Home entertainment ideas
 

Right, I'm moving home in the upcoming weeks and I want to get a head start on planning my home entertainment.

Here's what I'd like to do:

Centralise photo's, video's (HD), music and documents, be able to stream them to laptops, Xbox 360 and Ipod. The usual windows and apple file types.

Be able to play different music/videos in different rooms.

Supply power to a summer house at the far end of the garden and be able to feed movies to a projector in there, and also have a projector screen and audio.

I'm planning on using Virgin to provide internet access and HD tv. I'm also contemplating the idea of using the internal wiring to provide high-speed transfers around the place.

Any suggestions on where to start (bar the usual AVForums suggestion)?

I would try avforums;)

What sort of budget have you set?

Centralise photo's, video's (HD), music and documents, be able to stream them to laptops, Xbox 360 and Ipod. The usual windows and apple file types.


One word NAS :thumb:

For the summer house run some network cable to it and buy playon mini media player that'll stream all your content from the NAS and link to the projector.

Do a search for "grooves home cinema", might give you food for thought


Mart

I was thinking of a NAS with blu-ray for backing it up.

In terms of budget, I haven't set one, but I don't want cheap tat that will break one day after the warranty ends nor do I want something to compete with the local multiplex :D

For home networking I have used products from these people

www.solwise.co.uk

Works really well :thumb:

NAS would ideal especially the 2tb drives are getting cheap. As for tv ideas you could go for sky hd and have a playback system to other points with magic eyes.(which I could sort out ;) )

unRaid :D
Really easy to use, and you can just chuck a huge parity drive in, then any size/speed drives in for data
im running one with about 3tb of storage and a 2tb parity drive (in case any of the drives fail it can recover data etc)

i have a boxee for streaming videos and internet content etc
but my ps3 etc could quite easily add the unRaid server for content

That would depend on the deal I get from Sky. VM have made me a very good offer :)

btw, dont forget to look at quidco ;)
http://www.quidco.com/sky-digital-tv/
http://www.quidco.com/virgin-media/

and id be wary of Virgin, parts of they're network and bloody awful now
my parents are getting 1.5Mb instead of 10 atm....
and they are also doing some bloody annoying traffic shaping, and caps
One of my friends on Virgins big packages can buy a game online off steam, and then start downloading it, hit his cap midway for the day and then be stuck on a meg or something stupid for the rest of the day

I currently get less than that speed on the BT line at the place I've sold, so even 1.5Mb would be an improvement :D

Sky's HD coverage is far better then virgins so virgin maybe cheaper.

I have virgin bb and sky , I have no loyalty :D

lol ive the same problem, but with a place ive just brought :d
had 0.8Mb when i 1st got here, managed to tweak the wiring (as the internal stuff was shocking- new build...) and got a massive 2Mb now :D

My first reccomendation is a projector. I have the screen mounted in the ceiling and it pullsdown but you can display it straight on to a painted wall if you like. The lap top, X-box, DVD player and TV tuner are all plugged in and the X-box works as a media extender so it can play any films or media while someone else uses the lap top. If you get an Av reciever with two independant HDMI outs it means you can play different sources in different rooms by running the cable. A nas is a great idea and I will add one to my network after my PC has been built.

Personally I would ditch the xbox as a media player as it's a poor one. The lack of .mkv and Blu ray rips compatibility let's it down .

Funnily enough, I'd been looking at their Gig powerline adaptors.

Can I ask when you 'stream' these videos do they retain the full modern HD sound codecs? In other words will the quality of sound be 100% identical to that which comes from a Blu Ray disc?

Yes if you rip dts hd or true hd they'll play fine on a compatible amp

What software would do that?

Has anyone got any experience of Sonos?

I can't recommend software as I've never done it.

I get my hd stuff from the interweb officer :D or watch them on the bluray player

What does that actually mean Ant?

Do you use a Blu Ray disc and rip it to a hard drive or do you download it from somewhere?

Yes. Works well most of the time, I have one attached to a NAS on which I have my CD collection ripped using lossless formats.

I can listen to music in just about any room I want, problem is I never actually do. I've got a highish end stereo system in one room and so always want to listen to music on that system, not secondary systems. I don't listen to music in the car anymore for the same reason.

But if you want music in lots of rooms then Sonos works well. Their back up support is something that always leaves me gobsmacked due to it's efficiency, if only all companies could be like that

Get a nice Onkyo 608 ;P

the AV Reciever will decode the audio and output to your speakers etc

http://handbrake.fr/index.php

Above isnt too bad :) but your'd need a bluray player on your PC (not that expensive anymore)
i couldnt possibly comment on downloading bluray rips ;)

Isn't the Onkyo a bit excessive for watching films outdoors?

depends how much money you have to throw about :D lol

For streaming you could do a lot worse than Flumotion or the trusty old VLC.

Like earlier suggestions, would need CAT5e running down to the summer house.

XBMC running on Ubuntu running on an Acer Revo. Will play everything.

Interesting point inadvertently raised by James here - there's a subtle but important difference between a media player accessing and playing content that's basically hosted on a generic file-server, and a media player accessing and playing content that's being properly streamed by a streaming-server. Provided you get your setup right, the latter of the two will give you measurably better results, with equivalent powered and costing hardware.

What??:wonder:

It's a very basic entry level avr. There is no point imho in having a projector and then having poor quality sound. Also there is no point in having poor quality sound and video streamed all across your house including the shed, it is far better to have good quality sound and video in one room.

This is why I started off by asking you what budget you had set, to do what you have outlined in the op to a decent quality will cost a fair amount of cash