I am about to start building a new home, in which I would like to have a "video distribution" system, for distributing video and radio signal to each room. Can you please advise whether this is feasible and what type of hardware/wiring would be needed?
thanks
Hi Robert, thanks for your reply.
Are there any sites on the Internet that I could use to investigate these choices?
Depends on what you are calling 'video'....
Distributing modulate composite video and/or CATV and SAT is easy using a decent RF amplifier and RG6 coax to each room.
Distributing Component video to each room is much more costly and wire intensive.
Distributing radio to each room could be done with speaker wires from a centralized amplifier and radio source and impedance matching switch and/or volume controls, or you could use an ethernet backbone running cat5e/cat6 to each room and stream audio to network aware devices or PC's. You could also use your RG6 video backbone to distribute audio from modulated digital SAT music channels to all your TV speakers.
Lots of choices. Depends on what you want to spend and the flexibility/scalability that you want.
A few to get you started:
Ethernet.
Yes, that sounds simple. Too simple. But why not? Check out using a Media Center Edition computer, available now in several form-factors including that of an audio-video component. Record and transport radio, television, music, video, photographs from your main server which is simply a properly equipped PC. Send it at your leisure to other rooms through the use of either other MCE computers or MCE extenders, which are very affordable.
Content is gathered through whatever source you have or choose, and is archived onto the media center server. Extenders are available in several different packages, including Xbox consoles. Look for the technology soon to be incorporated into smaller packages, likely even embedded into displays such as plasma's. This can help reduce your costs, because now you don't have to have a tuner in the display as it's in the MC server.
HD can be recorded off-air right now, and look for future solutions to capture HD programming over cable and satellite.
PVR features, like Tivo but with NO monthly charges. Internet access is required for the free programming guides.
Watch this technology, these products. They are here now.
There is an author ("Affordable Home Theater" rings a bell as to the title of his book), who has a Web site with lots of details. As I am away from the office, and on my laptop, I do not have the URL bookmarked. Do a Google for the above title and variations. Seems that the book was only about US$25 @ Amazon, and the Web site had lots of ideas. I'll check, when back from vacation, and see if I can locate the URL for you.
Good luck with Google, Hunt
Cabling-Design.com Forums website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.