Media access throughout apartment. Suggestions?

[Justices]

I want to install four TVs in different rooms that can quickly access and play (sometimes simultaneously) a large collection of films and tv shows. All the media is currently stored on 2 x 2TB external hard drives and organised into Action/Comedy/Drama/Thriller/Sc-Fi etc. folders. At the moment I just leave a HD in two of the room and plug them directly into the TV via USB. Moving them about is a pain though.

Macs all over the house, not a PC in sight.

Does anyone have a solution that they use for multi-room entertainment?


Thanks in advance.

[VEX]

Smart tv's and clever little boxes that will insert 100mb data onto your coax tv network and the peel it off arou d the house where ever you need it.

Might be using some on another PH home in the next few weeks.

V.

[Justices]

Cheers! I will keep an eye open for that.

[ASK1974]

What cabling do you have installed to each TV point? Or have you the facility to install some new cables? If the former is limited and the latter impossible then you'll need to use some form or network delivery solution leveraging Wi-Fi. Three obvious products that spring to mind are Apple TV (as long as the content is formatted for iTunes), Western Digitals WDTV and Dune HD. All allow playback of stored media with a fairly user friendly UI. I have both Apple TV and WDTV and they both work well, WDTV has excellent format compatibility and for under £100 per TV it's a steal. Much better than using a smart telly.

Just make sure your media is installed on a suitable NAS with something like Twonky media installed.

The downside of this is you need a playback solution for each TV, if starting from scratch with the right cables I'd use a video distribution system to link all four TV's to one system, granted a bit more expensive but operationally much better and each TV is a simple, tidy installation.

EDIT: using seperate players for each telly will lack the facility for simultaneous playback, you'll definitely need a central system for that or maybe VEX knows something I don't. Not sure how you would coordinate playback via streaming solution.

Edited by ASK1974 on Thursday 18th July 07:11

[Bullett]

Assuming either wifi or some form of hardwired Ethernet connection (home plugs work). Also I assume by simultaneously you mean concurrent playback of files not synchronised, not sure of any device that will do that for video. Music is possible on something like Sonos or Squeezebox which is what I use for music playback.

I use XBMC on a RaspberryPi. I have multiple clients around the house all of which map to a single NAS containing all media (music/video/photos). I can have several streams running at the same time if I need to and as my NAS is actually a server I can stop playback on one device and resume on another, I needed a db on my server for this. It will also run I.player and other catch-up TV solutions plus loads of other plug ins to do pretty much anything a smart TV can do.

An Rpi is about £35 for everything you need. The software is freeware.

It's not plug and play though. You need to be a bit technical to install and configure it but it's not difficult. Loads of how to guides ont he internet.

Another alternative is Plex. This is a client server architecture and works in a similar manner to XBMC.

[mx5tom]

I'm just going through the same process of getting this set up, and I decided to go with Plex.

I've got a Plex Server running on an old Ubuntu computer, and I'm probably going to buy a RaspberryPi to connect the TV's. There are also Plex apps for most SmartTVs that would let you stream content to the TV without having to use something like a RPI.

As mentioned, it's free and the UI is great. I looked at XBMC and it's very similar to Plex (Plex is actually a fork of the XBMC project), but seemed a little less polished. I'd give it a go, I think it's great.