I forgot to say before. This sounds like a fun project and I hope it goes as well as you'd like. Congrats on your new house, as well. I probably come off as a zealot or whatever, but I hope my input can help you, whether or not you use it. I've addressed some additional items below as well. Just my $0.75. > > 1. Will you be using an audio receiver / amplifier? > > > Yes. > Do you have a receiver that supports separate rooms already, or do you plan on buying 6 separate receivers, one of which supports digital surround? One of the messages in the list did mention receivers with multi-room support. They DO exist, but they are usually the higher end models. Almost all receivers have a speaker selection option to select multiple speaker sets, but you usually can't pipe separate inputs to the different sets. > > 1. If yes, are you going to try to support digital > surround sound? > > > Only in one room, the actual home theater room. Will you be using a DVD player in this room? I think I saw you wanted the receivers in the server room. That would mean that you would either have to run optical or high-grade coax (digital audio coax...RCA plugs on the ends) from the dvd player back to the receiver in the other room (expensive again...) or have the dvd player in the other room. > Running analog wires, in my opinion, would be a last resort. The > degradation of video and audio quality would probably be > significant enough that it would almost outweigh the benefit of > doing this at all. Especially as you increase the number of rooms. > > > I'm not an A/V wiring expert, but how does the cable company maintain > quality with co-ax cable? I was just going to do the same thing, > assuming it is possible. The cable company maintains good quality by requiring a "thin client" as well...a cable box. For digital you either rent or purchase the box, and for analog, the decoding hardware has been built into televisions for many years now. Doing the same thing as the cable company would require expensive equipment to create the same type of signal used by the cable company. Just running video over coax (probably using an RF modulator or something?) is likely going to make your picture look very grainy an anything larger than a 20" television (but still noticeable even on that small of a size). Basically it will look like you are watching a reasonably clean picture off of a rabbit-ears antenna. If you've ever owned a video game console, you might know what I'm talking about. The clarity of a the signal coming off of an RF modulator (converts the video to coax inputs) is quite poor compared to even standard composite. Unless you ARE talking about composite cable (the yellow one) which is definitely acceptable. > > REALISTICALLY... using some sort of thin client that you can hide > somewhere is BY FAR the most flexible way to go. Your "wall jacks" > to "simply plug in" to would be much better suited as networking > ports or even wireless, with some sort of device in between to > convert the stream back to something you can use on a TV or > stereo. A computer can be such a flexible device that you don't > have to have an entire desktop case to dedicate to such a specific > task. > > > The server sitting in a dedicated server closet is supposed to be the > flexible device. All output would go from it, to various rooms. It all depends on how you look at it. In my opinion, converting the digital data to analog so early is more of a headache. That is why digital cable and satellite are so big these days, because it is much easier to distribute a digital signal than analog. So Having the server distribute (or provide access to) digital media directly allows you to keep it digital as long as possible. You > > Could be an issue in the future, not sure. > > Probably more issues, but really I don't see it being worth it. > Myth on your server can save it's streams to some sort of shared > folder and you can just read them right off the server and not > even bother with the myth front-end. I'm pretty sure it's standard > mpeg format video (for recorded programs) and if not, you can have > a script convert them. > > I know I probably sound like a MS / XBox fanboy here, but to put > this into perspective, I don't even have an XBox. I plan on > purchasing one in the next month and doing exactly this. 5 of my > friends however DO have modded xboxes (you can do it with software > these days, no opening of the box is required if you don't want > to....this also allows you to put it back to it's original state > easily) and I can tell you it's great. It put the itch in me to > pick at least one up if not more and for like $99 used, its a steal. > > Let me know what you think about this since I have other ideas, > but I just think this is the most convenient, clean and highest > quality solution for this type of installation. > > > Thanks for the input. Since this is still the exploratory phase, I > obviously had not thought of everything yet. I just wanted to know if > MythTV could handle multiple channels of audio and video output. > > I've seen some of the small form factor PC cases, and they would look > OK scattered and hidden around the house. But unless I can run them > all as headless myth clients with their own web front-end, I really > don't see the benefit of putting a computer in every room just so I > can centralize the storage and streaming of my A/V media. I might as > well just put a small boom box in every room and be done with it. > > If I CAN do the SFF headless myth client with web-based front-end, > then it becomes something worth looking into. > > Dave > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota > tclug-list at mn-linux.org > http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list > -- <http://www.plaudit.com/> Matt Dittbenner *EMAIL* mbditt at plauditdesign.com <mailto:mbditt at plauditdesign.com> *WEB* www.plauditdesign.com <http://www.plaudit.com/> *PHONE* 651.646.0696 *ADDRESS* 2470 University Ave. St. Paul, MN 55114 -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20060803/cc45982e/attachment.htm -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... 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