Creating a "Wireless House"

Smirky

Can anyone advise - I want to set up my new house so that in most major rooms I can

a) Watch digital TV
b) Listen to my MP3 collection
c) Browse the Net
In my living room I want to do all of the above + view my digital photos & movies via my projector.

Now I know this can be done by hardwiring the house. It is not a new house so without pulling it asunder I assume this would be a huge job. Any advice or rough costs for an average house?

The alternative would be to go Windows Media Centre & WiFi everything to & from component parts using senders & receivers. I am not very teckie but my bro is. Any suggestions or reccomendations on this side?

I have looked also at the Sonos, Slimdevices & Creative labs systems, but appears to be limited to music only, rather than multi-media.

Finally I could go into Philips, buy their Media Centre & beam that to the tvs in the other rooms & then buy their Stremium music centres & beam that around the house. Means you can only watch what the same programme on each TV in every room, unless I got multipoints from Chorus.

All advice welcome! I don't care how it gets done as long as it works well!

Smoggy

Im not a master in this area, BUT i do have a 54g wireless network and streaming movies from the server to different machines will quite often cause the movies to stuter, due to lack of bandwidth. The new N wireless networks might be a better job, I dont have experience in them. Also to get full coverage around your house you will have to use some form of repeaters, that will take the signals in and re broadcast them.

I know that when I move I will be hard wiring the whole house with CAT6.

If your looking to share music, pictures and the internet around the house a wilreless network will see you well and you can look into other ways to share the TV etc.

Here is my setup :

media center in the living room , hooked into the TV and stereo, for TV , Movies , Music pics etc, connected to a server via wifi. An xbox 360 hooked via wifi to the network doing the same as above and pc's and laptops using wifi and one hard wired into the router.

I dont know what you can take from this post, I guess the moral of the story is that wifi is good, but is limited, heavy streaming will cripple it.

cooperguy

This gives you a review of the media center extenders that do it and what does it well. http://www.winsupersite.com/reviews/mce.asp It says in there that the best way to do it is with 802.11a because 802.11g causes some stuttering from time to time

Smirky

@ Smoggy - thanks that is helpfull. What Media Centre did you go with or are you using a PC with Windows Media Centre?

Anyone have any direct experience of using the Extenders for Windows Media Centre?