New home entertainment system - what to do?

OhPinchy

I am completely renovating my house at the moment and bumped into a lad that owed me a favour on Friday which was handy cos he installs audio/visual systems and I was due to put up my new plasterboard slabs and ceilings on Saturday. So he ran some wires into the house for me.Basically what we now have is:

-TV is in one corner of sitting room, hi-fi will be another corner beside the sofa.
-We intend having our PC located upstairs in the box bedroom. My mate ran VGA and audio cables from box bedroom to TV and hi-fi. Basically this would allow us to use our LCD TV as a monitor for the PC and so watch videos stored on our PC our surf the web during TV ads etc. using a Bluetooth wireless mouse and keyboard.
-He also ran VGA and audio cables from TV and hi-fi to the master bedroom.
-He also ran some cables between TV and hi-fi point.
-he also ran 5 cables for a surround sound system in the sitting room.
-he ran speakers from the hi-fi point to kitchen, all bedrooms, and even the bathroom. Intent is to put in a good hi-fi in sitting room and be able to listen to it in the other rooms through ceiling mounted speakers (anyone have any of these that are any good).

In case it helps give a better picture – our electrician has run cat5e cable to all rooms in the house for the telephone, and has digital cable (think he said it was satellite cable) going to all bedrooms for the TV aswell.

I have two main questions:

-how can we control the sound system so that I can listen to the sitting room hi-fi in a particular room. My mate mentioned something about using a device which allows you to point your remote control at it and then this will transmit this to a device which is attached to the hi-fi – anyone know anything about these? That sounds like it would control the hi-fi functionality but what about the output – can we use a splitter switch to choose which set of speaker cables should be used, and if so, can we get an electronic version of this which would allow us to do this remotely so that I could be in the bedroom and press play on the hi-fi and it would then turn on and play the song through the speakers in the bedroom only?

-should we go with a Windows Media PC? We haven’t bought a TV, PC, or hi-fi yet and I really like the idea of setting up a cool system but to be honest I don’t really know what it involves or what it can do. Its only gonna be me and the girlfriend, both 24 so no kids planned for a good while yet. We would want to have a dedicated PC that can be used for browsing the web and things like that, and I’d say it would be necessary to have it so that one person can use this for surfing without interfering with the other watching TV. I’d really appreciate someone highlighting in laymans terms what benefits we could get with a media PC and whether we would need two separate PCs.

We will be getting NTL digital TV and using NTL cable broadband and are not loaded (GF’s brother is the sparks and did a deal and all the other cables cost zilch) but just want to know how we can get the best use out of our PC, TV and hi-fi which are all things we would be buying anyway.

Thanks in advance.

Ciaran500

A media PC will allow you to listen to your MP3, music cds, watch DVD, watch downloaded content from the internet and can be used as a PVR so you can record TV onto the HDD. Basicly replace everything. You would need a seperate PC if you want one to be able to surf the internet and the other play music/video.

OhPinchy

I assume that using a Windows Media Center PC I would be able to record TV onto the PC or DVD.

Would I need to buy a high spec computer for it to be a Windows Media Center PC and how much does the software cost?

Could I also have the PC over by the hi-fi and use the VGA cable to send the visual back to the TV and the audio cable to send the sound to the hi-fi? Would I then be able to use the PC as an MP3 server throughout the whole house (sound through the speaker cables in each room and then using some other solution to use the remote in each separate room)?

Any ideas on using a remote in one room to control a device in another room (does the Windows remote come in a bluetooth version)? And what about contolling which set of speaker cables the hi-fi output goes onto and can this be controlled remotely?

spartacus93

OhPinchy wrote:

I assume that using a Windows Media Center PC I would be able to record TV onto the PC or DVD.

Yep, you could do all that. And rewind and pause TV.

OhPinchy wrote:

Would I need to buy a high spec computer for it to be a Windows Media Center PC and how much does the software cost?

No, nothing major anyway. Read the thread on Media PCs in this forum, the guys that have done it posted their specs so that should give you a good idea of what you would need. They were powerful machines, but nothing extraordinary if i remember correctly.

OhPinchy wrote:

Could I also have the PC over by the hi-fi and use the VGA cable to send the visual back to the TV and the audio cable to send the sound to the hi-fi? Would I then be able to use the PC as an MP3 server throughout the whole house (sound through the speaker cables in each room and then using some other solution to use the remote in each separate room)?

Yes, google Windows Media Centre Extenders

OhPinchy wrote:

Any ideas on using a remote in one room to control a device in another room (does the Windows remote come in a bluetooth version)? And what about contolling which set of speaker cables the hi-fi output goes onto and can this be controlled remotely?

The Windows remote isnt bluetooth. Devices like this could help http://www.linksys.com/splash/WMCE54AG_splash.asp you would get one for each hifi / tv in your house and connenct it to your network. This will enable all your devices to access all the content on your Media Pc.

I have more info on this ill root it out later and post, or ill scan a few pages and send them to you

spartacus93

The software and remote would be 150ish from www.jes.de you would also need a TV Tuner for your Pc. The Hauppauge ones are meant to be the business. The 350 model is 160 from the same website.

OhPinchy

Thanks for that spartacus - would be interested in reading anything else you might have on it.

It seems that for a WMC Extender you need to put either a wired or wireless computer network in place. I reckon it would have to be wireless as I do not have the cables in place for a computer network (the cat5e stuff is for the phones and is not in ideal locations for computers). And its now too late to run anymore cables as the walls have now been slabbed.

What I do have in place is a network of cables which would allow me to view or hear the output from either a normal or WMC PC in pretty much any room. So I guess I would need a remote that would allow youo to control the WMC server machine as if you were physically at it as opposed to setting up an Extender which is pretty much a client of that server and needs to be on a network with it. That or install a wireless network for the extender but this sounds like a lot of hassle and I would have concerns over speed (3-bed semi-d with all walls being concrete).

I will make the time to read through the Media PCs thread and read up on WMC in general. Would I really need a separate PC if I wanted to browse the web from another room? I reckon if I went with the Extender option it should be possible to allow a client machine piggyback onto the WMC server's web connection and then one person in one room could browse the web while the other watches TV - is this right?

Does anyone know if there are any products out there which basically take in a generic infrared remote signal, transmit it via radio to a receiver which is attached to the intended device and that receiver then fires a copy of the original infrared signal to the intended device (this would answer a lot of my queries)?

switchrider

Check this link out http://www.audioholics.com/cedia/cedia2004/ParasoundZselectSpeaker.php
Not to sure if you can control it remotely but will do some more hunting for others. I'm roughly doing the same as yourself - speakers throughout the house. Thinking of sticking the computer upstairs and then running CAt 5 (or wireless) downstairs to a media player like the one above or netgear do one also. Then hook it through the Hi-Fi for mp3 throughout the house. Just need to sort out how to control it all. Will let you know if I find anymore...

OhPinchy

Thanks switchrider – let me know how your search goes. I’ve just finished reading the Media PC thread (which should be a sticky) and though it all sounds amazing I’m a bit overwhelmed to be honest – and I’m fairly tech savvy or so I thought!

I’ve now gotten a good understanding of what Media Center can do within one room, but its accessing it in other rooms that is confusing me. Can anyone give a laymans terms of what Windows Media Center Extenders do? As far as I can see you hook them up to a TV in a separate room and then use the TV to browse the menu and play some songs or films from your WMC PC in the sitting room. Could someone else be in the sitting room watching a different film at the same time?

To use an Xbox as an extender do you need to add anything to it, cos if not it might be a cheaper way of doing an extension cos at $250 the extender linked above is pricey?

Is it possible to use an extender without a TV (i.e. extender plays through a hi-fi in the bedroom but there is no tv in that bedroom)?

Can I use the WMC PC in the sitting room to browse the web with a wireless mouse and keyboard, and could someone else be watching a film upstairs through an extender at the same time?

I’m working full time and spending all my evenings and weekends renovating the house so unfortunately don’t have as much time as I’d like to research this but my main short-term question is – in order to use wired extenders (as opposed to wireless) what cables do I need to run in – will cat5 at every point of extension do? I need to figure this out asap as I have to run whatever cables are necessary by the weekend.

I guess theres two ways of using the WMC PC to serve other rooms in the house:

-using extenders to create a network, and then using separate TVs to control the extender and get it to pull data from the central WMC PC server. If this would mean that 2 people in different rooms could pull different data from the WMC PC at the same time that would be a huge advantage.

-have no extenders, but run output cables directly from the output of the single central WMC PC to individual TVs and speakers (would go thru an amp first) throughout the house and using a splitter switch to control which TV or speaker the data runs through. Issue with this is how to get a remote in the bedroom to control the WMC PC, and how to remotely control the splitter switch (though switchriders link seems to handle this) – this option is almost sure to only allow one person use the WMC PC at a time.

OhPinchy

Right, got some answers to some of my questions:

From Microsoft website: "One user can watch a movie using Windows Media Center Extender in the living room while another browses through the family's music collection on the Media Center PC in the den. Up to five different instances of Media Center Extender devices can run at the same time.
"

I'm assuming that this means that the user in the den could just as easily be browsing the web or doing some word processing or whatever.

A wired network is preferable for the extenders so I will install cat5e cables.

Set top extender is pricey at around $300 and is pretty good by reviews I read but does not allow you to play dvds on the remote tv. Xbox extender is around $80 and is good in that it allows you to play dvds and works out well cheaper if you already own an xbox. Downside is the noise off it, cannot power off thru the remote, and the bootup and response times are slow due to it being a software application attempting to emulate hardware.

I now see my Windows Media Center PC based in the box bedroom (where it can be used as a normal PC while others pull data to listen to or watch off it – I hope) and one extender in the sitting room and another in the main bedroom. Might go for an xbox one in another bedroom but we’ll see. Crap thing about this is I will still have to have a DVD player and hifi in the sitting room which I thought I would not need and the added price of the extenders is significant.

I can’t find anywhere to buy extenders in Europe so am not sure why that is, so I might have to pick them up when I am in the US next month.

Still interested in ways to feed audio only to other rooms and how to control it aswell.