Home Media Streaming with magic eye.

Worems

Lads,

I've just bought a new house and completely stripped the walls and the place bare. I am in dire need of advice. I have just rebuilt one of my old PC's and put a 2TB HD in it and have all my movies, music and photos on it. I want to stream it throughout the house. I'll have 3 Tv's. I am connecting plenty of RJ45s around the place and will run the movies etc off the Playstation or a network media streamer.

I am confused though. I really would like to be able to place an amp, relaying to the ceiling speakers, in by the computer with the Sky box under the stairs but have no idea how to hook it up around the house. The house will also have plenty of Co-ax spots as well. Is there any way that I can use a magic eye remote to access all the units under the stairs or do I need wall units to access these?

I might not be making much sense here. Sorry.

Cheers
Richie

basill

I did basically the same thing. We brought a new build house with no flooring down so we pretty much could run cable without to much hassle. Mate is a spark so that kept the costs down. Cable is cheap. A box of Cat5 is about 100 Euro. Cat6 a bit more.

We ran a mix of Cat6 and Cat5 cable to all of the rooms. Some goes directly from a room to the loft where a 48 port patch panel is located. Then from patch panel into a 24 port netgear unmanaged switch. Other cables go from a room (say lounge as an example) to under our stairwell which is where we decided to centre all of our gear eg: sky boxes (sky multiroom), amp, dvd players etc. I have a Readynas duo with 2*1TB drives. This is located in the loft and connects directly into the netgear switch. All of our media is stored on this eg: avi files, mp3, photos etc.

We wanted nice "clean lines" everywhere so in our lounge all we have is the 50" LGPK590 tv hanging on a wall. It has DLNA as well as LG's proprietary Netcast internet access service. The latter is very limiting in that you can only access web services that LG has "agreements with". Think of it as like clicking on an APP on an iphone. If you want to check the weather or facebook, watch a youtube video then its fine. It can't surf the web though. For that you will have to go back to your pc/laptop/ipad etc. Dining room/kids playroom is exactly the same - just a 42" LG tv hanging on the wall but has exactly the same functionality as its bigger brother so plays sky,dvd, movies via the NAS and Netcast internet.

The TVs were pretty much plug and play. They play without any hassle all of the kids movies which are stored on the NAS. We saved them all as AVI format but the LG tvs we have will play just about any type of media you have. I would download the manuals of a tv you are interested in just to make sure it will suit your needs before splashing out the cash.

We ended up running 2 Cat6 cables from the stairwell to the Lounge so that we can use HDMI extenders/baluns to run sky and dvd to the tv plus anything else in the future that has an HDMI connector. The extenders were from ebay for about 40 quid a set. Avoid non powered ones due to reliability issues. The extenders allow you to run HDMI over Cat5/6 and keep the costs down. HDMI cables over about 10m in length suffer from reliability issues unless you are prepared to pay an extortionate amount of money. Hence why so many people run cat5/6 instead. Then there is a Cat5 cable that connects into the LAN port on the back of the TV. We also have a couple of runs of coax cable from the stairwell to the tv as well. One is a spare and the other is for the magic eye which connects onto the RF2 outlet on your sky box.

Other things to consider:-

- We moved our phone line master jack under our stairs. We send the phone line up via Cat5 to the patch panel. This enables you to turn any cat5 port around the house into a phone line should you wish.

- We went with sky multiroom so we ran 4 lots of coax from outside the back of the house (best line of sight position for the satellites in our case) through the loft and down under the stairs. All the sky man needed to do was to bolt on the dish and align it and terminate the cables and plug in the boxes under the stairs. He was well chuffed I can assure you. we went with an independent installer to avoid all the usual horror stories you get with the usual sky installer morons.

- There are various RF remotes on the market eg: harmony 900. These enable you have complete control over your system. They work by converting IR into RF then back into IR. The blasters attach onto the gear you are trying to control eg: amp, dvd player.

- what are you doing about sound/AV? Our lounge has surround sound coming from a Denon AVR-1911 amp. We put sky through that as well as the dvd player. It has an HDMI output which I then have going into a cheap 4*4 HDMI matrix. This enables us to send whichever HDMI source we want to another room.

- we put in 4 zones of Sonos in the house as well with pairs of Monitor ceiling speakers. The sound is brilliant. They play your music and also internet radio. You can group the zones to play the same music eg: if your having a party. Or each one can play its own source. You can set volumes individually as well. There is a free app for the iphone/itouch/ipad to control the system which means you avoid having to buy additional controllers - very very pricey.

I got all of the AV gear from Richersounds in Belfast. Most of the networking stuff was either ebuyer or off ebay.

Worems

Thanks basill. I ended up just calling a guy out to sort me out and It's all going to be completely hooked up through a system called Control4. I think all the systems got a little too much for me.

Apologies for the late response. After I got hooked up, I didn't look at this thread again. But thanks for all the info, great to know some of that stuff.:D

OllieMc

Hi Basill.

Im currently trying to set up a sililar system to you and have come a little stuck. The house is built and I have run 2 cat5e cables from each room. Probably not enough but Im going to have to manage.

Can you let me know what the idea of running the cable to the patch panel and then to the switch.
What kind of hdmi extender did you get and where did you get them from.

OllieMc

basill

Can you let me know what the idea of running the cable to the patch panel and then to the switch.

Can you be more specific? I am not completely sure what you are asking but will give it a crack anyway. Firstly I am in no way a techy so this is my limited understanding of networking. Terminating all of your cable runs at the patch panel is the perceived standard in networking. It is a neat and relatively quick way to terminate your cables since all you need is your krone tool.

By having all of your cables punched into the patch panel you can then choose which ones you want to connect to your network switch. It is the job of the switch to do all of the technical wizardry such as sharing the internet connection across the ports that require access to it. Other devices such as a NAS can be plugged into your network switch and will therefore be shared across your home ethernet. This means your network is always on and avoids you needing to keep a pc online in order to share music and other media files. We find this especially useful as it means we can access our music and movies 24/7 irrespective of where our pc's are on or not.

Another advantage to using a patch panel is that you can share your telephone. If you "send" your telephone line from where it comes into your house via a cat 5/6 cable up to the patch panel then this allows you to turn any cat 5/6 wall plate that you have around the house into a telephone line. All you would need to do is to get something like a 5 way RJ11 splitter, plug it into the front of the relevant port on the patch panel and then patch across to the ports you want activated for the phone. If you want more than 5 ports then buy another splitter and daisy chain them. As far as I am aware there is no limitation on this.

What kind of hdmi extender did you get and where did you get them from.

I got mine off ebay. They are a no name brand. I did write to the seller trying to get more information on them but he never replied. Approx. 50 quid in cost. Fingers crossed haven't had a problem with them so far. To be fair this whole area is a minefield. If you have a search through something like avforums then you will soon see that there are those who opt for the really expensive Gefen right down to the bargain basement.

After speaking to people at Richersounds and reading on forums I went for a powered version as they tended to have better reliability.

duffman21

hi Basil,

Great info, your system sounds like what I'm looking for. Currently on a new build and am wondering what system to go for, what way to set it up, how much cable to run etc....

How much did you spend on your system....