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View Full Version : Home theatre question (possibly show suggestion?)


jnmoriginpoint
01-16-2009, 04:35 PM
So, I just built an addition. To keep my options open I ran RG6 (coax) cable through the walls to each room, as well as cat5 and 14? gauge speaker wire. I have all the cat5 and speaker wire going to one central location that I assumed I'd put a media distribution hub. I also put the cat5 and speaker cable in a cutout in each room around shoulder height, that I could then place a touch pad on my walls to adjust the sound volume/media content to that room (should I ever win a lottery).

My question is this:

What is the best (economical) way to distribute sound and video to my rooms? I don't need to have it be HD (recognizing that HD doesn't stream on cat5 if I remember correctly) - I'm more thinking about getting sound into individual rooms, and video if it's easy.

Some thoughts I had:

- putting something like a Yamaha receiver that has network capabilities to pull off of a networked media source like a hard drive attached to a Asus WL-520GU Router (you can mod it to put the hard drive on its USB port). The receiver would ideally be multi-zoned. But what would decode the video on the hard drive and allow it to be distributed? Could the video on cat5 to each individual room this way?

Thks.

uteck
01-19-2009, 12:59 AM
You should check out Fiire http://fiire.com/. They have a great home theater system that is designed to follow you from room to room. And since it is based on Linux and MythTV, you can build your own boxes if you want to. Normally the follow-me feature uses a bluetooth device, but I am sure you could use the cutouts in place of that.

Too bad you did not put in Cat6 so you could get better gigabit performance. It will work on Cat5 but not a well as Cat6, but you can stream HD on Cat5. My HDHomerun only has a 100MB port and it streams HD channels fine. I think they are only 720 (not sure if i or p).

jnmoriginpoint
01-19-2009, 02:17 PM
I wound up using cat5e, which I gather has an extra turn per (?) length to reduce emi. The Fiire is an interesting device. Do you have one myth box streaming around to the individual Fiire Invisibles?