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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.
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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'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?
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!
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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.
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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)
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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 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
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