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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)
Well one would think you could run just a standard TV out to get the video, and run your soundcard through your stereo amp to get the audio. Most likely your best bet would be to keep it all wired since speed would be limited via wireless. Those are just a few of my thoughts, but what do I know, I'm just a silly college student. Good luck.
I bought a SliMP3 myself when I bought my own home, and I really like it. It's basically a dumb terminal powered by a perl daemon running on my file server. It has great sound quality and a good display. I'm not quite finished building everything yet ( my plans include remotely switchable lighting and video to my tv ), but one big advantage of the SliMP3 is that I can hack the daemon code myself -- so I can use the remote of the SliMP3 to control other applications, e.g. a video stream from my computer and the lighting.
---
"The chances of a demonic possession spreading are remote -- relax."
My Thomson VS530C works great for transmitting video and audio from my computer to my TV set via WLAN.
I have gone for a different approach. Instead of one, single point of failure, I have several separate devices around the house. The downside is that I cannot listen to internet radio throught my home, but should my computer die my television will work and my wife can listen to whatever she likes on the stereo.
Its also cheaper as I don't have to fork out for "new" technology. If I was you I'd be saving my money for the coming recession....;-)
I have an old laptop 1GHz PIII running on my stack of Amp / CD / VCR etc... feeding into both the amp direct and the VCR. It works just fine.
To listen to internet radio or MP3s in my kitchen I open a couple of doors and turn up the volume. Wireless technology at its best.
For a very long time, I debated a similar issue, and what I've found easiest to do is simply to stick a machine next to each 'media outlet' which exists in my house. My television has a displayless (asides from the tv) machine with an svideo output card, and my hifi has an old toshiba laptop plugged into it (120MHz machine). For times when I want really excellent sound, I have a second hifi which tends to get plugged into a soundblaster live - but for the majority of the time, soundblaster sound from the laptop suffices.
;)
:)
This is what I find simplest, since as I have the house networked, adding nodes - or controlling them - is childs play. I can happily even sit on the sofa and remote control the computer via the TV, which will happily play videos off my desktop which have recently been downloaded, for instance. I would guess that Wirelessly networking this would be more convenient, and specifically wiring each device would be a little higher class (ie. sending gold signal wiring to amplifiers &c), but in general I've found the networking approach to be the most flexible (and I've done a fair amount of work as a sound engineer, so I speak from a little experience).
As far as internet radio in every room goes, you might be simpler wiring up lots of speakers - I would guess it depends on your house size. I'd just plug my one of my laptops into the room in question and solve the problem that way, but that's just me.
Cat5e is a wonderful thing.
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The main issue with wireless is speed... it's not terribly good, but enough to stream DivX (disclaimer, haven't tested, only done the math.) If you're planning to move several gigabytes from machine to machine in a hurry you might want wires instead.
Security is also a weak link with wireless, but that depends on your location as well. Encryption is always extra overhead, which is a bummer.
But personally I'd rather have a slow flexible system than a fast system I can't change because I've installed the RC45 jacks in the wrong places.
.: Max Romantschuk
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.
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!
I'm always a bit sceptical about these ideas and maybe I'm a luddite in this respect. I've always gone for speakers, amps etc. that will give the best sound quality, why I would then want to use an source, such as MP3, that would sound the same on a £50 stereo is beyond me.
Likewise with internet radio, fine for voice, but when it comes to music I would rather listen to an FM radio station with decent sound quality.
Likewise using Cat 5 cables or, even worse, WiFi, for linking parts of the sound system seems pointless. Most speaker, cable and amp manufacturers spend a fortune on R&D to develop their products to produce the best quality sound by reducing interference etc. Using cheap (compared to HiFi) R5 cabling or WiFi would negate any of these benefits.
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?
The core parts of this are:
1) A computer with an infrared/RF input device.
2) An A/V tuner + amp + display device in each location as required
3) Loadsa co-ax cable.
4) a bank of modulators/demodulators.
Now, get each input device, (computer, sat box, cd player etc) to modulate itself onto a different channel of a single co-ax that does a loop around the house (or star network, depending on layout). They can do this from any point on the wire and broadcast it back onto it without problems.
Connect up each of the A/V decoders/demodulators/displays etc, complete with a "magic eye" that can modulate the remote signal back down the same wire, back to each device that has a decoder/re-diffuser.
The advantage is that you've got a single bit of wire going everywhere that has everything on it.
The disadvantage is that the quality can be lacking, but that's ALL down to the modulator/demodulator pairs you use.
You can then even talk to your computer via IR/RF now, which means that this can be extended into an X10 system to control lights (or anything else really).
Another advantage is that you can watch anything in any room similtaniously.
I had the same dilema.
What I do is quite simple.
The internet come into the office room (my wife and I share 7 different PCs + one for the children.) Apart from a KVM for my cluster each PC has VNC installed so that I can, for example, switch off the childs PC remotely - which saves a screaming match at bathtime. There is a WIFI access point which means we can use laptops throughout the house and part of the garden (this does include the hammock).
My designated "media" PC has a 2.4Gig AV transmitter which are fairly common is consumer electronic places now. I have multiple recievers around the house - 1 for bedroom TV/Stereo, one for dining room stereo, one for TV room TV/stereo etc. The only place I miss this is the shower.
The TV room system also has a transmitter (on a different channel) so the cable can be watched on any of the other TVs in the house (all watch the same thing at the same time). To switch from watching cable to listening to the stuff from the computer is a simple matter of flicking a switch on the reciever.
The only thing to watch is that you set up the channels on the wifi and tv transmitters so that you don't get interference from each other.
It could be better but it works a treat here. And importantly my wife can still work out how to switch things on and off ("1 TV, 1 cable box, 1 VCR, 1 DVD player, 1 Stereo - just to watch TV! You have got to be kidding."). The trick is to leave everything on and just switch screens off.
I run a 240gb raid 0 file server for all the music and movies(126gb MP3's & 40gb movies). I also use it as a game server. The raid array keeps things humming along, but I'll cry if one of the drives dies, since I haven't got enough spare room to back everything up yet. Individual things like tunes and movies are played off of machines in the living room or the various bedrooms. A DSL router provides internet access.
A friend of mine has a similar set up, but went an interesting route for his massive DVD collection. Get yourself a good DVD ripper or just go buy one of the big Sony DVD jukeboxes. They hold something like 100-500 DVD's. This guy has one of the larger models which he controls through a PDA. He just puts them in when he buys them and doesn't usually remove them. He has the title listing on his LAN and found some software that turns his PDA into a programable universal remote. His MP3 collect which for some reason is identical to mine, he controls through a webbrowser. I'm not sure if he just wrote the code(html)or had a piece of software, but reguardless he can control that as well from any machine in the house or his PDA.
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 -
One thing I can't stress enough is to be wary of ground loops when connecting any number of audio/video components together. If there's more than one path to ground throughout your entire connection of equipment it's extremely likely you will hear a 60Hz (50Hz in europe) hum in the background of all your music. I just managed to track down and stop mine the other day.
Connecting a computer and a home stereo receiver is probably the most common cause of this effect.
Fortunately, you can get ground loop isolators pretty cheap for line-level, and cable tv applications... of course, if you choose wireless this is a moot point.
University - a box of academia nuts.
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)....
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If you decide to go wired, run conduit instead of wires everywhere, that way, if you decide to change your solution in later years you don't have to rip the walls up and replaster, just run new/more wires or fiber-optic cable down the conduit. {I'd like to take the credit for this idea, but I saw it in a previous Slashdot article as I was Etherneting my house)
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Is say Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS).
;) Only problem: sound also gets to the other rooms(interconnected amplifiers) so you might want to use a separate soundcard with videoplayback.(for true 5.1 sound you might want to do that anyway)
Internet Radio(with the same music in each room): put a stereo amplifier in each room, and interconnect them via the "tape" i/o. No need to stream anything and you can choose the volume for each room individually.
Video: Put a thin client (x-terminal) in your Home Theatre, 2 reasons: Low Noise and Low Noise
Beware of Programmers who carry screwdrivers. -- Leonard Brandwein
This is the way I did it a couple years back....still working fine.
Your spouse will hate wires if you have one. Work out where your cable runs should be and make sure they are invisible. Or go wireless.
/lots/ of channels and a good amp. I didn't do this and I now find myself swapping cables, which is irritating. I will be buying a good pre-amp soon!
Projectors are now at a sensible price, starting at about 900gbp for an Epson EMP-30. I use one of these and it's fine. My girlfriend and I love the way the TV and everything disappear when not in use, meaning the house centres naturally around the fireplace as if it were 1940 again!
Projectors also work really well with a KVM switch. Put the monitor output into the 'Computer' input and the sound into a hi-fi, add a wireless keyboard and you are laughing, whether you have ten PCs or two.
If you are expecting lots of different audio channels: PC, TV(etc), CD, not to mention the old favourites like radio, then get a separate pre-amp with
Justin.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
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.Now for the fun part, actually USING that bandwidth. I hate M$ to, but the best way to play whatever you need at any location is with a modded Xbox and Xbox Media Player Website. This spliffy piece of software can play just about any media format you can think of, from VOB, DivX, Mp3, Ogg, and many many more obscure formats. It can play them from the harddrive, dvd drive, or over the network with SMB (Windows) shares, Shoutcast for your internet radio, and tons of other options. Divx plays just fine over a 10mbit connection, so switched 100mbit aught to be a dream. Here is a review of XBMP on TechTV with videos of it in action. Picture slideshows, playlists, this piece of software just keeps getting better and better. Fully controllable with a standard controller or the DVD remote you can purchase separately. (I recommend the Logitech RF wireless controller if you can justify the extra money. Solid contruction, flawless performance.) Its all about the wireless, baby.
Even better, no expensive modchip or chip installation required. Some people figured out how to run code without a chip, and some others figured out how to flash a BIOS on the Xbox with this technique. No chips, just shorting two easy points on the motherboard. Check on the #xbins channel of Efnet for information; look for the 007 agent under fire package with raincoat. You'll need a friend with a modded Xbox to get the savegame on a memory card, but once done, Xbox is a cinch to crack.
As a perk, you could even get a few room-to-room Halo/Unreal/RTCW/Doom 3 games going on.
Toodles D. Clown
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.
My home is an old-style brick house with chimneys, since it's modernised with gas powered heating, i dont use the flues. Since there is a unused fire place in the middle of every room in the house and the flues make great cable ducts, fairly short, wide and easy to use.
My switch is in a cuboard in the loft with easy access to the converged flues.
Also opened out the fireplaces make great recess for equipment.
In my home entertainment system, at least...
The home entertainment system consists of:
Sony TV
Pioneer 5.1 Digital Reciever
Cambridge Soundworks speakers (MC300's, Surround IV's, etc)
Toshiba DVD player
Sony CD Player
ReplayTV
TurtleBeach AudioTron (MP3/Internet Radio)
Nintendo GameCube
The last three items are wired to the Router/Gateway/Wireless Access Point/Cable Modem. Upstairs are all the computers (3, not including free roaming laptop) hooked up to a 10/100 switch and a wireless bridge to communicate with the downstairs. The server is upstairs and serves the MP3's to the AudioTron.
Works for me.
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.
I'll let all the other trolls duke it out over wired vs. wireless. My only comment there being that if you can afford 54Mbit wireless for the data and 900mhz/2.4Ghz "rabbit-ear" relays for the audio, it'll save you a lot of headache w/r/t running wiring, breakout boxes and having a central cabling hub. If you do go wireless, remember that 2.4GHZ cordless phones and certain microwave ovens will toast your band width when in use. I'm using a 5.4Ghz cordless system in a 54Mbit 2.4GHz wireless field and have seen little to no cross-over interference.
What I'd recommend from an system infrastructure standpoint is to consider the Mini-ITX form factor for building "media nodes". The nice thing is that for less than $500US you can build a complete mini-itx system with 120GB+ of storage capable of 5.1 audio (via optical out) and s-video out. For a bare audio server with no optical drive you can even get that price closer to $300US. The core idea here being that you can start small and expand your system just by adding new nodes with specific functions.
e.g. Make a single audio server node first, once you're done with that you can inexpensively add another box to the system that supports video file serving and sits under your TV and can play directly onto such. Etc, etc for adding digital player nodes elsewhere... I'm pricing a mini-itx system for about $250 with an old 6gb HD and 128mb of RAM that can serve as a streaming video/audio node for the TV in my bedroom. The idea is to also make some nice simple, large-text rendering web interfaces for managing all of this from a central machine anywhere in the house.
For more info on mini-itx: http://www.mini-itx.com
ATI's Remote Wonder wireless remote control is pretty nice too. X-10 makes a similar model that can also be integrated to control their digital-home power/audio/video transmitters and switchs.
All and all, have fun with it and think more task-oriented about how you want to use the technology that's so readily available.
cheers,
Levendis47
--==[ AOL YIM ICQ : Levendis47 : levendis47@yahoo.com ]==--
Our household LAN has various components, like a file server, an Xbox for DivX and mp3 playback through the 5.1 surround sound system, and a half-dozen PCs (shared house). We needed both wired (for speed; e.g., file server to LAN or Xbox to file server) and wireless (for laptop flexibility) so we installed both. I can use my iBook with a little micro hifi in the kitchen to stream mp3 wirelessly, as the layout of the house made wiring the kitchen a pricey prospect; meanwhile, I still get to shove gigabytes of data on and off the file server pretty quickly from any of the wired desktop machines.
I think the best answer depends on the layout of your house, but with wired being so cheap, I would suggest using wires were you need them and they can be easily run, and wireless wherever wires cannot reach.
As for getting music to each room, I'm leaning towards the view many other posters have suggested: round up some classic Pentium desktops and use them as streaming nodes. It's not fantastically elegant but at least it's cheap and flexibile.
You win again, gravity!
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 --
I discovered that I had to unplug my Apple Airport Base Station AND my 802.11 printer adapter ANY time I wanted to use my wireless speakers because they interfered with each other (both on the 2.4Ghz channel) = there was a pop in the audio with 802.11 on
Also nearby wireless cameras make a difference as do nearby phones. Plan for hardwired phones to be near basestations OR get a different spectrum phone like a 5 Ghz phone
I have also discovered that Bluetooth interferes with my Logitech mouse working - so it's good to do some small testing just so everything will work everywhere.
Also, make sure the general area of your "brains and bulk" to your computer is located opposite from your kitchen as it is the area in MOST houses that draws the most amount of electricity and the microwave can cause interference too.
For internet, I have been personally recommending to my newest customers that they not have a landline phone period and just use a cell as a home phone (there are adapters availible that allow you to use all the phones in a house with a cell phone) - or potentially use a VoIP phone - use eFax for faxes. Get broadband.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
When thinking about the wired vs. wireless, don't forget the health issues: the correlations between cell phone usage (that is, microwave frequency radio near the ear) and inner-ear nerve cancer, and the correlations between ozone exposure and leukemia. Although your direct exposure is bound to be less intense for internet than for a cell phone, you have to consider that 24-hour exposure is going to make that more significant.
Because of this, I'd suggest wired, LCD monitors, and with good ventilation for the power supplies.
But then there comes another issue: when standards upgrade and you want to upgrade as well, how easy or difficult will it be to change your system? For this reason, I would suggest running the wires behind screw-in molding, or a self-latching molding if you can get it. I'd make the molding large enough to hold at least four cables, maybe larger. Where you have such things as a false cieling [kitchens] or false floor, make use of those. Finally, color-code and tag everything, at both ends and whereever it can be accessed, and make up a master plan of the house cabling. Put that master plan in an envelope that is taped into the router's enclosure, and another copy of the master plan on the inside of the house's circuit-breaker box. Make sure that the master plan references everything by color, so that future owners can easily track things.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Here is an idea that worked for me. Put in moldings. Crown molding that goes around the room close to the cieling, and baseboard molding that goes around the base of a room. You can get it in literally 100's of styles to fit your home/budjet, and used correctly adds really well to the asthetics of a home. You can then run wires along the top of the Crown molding, and pick some that leaves a gap along the foot of the wall, and you can run wires behind it. I let my wife pick out the styles she liked best within the price, and phisical contraints, and she was thrilled. hope this helps those of you who want the CAT 5, but also have wives.
Other than that I'd say CAT5 and SPDIF digital everywhere. Wireless is fine for stuff that moves, but you ain't going to move your home theater setup around the house, are you?
I ran a 6-in-one cable in my house which is two cat5e, two coax, and two fiber optic bundled into one cable. The super fat stiff cable is also really eash to push up through wall cavities, but it could be difficult to fish through tight corners though. I highly recommend this stuff as it makes it really easy to get connectivity anywhere, and lots of it. A 500ft role did my 2800sqft house to a central wiring closet in the basement just fine. The jacks are a 6 in one faceplate that you snap the different connectors into.
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!
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).
For mp3 jukebox and internet audio I like the Slim Devices audio player. It's cat5 only, but it still is pretty sweet.
Now I'm thinking about getting one of the Via Epia based mini-pcs for fileserver/jukebox usage
I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone mention this. I picked one up after it was mentioned in /. a while ago, and I couldn't be happier. The client runs on a PS2, which means you can use the PS2 to feed Optical Digital out and Component Video Out to any television. The server supports multiple connections, and a PS2 plus the little remote piece won't run you more then $230 or so. $50 for the QCast software. Plus, if you want another client box you just buy another PS2, and the kids'll probably thank you for that (assuming they exist).
For those who didn't catch the little article, QCast supports MP3, OGG Vorbis, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and the various flavors of DiVX (3.11, 4, and 5), as well a JPEG and PNG photos for slideshow playback.
I had been looking into building an HT Computer (I really just wanted streaming playback of the above list, not something for on-the-fly HD scaling or anything like that). For something that wasn't going to overpower my audio with fan noise, would playback any of those formats without any assistance (sorry Via Epia), and would fit in a case exactly 17" wide so that width would match the rest of the equipment, I was looking at something significantly more expensive than $230. It connects to a file server with a 4x80GB drive setup (drives ran me a sweet $50 each).
I use a ReplayTV for PVR functionality. It connects via ethernet, and there are third party programs available that allow you to connect and "download" one of the shows from it (although it only use 10BaseT). It would be somewhat trivial to have a cron job set to run the program, pipe the file to a DiVX encoder of your choice, and save it on a centralized box.
Oh, yeah, use CAT5. RG6 for the actual video source, but if you're trying to move PVR-ed video around, CAT5. I'd make sure to run all CAT5e or CAT6 so that I could make the jump to gigabit ethernet when the switches stop costing more than some of my computers.
Hope this helps!
I would also recommend running wire wherever you can and using wireless for mobile devices (laptops, PDAs, etc.). However, I disagree with the idea of putting a Wireless card in the desktop.
I would suggest that you go with a wireless broadband router instead. Most of those that I've seen also include regular wired ports. Plug your wired system into those and use the wireless for mobile devices. That way, you don't need to have your desktop on to use your laptop's connection. Also, it saves all the peer to peer manual connection setup.
I would also recommend using encryption for privacy reasons but YMMV.
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?
Too bad Santa ends up with a router up his ass every Christmas.