Advice, house multimedia.
Discussion
Hopefully some experts maybe able to help.
Moving house soon and want to think about ensuring i have the right idea about mulitmedia setup.
Have 4 kids/our bedrooms, 1 "family" room and living room all to have TV's either wall mounted or free-standing.
What i want is to enable to have the bedrooms and living room to have computer access for streaming movies etc and internet browsing. Ideally the kids in each bedroom could actually have normal computer access.
Now im guessing this can be done using a central NAS server sending everything to each room via CAT5 cabling? Im discounting Wifi initially due to bandwith problems if everyone is on it but i will have Wifi available.
Is this feasible as im trying to not have 4 laptops in the house but have the same facility via TV's and some method of keyboard/mouse.
I will have Sky but this will be only in the living room and family home via multiroom so that will be taken care of.
So is the above or part of it feasible.
Moving house soon and want to think about ensuring i have the right idea about mulitmedia setup.
Have 4 kids/our bedrooms, 1 "family" room and living room all to have TV's either wall mounted or free-standing.
What i want is to enable to have the bedrooms and living room to have computer access for streaming movies etc and internet browsing. Ideally the kids in each bedroom could actually have normal computer access.
Now im guessing this can be done using a central NAS server sending everything to each room via CAT5 cabling? Im discounting Wifi initially due to bandwith problems if everyone is on it but i will have Wifi available.
Is this feasible as im trying to not have 4 laptops in the house but have the same facility via TV's and some method of keyboard/mouse.
I will have Sky but this will be only in the living room and family home via multiroom so that will be taken care of.
So is the above or part of it feasible.
I use this on my main display, you can fasten it to the back of the TV if space permits, I think they would be ideal in kids rooms, load it up with XBMC and they will have all the movies they want.
The one I have only has a cheap celleron processor in it but it does everything I need, it has windows 7 on it and is a fully fledged PC. Cost was about £240 all in (not including W7)
Put a NAS somewhere with a couple of 3 or 4TB hard drives in, network everything together and the whole house has access to a file server from their PC equipment.
The one I have only has a cheap celleron processor in it but it does everything I need, it has windows 7 on it and is a fully fledged PC. Cost was about £240 all in (not including W7)
Put a NAS somewhere with a couple of 3 or 4TB hard drives in, network everything together and the whole house has access to a file server from their PC equipment.
Quite a lot to consider here but the main two are streaming multimedia and using a TV to browse the Internet. The former is quite easy, as you note a NAS can be used to stream movies to a Smart TV but for various reasons I'd use a seperate media player like Roku or WDTV as they're faster and offer a better user experience. Both are less than £100 so one per TV is not all that bad. Of course Apple TV is the other obvious choice if you've already bought into the Apple sphere.
Browsing the Internet is a different matter and the only real option is to have some form of PC connected to each TV, everything else is either very expensive, unreliable or unusable.
Browsing the Internet is a different matter and the only real option is to have some form of PC connected to each TV, everything else is either very expensive, unreliable or unusable.
NH1 said:
I use this on my main display, you can fasten it to the back of the TV if space permits, I think they would be ideal in kids rooms, load it up with XBMC and they will have all the movies they want.
The one I have only has a cheap celleron processor in it but it does everything I need, it has windows 7 on it and is a fully fledged PC. Cost was about £240 all in (not including W7)
Put a NAS somewhere with a couple of 3 or 4TB hard drives in, network everything together and the whole house has access to a file server from their PC equipment.
Sorry, forgot the linkThe one I have only has a cheap celleron processor in it but it does everything I need, it has windows 7 on it and is a fully fledged PC. Cost was about £240 all in (not including W7)
Put a NAS somewhere with a couple of 3 or 4TB hard drives in, network everything together and the whole house has access to a file server from their PC equipment.
http://www.pistonheads.com/gassing/topic.asp?h=0&a...
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