Wiring my house to an HTPC

[driver66]

Hey guy's not sure if this is the correct place but here it is

What i am trying to do is set up an Htpc to run say 3 different tv's throughout the house and use it as a DVR also.
I know there will be alot of wiring and such involved but how would I best get everything hooked up to get what I'm looking for?

Say how would my television interact with my pc's etc... Budget is not much of a concern so much, but not going to spend a years salary if you know what I mean

The house already has a home theater system with volume control in every room, phone is wired through,doorbell, caller I.D. shows up on the T.V.'s etc....

Thanks for the help guy's this is my winter project :shadedshu Maybe even a work log?

 

[TheLaughingMan]

Does your current system have any of the following.

DVR features, external HDD option, Ethernet port, or WiFi?

 

[driver66]

It is being built from the ground up so to speak, The HTPC that is. The house has cat5 and Wifi throughout.

 

[TheLaughingMan]

Oh ok. The simple way to do this would be to build 1 HTPC for the center room. It will act as the DVR and storage system.

Specs: Not much power is needed to you just need a good quality mobo, decent dual core CPU, 2 GB RAM, and either a low end GPU (not the new Nvidia GT 100s, they suck) or an one of the better IGP's (ATI 4200/785G or Nvidia 9300 or 9400).

Then you can just buy 2 of these: WD HD Media Players

This is simply to setup, works wirelessly, and works well. I am not sure of the full feature list of options for those as I have only seen it work in a demo for 15 to 20 minutes. I think you can set it to DVR shows and save to an external HDD connect to the WD units, but I am not so sure about saving to another computer entirely.

There are other methods to achieve what you want as well, but I thought I would start with the easiest solution.

 

[driver66]

Thank you bro i will look into those for a minute

No I'm not necessarily looking for the easy way out at all ..... The more complicated the better right? Shoot me your ideas

 

[smashed_99cbr]

snapstream.com

lumenlab.com

 

[TheLaughingMan]

Build HTPC's for each TV. Make the primary one larger so you can add more storage to it, as it will act as a central hub. The two extras will be cheaper to build, but should have some local storage.

You can use either Windows 7 (simple, easy, decent features), or you can use Linux MythTV.

MythTV is more complex to setup, but you can do anything you would like with it including saving video's recorded to any other computer location, backups, time recordings, sharing with any other device on network, etc. This way, they are your DVR's you built, with your software, so they will do what you want them to do. You can wire them, or wireless of any standard as these are custom computers.

http://www.mythtv.org/

 

[ShRoOmAlIsTiC]

instead of building some, buy a couple of these and build one good one with lots of storage
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883103228

I just ordered mine today to go with a 3tb htpc and I just finished up my gigabit network. I dont have attic space so I had to dig a trench around my house to run the cat5e.