media center pc

[drwoo123]

So after a long time I decided to ditch my laptop and build myself a new desktop. Budget isn't much of a concern so it can go anywhere from 1-2K.

Problem is as follows, I have a room in the house where my PC will live. My television (s) are in other rooms. I wanted to use my PC instead of paying monthly for a Tivo. Since I did a lot of home construction recently all the rooms are wired with multiple ethernet, cable (coax), and phone / fax jacks that all come to a wiring closet in the same room as the pc.

Is there a way to use this PC with all the different tv's or am I SOL. What would the user experience look like. Would I need special remotes / hardware / software.


Many thanks in advance.

 

[erwos]

You may want to look into using Windows Media Center and Windows Media Extenders. Or you could do the SageTV equivalent. I do the former, and I find it works quite nicely.

 

[drwoo123]

how does sage tv stack up against WMC?

 

[Modelworks]

Are you wanting to do HDTV ? Or just SD to the other tv's ?

 

[drwoo123]

it will be a mixture of HD and SD to the other tvs. I have an older tv that is SD, and the 3 newer ones that support 1080p

 

[Modelworks]

Originally posted by: drwoo123
it will be a mixture of HD and SD to the other tvs. I have an older tv that is SD, and the 3 newer ones that support 1080p

That complicates things a bit.
Probably best to go with WMC.
Here is one such device.
You would need one for each tv though.
http://www.bestbuy.com/site/ol...77231388#productdetail

It does take away all the hard work though.
Just put one box on each tv, run media center on the pc and you get a remote for each box.

 

[drwoo123]

if i decided to ditch SD and stick only to HD would that make matter easier

 

[Modelworks]

Nope
The HD is the problem.
It takes more bandwidth and it requires connections that are harder to do since you need component or hdmi outputs for each tv.
Some HD content is also copy protected so that complicates it even more.

http://www.sagetv.com/hd_extender.html
Has that for 199.00 , one for each tv.
Thats about as cheap as distributing hdtv gets.



If it was all SD content it would be really simple.
take the ouput of the pc, input into a rf modulator, then distribute over the houses coax to every tv in the house. Purchase a single uhf based remote and you could control it anywhere in the house.

Cost probably under 100.00

 

[erwos]

If you want to do CableCard (which is the only real way of getting encrypted QAM channels - aka, non-OTA digital channels), you're going to have to go with Windows Vista Media Center and a pre-built machine, like an XPS 420, since CableCard requires OEM certification (and there are no hacks around it). You can, however, use extenders. SageTV is not an option in this scenario.

As someone else mentioned, if you're going to be distributing HD content around the house, a gigabit network should be high on your list of priorities.