.
As far as:
RG6 vs. CAT5e, digital vs. analog, line level vs. speaker level (for audio)
Run all of them. You need coax for video, cat5e for networking, digital (AES/EBU whatever) for long distance audio transmission, and speaker cable for your speakers. Run extra. Especially cat5. Consider running fiber too. You can get 1 cable that has everything I just mentioned inside it and run that.
I think the best suggestion I can make is to buy pro-audio gear. It's designed to work well with long distance interconnects (everything is typically balanced).
For video, get decent coax (well shielded) and possibly a decent amplifier as well.
Life is too short to proofread.
I would second a fanless mobo. Cheaper than a laptop (even an old one), you could build one inside an older VCR enclosure (prolly even fit a power supply in there), stick a cdrom / dvd drive in there (though I'm not sure how good a playback you'd get... then again, if my K6-2/300 can do it, I'd hope these things can, too). This gives you several bonuses:
:)
- equipment appears to be part of the entertainment center
- wireless means good enough mp3 / internet radio streaming and not being tethered to one place
- tvout + some-software-whose-name-eludes-me gives you the ability to control the box via tv and remote
- fanless means it's quiet
- a good laptop hard drive means it's still relatively quiet (or you can go solid-state media)
- built-in dvd/cdrom allows you to play dvd/vcd(/maybe even divx, but a fanless cpu might be underpowered here)
- USB gives you the extra flexibility of hooking up other devices (e.g. cameras for picture shows, multimedia
solid-state cards for audio/images, wireless USB adapters)
This is the approach I'll be taking. So far, I have a USB adapter for 802.11 (have a PCI one, too, in case the USB doesn't wanna work) and an older ATI video card w/ a DVD add-on and tv-out. Unfortunately, I'v exhausted the wife-imposed computer budget for the year, so it'll be a while before I get anything else
Have EVDO, will travel.
I went with CAT5 in every room in my house. Two ports in every room which enables me to do both ethernet and phone easily through a patch panel.
It's really hard work unless you are taking down walls anyway or just have easy access and/or the right tools to do the job but it's worth it.
-- http://z80.org - all opinions, all the time --
Yeah - the SLIMP3 device is indeed interesting. In fact I bought one for my brother as a wedding present so I could use him as a testing ground before buying one for myself.
The major issue I have with the device is that it will only play standard MP3 files. Files of any other format (FLAC, Ogg, WAV etc) have to be converted to RAW and then into MP3 on the fly before being streamed to the device. MP3Pro of course is the biggest looser since it contains a very low quality MP3 track which the device plays . This produces VERY low quality output.
Is there a device anywhere that allows native playing of other formats? i.e. a device that you can upload different codecs to depending on your music library?
A for the cabling, I'm currently installing Cat6 cables around my new house and will have a wireless network for laptops so I can browse in the garden (I'll have an RJ45 in the toilet for best access whilst I'm crapping - as someone earlier mentioned!)
Dunk
My loop was caused by having my computer (in another room - same floor) connected to my receiver through the cable tv (split between my digital cable box, and my tv-card). Putting a VERY simple isolator (made from two opposite 75-300Ohm adapters connected together) was all it took to break the ground between them. It removed the hum from my sound, hoirzontal bars from my picture and lowered the overall noise floor of my system.
It's possible to get ground loops even from outlets on the same circuit if the ground between them is poor. The only effective way of connecting multiple grounded audio devices together without isolators is to plug them into the same power strip or, of course, to use properly balanced equipment - which most consumer electronics are not.
University - a box of academia nuts.
What I would do, since wire is cheap relatively speaking, is pull everything that you think that you might need. I would pull a coaxial, two cat5e, and a phone line (cat2) into all of the places in question and then leave what you are not going to use in the walls for later. Perhaps even a piece of fiber (single mode) There are some companies that have wire bundles where all of the above mentioned wire is in a single bundle so that you only need to pull one wire (albeit a large one). I would also pull a few pieces of heavy nylon cord for use later. These help when you need an additional run. Simply tape the new wire (fiber?) to the nylon and pull the nylon cord out, thereby pulling the new wire into place. You may want to pull a replacement piece of nylon cord with it for the next time.
Remember that you must be as gentle as possible with the wire so as not to pull the twists out of copper wire or shatter the glass in a piece of fiber as you run it through the walls. The last thing that I would strongly suggest doing is testing the cable after you have pulled it. I'm not talking about one of those $45 boxes with lights that your nearest Fried Electronics (Fry's Electronics - I used to work there and most of the sales people don't know shit about this stuff) will try to sell you. I'm talking about a $5-8k tester from Fluke, Wavelan, etc. that can tell you what the wire is actually transmitting. You should be able to find someplace to rent one for the day or perhaps your lucky enough to have a friend in the business. Or you could pull one of the tricks that Fry's customers do all of the time: buy yourself the tester and then return it within the 30 day return policy that they offer.
Once you have run all of the wires that you may need for the next 10-20 years then you will be free to hook whatever you want to the ends of it. There was a slashdot discussion on the merits of a Linux multi-media server that you may want to search for as well. First get the infrastructure (wires) installed and then your options are wide open.
Good luck. Tres
Restore America: Dr. Ron Paul for President!
The disadvantage is that the quality can be lacking, but that's ALL down to the modulator/demodulator pairs you use.
Quality will not be "lacking" it will be *awful*. You will never get acceptable (to me) quality from modulated co-ax. Composite is ugly, Svideo is OK, RGB/Component is great.
---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
All of this talk of "work of punch holes and replastering" might scare a guy. I've run CAT5 all over my house and NEVER replastered. Find a good wall where you want the cable and have attic access, punch your hole to match your box size, run a hard wire down the attic to the hole and pull up the CAT5 cable. This is assuming of course that you have an attic. I've run tons of Coax, telephone and CAT5 this way and never had a patch job.
"Action is the thing that escapes most people. Great ideas are a dime a dozen. Great actions are few and far in between.
binaural huh? well then i strongly recommend the album "Binaural" by Pearl Jam. it's a great cd recorded using binaural technology (most of the songs anyway).
Are you saying this is actually a problem? Do you have *any* experience with this? From you comment it's quite clear that you have very little experience with Ethernet.
The IEEE Gigabit Task Force ratified the final version of IEEE 802.3z in 1998. The IEEE 892.3ab supplement was adopted in 1999. Standardized GigE has been around for 5 years now with vendors making prestandard equipment up to a year before the ratification date. GigE did not, I repeat DID NOT require upgraded wiring. That was complete and utter FUD. IEEE 802.3u (a.k.a Fast Ethernet) required Cat5, forcing users to upgrade from the error prone Cat3. GigE runs on Cat5. It doesn't even need Cat5e, although the signally is better. As we all know GigE is just now becoming reasonably priced. I think it's safe to assume that in the next 5 years (the average time it takes a Ethernet standard to become reasonably priced) this guy's Cat5e will more than be able to sustain the needs of his entertainment system. By the time he actually needs GigE, 10GigE will be reasonably priced.
What will greatly increase in the next couple of years is the size of ripped movies. Compression will get better, making smaller files, but quality will far surpass compression, giving us much larger files. Streaming a 1.5GB movie over a wireless connection which is not very tolerant of interference is a horrible idea. It's true; the cheap APs made by D-Link, LinkSys, Belkin, and others can not handle interference. The quality APs made by Cisco, Lucent and Enterasys are what handle interference. Of course the quality APs also cost as much as 8 times as much as the cheap versions. This isn't going to change anytime soon.
So would it be better to spend a large chunk of change on a wireless network that will have to endure upgrades every year or two to stay current and reasonably fast and also have to deal with interference OR would it be better to pick a widespread network medium based off Ethernet that already has the capacity to more than handle the foreseeable needs of this application and then some as well as being cheaper in the long run? Well, the answer is quite simple to someone that has half a clue about networking.
Oh, and what is an RC45 jack? Do you mean RJ-45 jack?
It depends on how much you want to spend. I put in cat5 cable to all the rooms in our townhome that we built 3 years ago. I now have 100Mbit throughput, and it is very nice. Once you do that you may want to add wireless later on. Try it out wired, and then see if you need to spend the extra money for wireless. If you have a laptop, you'll probably want to add it, but run wires if you have the option.
.wav files and store it on the server. With harddrive prices so low, I don't even worry about mp3 or other compression, and I get fantastic sound quality as a result. I can always convert the wav files to mp3 for my laptop if I want. If you buy enough space, you even can do both!
The key part of the system is the computer configuration. I built a server (an old PC with a 60GB harddrive) to store all of my files. All the other computers, including two laptops and three desktops, access it via ssh, vnc, and samba file shares. It is amazing how fast it is, and playing *any* kind of content over a 100Mbit is completely seamless.
I then use home-built PC's with the smallest harddrives I can find to connect the system to the stereo and TV. I use one computer that provides both both music and video (it has a DVD-ROM drive), and recommend using a Radeon All In Wonder as the video card. The computer runs well, and I have minimal investment in it.
Since I built enough storage in the server, I do not have to worry about running out of space anytime soon. I even have debated ripping all of my DVDs to DivX and putting them on the server, but that will take more space.
Whenever I get a new CD, I just rip it to
One thing I recommend is to get a fast CPU for the computer connected to your stereo, and underclock it. If you use the proper cooling, you can get away without a fan, which really improves the noise level. Of course, this takes a bit of work to get right, or you'll melt down the computer. But at least your data will be safe.
Also, put as much RAM as you can afford into your server. Your server will just cache everything it can for an incredible response time. I have a lowly P400 with 768MB RAM as the server, and it has hardly any load, even though it runs samba, a database, a web server, a proxy server (squid) and an intrusion detection system (snort) on it!
I built everything with the idea that I want it to be modular. When I run out of space on the current server, I will be replacing it with much more capacity. Since I figure that I will run out in a year or so, I anticipate buying a Athlon2000 with 2GB of RAM, and at least a half terabyte of RAM. Then I will just use the old server in my bedroom to watch TV and listen to music. In this way, I reuse everything, and formerly worthless computers become quite helpful.
-Mark
Microwave emissions aren't ionizing radiation like gamma rays, UV, or X-rays. Microwaves do not have a cumulative effect, as opposed to the "bit flipping" that higher-energy electromagnetic radiation causes in your DNA.
Microwaves have only ONE path to bodily damage - Heating via RF absorption at the molecular level. For microwaves to do damage, the power level has to be high. (Microwave ovens are usually 500 watts and above, most modern ones are around a kilowatt.)
Most WLAN cards are 25 mW. Higher-end ones (Ciscos, for example) are 100. There are a very small number of 200 mW cards.
Needless to say, these power levels are NOT enough to cause any significant heating, even if you're exposed to it 24/7. You're more likely to burn yourself via heat conduction from a laptop computer than you are to have any heat-related injuries from a WLAN card or cell phone. MAYBE if you touch the circuit traces of the PCB antenna directly with your fingers you MIGHT get a mild RF burn on the surface of your skin (This would require opening up the card), but thanks to the inverse square law, that's the worst thing that can happen.
I'll reiterate this again - I work for a company that develops transmitters for cell towers. On a regular basis, we're exposed to RF levels higher than even a habitual cellphone user. (Amps with covers off tend to leak a lot - Never measured the exact amount, but it's enough to register on other equipment in the same room while a transmitting cell phone will not.) Some of my coworkers have been in the industry for two decades and not a single person anyone knows has ever had any RF-related health problems except for the occasional RF burn from accidentally touching a live trace carrying 45 watts of power. A cup of coffee can hurt you more.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?