Full system build

deejer

HI All,

I said I would post this here first for some advise and then try the electrical forum for some idea of costs!

I am renovating a house and will be starting the electrical work from scratch. Its a small house (two bedrooms and an office room). So id like to make sure I do it right now so that everything I need is installed from the start (cable wise). I have a HTPC built, I have my work horse PC for the office room and I have my NAS. Im not getting sky so will have satellite through the HTPC (BGT3600 is the last component waiting). I also want to have a surround sound setup in the living room.

So basically I am just looking for some hardware advise here. I know that if I ask my electrician he would have an idea but this stuff still isnt in the main stream when building/renovating houses.

All help/advise appreciated!

RockyTwoArms

I'm no expert but sounds like your looking at centralised server setup with a shared library.
Looking forward I think wired setups are going to decline given the new wifi standard next year and availability of cheap pcs.

Look into XBMC as it is very flexible and good for library sharing. Just have a pc in each room connected over a wifi network. By mapping music store locations and a bit of SQL each device can share one library with distributed storage. - that should cover your media

For streaming your TV I'm too sure I know you could use vlc over the network to act as server and client.

Worth looking into eventghost to control it all.

In terms of cabling if I remember right old style electrical cable (brown and Blue) is great for speakers due to the relative quality, price, availability and durability.

You might clarify the distribution of pcs, sound and video you want to achieve

deejer

cheers for the reply

I think since I am starting the wiring from scratch I will add the ethernet cable around the house. I have very poor broadband anyway so need to make full use of the little I have.