Distributing TV through the house?

S

scbesterman

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 13, 2009
Messages
175
Hi Folks

Would love your help and guidance on figuring out the best way to distribute TV throughout the house.

Objective:
- Complete back-end/client network.
- Ability to record 1 channel while watching another on each TV in the house (or record 2 channels while watching a movie from the central library).

Here's my situation:
Two story, single-family home. There are TV's in the basement, office (also in basement), family room (ground floor) and each of 4 bedrooms (2nd floor). The TV's in the basement and family room are connected to htpcs. In the office, there are 2 pc's which should have the ability to be used as TV's. There are pc's in each of the 4 bedrooms on the second floor so plan to use their monitors as TV's. The pc's are running a mix of Vista Home Premium (w/TVPack installed) and XP Pro. Using Media Center as the GUI for all those running Vista.

Right now the only htpc/TV combo with an actual STB is the one in the family room. All other pc's/TV's are connected to the straight cable (so pick up only the unprotected/basic channels which are starting to disappear). My main pc in the basement office and the family room htpc have hauppauge 2250 dual tuners (so the family room htpc/plasma gets all the STB channels plus 2 available sets of unprotected/basic cable). The family room setup also includes a haupp HD-PVR. Am currently using my main (office) pc as the home server. With time and $ will build a separate server.

The house has cable/coax outlets in every room. A couple of weeks ago had the entire house wired with Cat6 (single outlet per room). All Cat6 runs are connected to a Netgear Gb switch (GS116). All wiring (cable and Cat6) come through an unfinished area in the basement so everything's out of sight. Plan to add a roof-mount antenna as, in my area, that should provide 30-40 OTA channels, many of which are HD.

OK...so...here's my current thought.
- Pay for an additional STB. Then there will be STB's connected to the htpcs in the basement and family room.
- Run the antenna lead from the roof to the basement area.
- Amplify and split the antenna lead. Run one lead directly to the basement htpc.
- Add more tuners to the primary office pc (which is currently acting as the home server) and run antenna leads to all available tuners. May add 1-2 HDHomerun's...if so, then run antenna leads to those, too.
- Run SageTV Server on the primary office pc (best support for central multi-tuner and distribution at the moment?).
- Run SageTV Client on all other pc's in the house (except for the basement one which has it's own antenna lead and STB).

Issues with above option:
- Requires purchase of SageTV Server and Clients.
- Will not integrate with Media Center for those clients running Vista Home Premium.
- Possible inability to smoothly watch TV on all clients (?).

Another route might be as follows:
- Disconnect all non-STB setups from the coax splitter installed in the basement by the cable company.
- After splitting the roof-mounted antenna lead, connect all those coax ends above to the antenna splitter.

Issues:
- No access to the unscrambled/basic cable for all TV's other than basement and family room.
- Need to add TV tuners to any pc's which don't already have one.

Another option would be to simply buy 1 HDHomerun for each pc and plug them all in to the split antenna leads in the basement.

Am I making all this WAY too complicated? From what I've read and played with it appears that Vista simply hates sharing tuners from a central point. Although Ultimate can support up to something like 10 tuners, I haven't seen a way to distribute/share those tuners across the network so they integrate with Media Center on the clients. Would Windows Home Server be a better choice for the back-end? If anyone has links, knowledge in this area, it'd be much appreciated.

Net, net....am very excited and yet a little frustrated atm. Any ideas, thoughts, guidance would be very, very much appreciated.

tia!!!
-Stefan
 
Your frustration comes from a lack of knowledge; VMC simply can't work like that. You need to use SageTV and go WHS which is actually better. HDHomeRuns and a couple of Sage Extenders is what you need.
 
Thanks for the feedback CrimandEvil!

Tried to study up and you're probably right about my lack of knowledge but am not entirely sure about your blanket comment that "VMC simply can't work like that", though. Have read about people using HD HomeRuns on VMC without problems. If I wanted to keep using VMC on the Vista clients...wouldn't the 'get one HD HomeRun per client' route work? Also...unless I've missed something (which, of course, is entirely possible),VMC shouldn't have any issues if I went with any option where each pc has its own dedicated tuner card and antenna connection.

Did read that the best back-end o/s is WHS so would look to that when I actually get a dedicated server up and running. However, have also read that WHS and VMC don't play nicely together.

With so many pc's throughout the house am not sure why I'd need to go out and buy Sage Extenders, too. Also...my limited understanding of SageTV Server is that it's designed to handle multiple, central tuners and distribute/share those signals across a network where the clients run SageTV....did not think that would only work with the use of Sage Extenders.

Appreciate your feedback CrimandEvil...just trying to figure out what all the options are then work to figure out the best given my network and hardware. It's kind of funny to me that with so many articles around the net about going the heavy back-end running WHS loaded with tuners combined with thinner clients route that I've not really found much on how to configure everything and get it all running.

Thanks again (in advance) to you and others for thoughts, other options, urls, etc.

-Stefan
 
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Why don't you get a Media Center Extender for each room and have one central server/MCE for recordings and tuners?
 
hiya danman

I've already got a house full of pc's and plan to use the monitors on a number of those for watching TV so not sure why I'd need/use extenders.

Also...yes...would love to have one central server/MCE for recordings and tuners but haven't found a way to get the signals from all those central tuners recognized/used by VMC in all the clients. Would you have a url or something that covers that kind of setup?

Thanks!
-Stefan
 
check out media portal. Its tv server can do that and there is a way for you to have all computers point to the same DB for data so you dont have to configure media on each machinne. I haven't messed around too much with its tv server but from all the reading I have done it was intended for the server/client setup.
 
Because that's the only way MS wants/will let you use Media Center when it comes to a client/server setup.

The easiest way to do this is to setup a WHS system and plug all tuners into it and let it do all the recording while also holding all your media and streaming all LiveTV through your home network to whatever system is requesting it. It's simple. It's elegant and it's practical for your kind of situation.

MS doesn't want this. They want you to buy an OEM PC and Media Center Extenders (which are quietly dying off, BTW. MS is the only making them now, they call it a "360").

scbesterman said:
hiya danman

I've already got a house full of pc's and plan to use the monitors on a number of those for watching TV so not sure why I'd need/use extenders.

Also...yes...would love to have one central server/MCE for recordings and tuners but haven't found a way to get the signals from all those central tuners recognized/used by VMC in all the clients. Would you have a url or something that covers that kind of setup?

Thanks!
-Stefan
Click to expand...

SageTV would work like this: You built a WHS and buy SageTV Server. Load it onto your WHS box and add a few PCI/PCIe tuners to it. You can do this part several ways too, load up the WHS box with three or four tuners and then build a few inexpensive HTPCs for through out the house and add a tuner into them. SageServer will use the tuners in the WHS box AND also the tuners in each HTPC system to do all of it's recording. Add a few HDHomeRuns and you can easily cover all your TV viewing needs.

Anyways, this approach centralises everything to the WHS box. For best performances you want a system or extender dedicated to each TV. Any PC will be able to go to the WHS and watch any of the recorded TV shows, I use Media Player Classic Home Cinema, don't bother using the garbage that is VLC.
 
quique55 said:
check out media portal. Its tv server can do that and there is a way for you to have all computers point to the same DB for data so you dont have to configure media on each machinne. I haven't messed around too much with its tv server but from all the reading I have done it was intended for the server/client setup.
Click to expand...
I've tried to use Media Portal for TV, it was a major bitch just to get my 650 Pro tuner working with Media Portal. Setting up TV Server just wasn't worth it at that point when both VMC and SageTV worked so much better. Get a couple of Sage Client or even the full SageTV app and let Media Portal launch it was just easier.
 
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