Home Theater PC & Setup - Advice Needed

air

Hi all,
I'm looking for some suggestions on achieving a somewhat integrated HTPC setup.

What I have is the following:
A house wired throughout with CAT 5 with a patch panel & rack upstairs near the proposed location of one TV.
There is another TV sited downstairs with CAT 5 and coax connection to the patch panel.

What I want to do is something like this:
Install a home theatre pc in the rack and be able to use this as a pvr from both tvs.

I'm open to suggestions on hardware / software that'll help me achieve this.
Should I look at Myth TV / MediaCentre?

Also if I have satellite and two digi-boxes should these be located at each tv with the output fed back into the pvr and then back to the tv?

Any tips or pointers appreciated.

pH

I guess if you're prepared to lose quality then it's all possible.

One of the main advantages of a HTPC is a nice DVI feed to a modern plasma/LCD panel, and it is then used as a DVD player/XVid/CD and PVR. Your sound should also be connected using an digital cable (coax or optical) from the HTPC to a decent amp.

Once you start dealing with long cable runs between to source and TV then you're into a shielded coax cable most likely. This is a crap picture, crap sound and not worth the bother. You can buy longer DVI/SCART/Optitcal sound cables but cost goes up, cable runs get tricky and even then 10m would be a long cable.

Same with Sky, if you're feeding a TV from a digibox then you want a SCART connection using RGB.

Getting the remote signals around the house can also be tricky, with a number of solutions (Sky piggybacks on an RF cable), other wired and wireless senders are also available.

Having 2 *different* TV pictures from the PVR at the same time will also be tricky (if that's what you intend).

To sum it all up - remote controlled planes! - The fun is all in the planning/construction the end result is not that interesting - same with all this stuff - if you're an enthusiast and will enjoy putting it all together and then go for it, if you're just looking for an end result then buy off the shelf components and keep it simple.

adrian.s

Mythtv will do this for you, but be prepared it's not cheap or the easiest task in the world to do.

Since mythtv is a client / server solution, what you can do is place all your heavy duty components (tuners, disks, memory) into the backend system which will be sitting in your rack and will have your tv signals going into the back of that. Your clients can be diskless clients that live near your tv and connect via the cat 5 to your backend system. They will need to run the mythfrontend. Your picture quality should be fine as it's an mpeg2 stream coming over the network into the frontend.

If you want to have two tvs running at the same time and both watching live tv, then you'll need to have two tuner cards. If you are plugging in a digi box then you'll be limited to only being able to watch the output from that on either of your tvs. I'd recomend freesat into backend so you don't have to worry about the digi box.

Adrian.

air

Hi Guys, thanks for the replies.

Adrian, why would you recommend digisat for the backend - purely so one wouldnt have to pay two subscriptions?
I imagine I'd still need two sat boxes and the ability to control the channel through the myth interface or whatever.
I am looking at having 2 *different* pictures from the pvr alright so I will need 2 PVRs. I think the Hauppage cards are the best supported.
I think the diskless clients idea sounds good, I'd prefer to be using the CAT5 rather than the coax to stream the video to the tvs, although the upstairs TV will be able to be driven directly from the PVR via a DVI cable as it's nearby, so I'll only have one diskless client.
I'll probably go with mini itx pc for the diskless client.

So at present my proposal is something like this:

2 Sat or Freeview boxes - -> PVR ---> DVI to One TV
---> Diskless Client at other TV
Video over Cat5

Going the other way I'll need the ability to change the digibox / freeview channel from both tvs (no problem with the upstairs, remote control extender for downstairs( this will probably be the only thing the coax connection will be used for)).
I'll also want some kind of remote to do media browsing, recording etc from both tvs.
I'd imagine that this could be a wifi pda connecting to the Myth server that would allow me to browse the media library etc and play music, video etc through the tvs.
If I get freesat I wont have terrestrial channels I think so I'll probably go for the dual tuner hauppage - further complicating things!
Finally is there some kind of tv listings guide for irish channels to let one implement a sky+ type effect for recording?
I know they're available for other countries alright.

adrian.s

air wrote:

Hi Guys, thanks for the replies.

Adrian, why would you recommend digisat for the backend - purely so one wouldnt have to pay two subscriptions?
I'll probably go with mini itx pc for the diskless client.

<snip>

Finally is there some kind of tv listings guide for irish channels to let one implement a sky+ type effect for recording?
I know they're available for other countries alright.

Hi Air,

The reason I don't recommend the digibox solution is you have to rely on interfacing to it via an IR Blaster or something to get the tv signal into your PVR. So you wont be able to watch and record two different channels. My current set up simply branches NTL's cable suppy so the TV can get the feed and the PVR thus allowing me to watch TV and also be able to record another tv channel on the PVR.

Your solution looks solid in terms of high level functionality. If you decide to go with freesat it's possible that you could also have a terrestial tv tuner to pick up the local channels, but I can see why it's probably easiest for ya to just go with the sky route.

In terms of getting channel listings, if you're pulling in a digital broadcast signal you should be able to extract a 7 day listing from the signal directly (though I've never done this). I use xmltv to download 14 days of listings from the radio times website. It works quite well but changes to schedules can lead to problems with recording the wrong program if the PVR hasn't updated itself.


A.

air

Hi Adrian,
Thanks for the reply.
Extracting the tv listing from the digital tv signal sounds very interesting indeed, is this a feature that Myth supports?

I'm actually leaning towards freesat for this install at the moment because my friend who owns the house doesnt use it all the time & doesnt want to be paying a subscription.
If thats the case I think I'm looking at a third tv card for the analogue stream.

In hardware terms, what are the minimum requirements for PVR recording? How many streams could a high end box simultaneously encode for example?