Distributing TV around the house: Options?

[ColinYounger]

I have the opportunity in the mid term to rearrange 'media' in the house and would like to know your experiences and hear your advice.

I have multiple inputs (sources) and many outputs (TVs). My perfect world would be to be able to watch\hear anything, anywhere.

Obviously I need to give a picture of the kind of sources. So, I have a TiVo, Cable and Freeview box as input - with DVD and audio as well (but they're not important in the grand scheme of things). I have a spare TiVo that I can bring online. The cable may be upgraded to V+ depending on what can be done.

I'd like to have both TiVos, freeview and cable outputs distributed around the house.

Tell me what you've done.

[RichardJH]

I distribute around the house an RF signal via co-ax to all rooms. By carefully choosing the correct modulated RF channel put out by each bit of equipment so as to eliminate ghosting and cross channel interference (bl***y French !! :D :D :D ) we get in any room Channels 1 to 5 plus the outputs from

2 Tivos
V+ Box
Pace Cable box
VCR
DVD recorder
Freeview box.

I do have a wireless sender but because of interfernce I only use the IR remote feature to give me control from upstairs of the 2 Tivos and the DVD recorder.

To cut down on the number of remotes needed I have 2 Harmony 655 remotes 1 in living room and 1 upstairs. The only other remote needed is the V+ remote.

BTW if you keep both V+ and standard cable STB in the same room you will need to cover the standard box IR window so that it will only recieve IR commands from the Tivo IR wand.

The V+ remote would otherwise send commands to the standard STB.

Hope this makes some sense.

[mikerr]

My setup: 3 tivos, 2 downstairs and 1 upstairs.
5 tv's dotted around (and also use PC as a tv)

CURRENT SETUP:

The tivo's are networked, then a chipped xbox1 can stream from any one of them(as well as from a pc. I use that for watching downstairs tivos(1,2) when I'm upstairs(3).

I also have the output of the upstairs tivo(3) routed through the house's arial (rf) cable,
with a tvlink eye + tvlinkplus to transmit the remote control signals. I have a few tvlink eyes, so that tivo can be watched on any tv(1,2,3).

So basically I can watch and control upstairs tivo(3) from any tv in the house, via tv-eye.

FUTURE:

I *think* if I did the folowing I should be able to watch any tivo from any tv:

1. Pair each tivo controller to its tivo
- I've avoided doing this so far, as it would mean they weren't easily interchangeable
2. have one tvlinkplus per tivo (£30 each)
3. have one tv-eye per tv
4. have all the tivos at the start of the aerial "chain"

Would that actually work? The only stumbling block would be
a) I'm not sure if multiple tvlinkpluses can be used at all - I only use one at the moment.

b) picture quality - rf is ok for the smaller TVs but the big LCD needs scart.
so the tivos would have to all be located near the big screen.

..or buy one chipped xbox per tv ;)

Wireless doesn't work well at all in this house... thick walls.

[RichardJH]

1. Pair each tivo controller to its tivo
- I've avoided doing this so far, as it would mean they weren't easily interchangeable

Before I was using the Harmony remotes I had 4 Tivo remotes 2 up and 2 downstairs set up for the 2 Tivos.

SWMBO was not best pleased when while she was watching something upstairs I grabbed the wrong remote downstairs and whilst wondering why my remote wasn't operating what I was watching I could hear an angry voice upstairs.

[TCM2007]

My solution is a tad complicated.

At the core is a PC running Media Center 2005 with twin Freeview tuners. this handles 95% of the TV. It's attached directly to one TV and via XBox 360 extenders to the others.

Sky is connected to TiVo. An old HP PC running Windows 2000 acts an eTivo server, copying everything from the TiVo, re-encoding it to high quality WMV files and copying them to the MCE server, which uses the Saved TV plug in to make them available through the MCE interface.

Video from the internet is available using Transcode 360.

MCE has my CD collection on it, and I'm starting to put DVDs on using My Movies as the kids keep breaking them.

[cleudo]

If I could afford it, I'd have embedded SDI run everywhere from a 32x32 SDI matrix. Soon as I win the lottery, that's what's going in!

[Raisltin Majere]

If I could afford it, I'd have embedded SDI run everywhere from a 32x32 SDI matrix. Soon as I win the lottery, that's what's going in!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative :eek:

[benallenuk]

in comparison i have quite a modest setup. Just the one tivo, one Cable STB and three TV’s, all fed by RF, oh not forgetting my Sling box sending tivo to my other tv in my other house.

The interesting part of my setup is the wired IR senders that work 100% and seem to pickup the tivo remote from the other side of the house.

Link here:

http://www.circuit-innovations.co.uk/repeater.html (http://)

[RichardJH]

the URL you gave was bad

But this worked http://www.circuit-innovations.co.uk/repeater.html

[RWILTS]

Am i reading the last right? You need to run a wire from the receiver to the emitter?

[benallenuk]

yh. or you could go for the more costly IR over RF. But this worked well for me

[mikerr]

Costly? it probably works out cheaper:
£30 for the reciever and sender together
http://www.satcure.co.uk/accs/page3.htm#tvlink-plus

[benallenuk]

I did look at that but £29.95 then plus £8.95 for a amplifier Bypass Kit tipped it over the edge. Im not scared of a soldering Iron, so perfer to have some input in my gadgets. I could get 3 kits for £38.85, find some old 12volt adapter off some discarded tech and then either go buy some el-cheapo bell wire, so chaw some from my junk draw, and posh boxes are for people who dont like wires.

I also like this solution as you can place the Emitter where you want, ie, if i used the RF system, you would have to place the RF IR emitter where the RF coax ended up, where I can run a separate cable and place my emitter in the corner of the cealing and cover a whole room, usefull for IR lightswitches, IR curtain pulls,
HIFI's etc etc. Also you can add another IR emitter and place in another room, which I plan to do soom as I have a V+ box comming. That'll cost me £0.90.

I suppose if you wanted an easy setup and non-unversal off the shelf system then the RF system is a good choice.

RANT OVER....lol

[itm]

Has anyone tried the Homeplug AV equipment? (A/V distribution over the mains power network).

[Restorer]

I am very pleased with my Btech Quintro (about £70). Deals with 5 scart inputs (or 4 scart + 1 svideo or phono) and has 3 outputs - one scart to main TV, phono leads to 2 other TV's - PQ very much better than the RF I used to use.

[RichardJH]

I am very pleased with my Btech Quintro

A very good bit of kit. I use it because my TV has only 1 RGB enabled input so by putting everything through the Quintro alows me to watch an RGB signal and record on the DVD recorder anything in RGB as well.

You can use the RCA output TV1/TV2 to attach an AV sender to

[Restorer]

I am very pleased with my Btech Quintro (about £70). Deals with 5 scart inputs (or 4 scart + 1 svideo or phono) and has 3 outputs - one scart to main TV, phono leads to 2 other TV's - PQ very much better than the RF I used to use.

Oh yeah and forgot to mention I use the Powermid IR Extender (about £25) so all input devices (incl Tivo) can be controlled from the other rooms.

[iankb]

At the core is a PC running Media Center 2005 with twin Freeview tuners. this handles 95% of the TV. It's attached directly to one TV and via XBox 360 extenders to the others.

Sky is connected to TiVo ...I have a similar setup, 'though I haven't tried linking my TiVo recordings into MCE (yet).

I was using video senders with my TiVo, but the signal quality gets worse as more neighbours discover the joys of Wi-Fi.

MCE extenders have the advantage over video senders in that you can watch different programmes, or listen to different music, in different rooms. However, you do need to watch the network bandwidth if you don't have hardwired networks.

I use Devolo 85Mbps Homeplugs to connect one Xbox extender, and a Wi-Fi network to connect the other. When both were on the same Homeplug network, the menu response on the Xboxes slowed to a crawl. Part of the problem may have been that one Homeplug connection operated at the full 85Mbps, but the other only operated at 25-30Mpbs. The odd thing was that the first (fast) one connected devices on different floors, but the second (slow) one connected devices on the same floor. It seems like my ring mains may not be the standard one per floor. Also I found that they would lose over 25% performance if passing through surge suppressors.

If using Homeplug, don't even think of getting 16Mbps devices. If considering HD distribution, the new 200Mpbs devices will probably be required. The potential for distribution of HD is another reason for using MCE extenders.