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My entertainment system is getting a bit ridiculous!


Scott

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In no way do I imagine that I have the stupidest amount of tech on this forum, so I can't begin to think what some of you guys have. I'm just planning out a bit of sprucing up and tidying and some of the things I've had to get are just bordering on insane.

 

My entertainment system consists of the following:

 

Big ass TV (TOTR & Modern with lots of toys)

AV Receiver (Modern-ish with network access, etc)

Virgin Tivo Box

*Free* View box

X7 Ultimate Droidbox

PS4

Wii U

 

Now, that might not sound like a lot (it isn't really) but all of those need power and internet access. Add into that the fact that we have a lamp plugged in also and the Wii U needs 2 plugs (one for the controller) we effectively NEED 9 power points. I could plug and unplug stuff as I need to but I'm just not that kinda guy. I like to get everything wired away neatly and ready to use as it stands. To that end I've ordered a 12 way tower plug with surge protection. Handily it has a couple of USB plugs on it too so I'm sure I'll make use of them also.

 

The next thing I looked at was standardising all of my HDMI cables. I needed 6 in total. I didn't want to buy REALLY cheap cables so they alone have ran me £6 ea. All of them are slimline and long enough that I can hide them away in the cable tidy on my unit.

 

Wifi signals are a little unreliable for what I tend to use my kit for (streaming reasonably high quality video). To that end I was fed up connecting everything in the unit to my router via wifi. I have 2 hardlines at the back of my unit that I use for my AV receiver (no Wifi) and split between my PS4 and *Free*view box. The PS4 has Wifi but it's just not good enough for me, I use it for remote play and the downloads for it are HUGE. I wasn't left with any option here, so I've ordered an 8 port switch. That'll add another plug to my ever increasing power supply.

 

With the 8 port switch, Gigabit for speed, I ordered up some LAN cables to go with it. I want them all the same so I bought 7 black, slim cables. Thankfully they were cheap at £1 ea :D

 

My main PC which I use for streaming has 5HDDs in it. I have a LOT of photos, videos and other bits and bobs on there that are irreplaceable. I've been looking at the larger HDDs for a while now and I decided to take the hit and go for a 5TB one. At the same time I decided on an SSD HDD to replace my Hybrid drive that's already in there (Hybrid drives suck BTW).

 

The plan is to have the following:

 

Drive 1 - OS (SSD) 240gb

Drive 2 - Program Installs & all my techy stuff 1TB

Drive 3 - All Media (Music, Movies, TV Shows, Family stuff, etc) 5TB drive

Drive 4 - Downloads 1TB

Drive 5 - Backup of family stuff 2TB

Drive 6 - DVD-RW

 

At the moment I'm using just over 4TB across all drives so I may even partition the 5TB for the program installs. Most of that stuff could be replaced fairly easily, although it would take a LOT of time. I guess for now there's no harm in keeping the drives and backing up what I can.

 

I'm really not looking forward to transferring all that stuff lol.

 

If I go ahead with the above I'll actually have a spare LAN port available. I might get a really long LAN cable so that I can put access in the garage. As good as my wireless router is, it's not good enough to hit the garage which is a fair distance from the house.

 

My hardline network consists of the following:

 

Virgin Super Hub (Super crap at routing) in modem mode.

Asus RT-N66U Router

Port1 - Hard line to Upstairs Router

Port2 - Hard line to Media PC

Port3 & 4 - Hard line to PS4 & AV Receiver

Linksys WRT610 Router (Used as a bridge)

Port1 - Hard line from Downstairs Router

Port2 - Xbox 360

Port3 - Playstation TV

Port4 - WD Play TV

 

Plans are:

 

Virgin Super Hub (Super crap at routing) in modem mode.

Asus RT-N66U Router:

Port1 - Hard line to Upstairs Router

Port2 - Hard line to Media PC

Port3 - Hard line to 8 port Switch

Port4 - Hard line to garage

8 Port Switch:

Port1 - From Router

Port2 - AV Receiver

Port3 - TV

Port4 - Freeview Box

Port5 - Tivo

Port6 - PS4

Port7 - Droidbox

Port8 - WiiU

Linksys WRT610 Router (Used as a bridge)

Port1 - Hard line from Downstairs Router

Port2 - Xbox 360/TV

Port3 - Playstation TV

Port4 - WD Play TV

 

 

That's gonna be a whole load of cable :D

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I currently have 12 power sockets in use behind the TV. :D

 

TV, Wii U (+controller charger), PS3 (getting rid of it though), PS4 (+controller charger), Freeview box, aerial signal booster, wireless modem/Router, USB harddisk, Raspberry Pi, 4 port switch.

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Oh I love threads like these :D My house move is just going through and I've literally just bought everything I need to redo the whole setup.

 

Satellite

1.2m dish

4x quatro LNB's - pointing at 9.0E, 13.0E, 19.2E, 21.2E (am aware of no Sky, think about the DVB-C card).

1x Hi-Gain DVT Aerial

17x8 DiSeQC Multiswitch (4 outputs from each of the 4 LNB's, and a single DVBT feed), located in Garage.

 

Server

i7, 32Gb RAM

1x Quad DVB-T2 Receiver

3x Quad DVB-S2 Receiver

1x Quad DVB-C Receiver (this is where we get our $ky from).

2x 1Gbit NIC's

 

Software

Windows Server 2008

NextPVR

WebGrabGuide XMLTV

 

Storage

QNAP TS 569 Pro

5x 6Tb Disks

RAID 6

 

Network

All house is hardwired, Cat 6a cable.

Main Living room - 4 ports

Other Living room - 4 ports

Kitchen - 1 port

Conservatory - 1 AV1200 Power Adapter

Master Bedroom - 4 ports

Bedrooms 2 & 3 - 1 port

Bedroom 4/Office - 8 ports

Garage is point zero. 19U Rack, 48 port PoE Rack; 48 port patch panel; Asus AC87U running DD-WRT

 

Each room has a TV, Raspberry Pi 2 running OpenElec 5.0.8 (currently), sync'd to MySQL, running NextPVR Live TV.

 

Once the house is all done and decorated, I'll do a full write up.

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I used to have loads of stuff downstairs, mainly old consoles and stuff but I had a big tidy up and just have a PC for gaming with a 360 controller, a 360 console that never gets used and a modded xbox classic which along with the PC takes care of all my emulation needs replacing the snes, master system, Saturn and everything else I had plugged in, so much neater.

 

I might get a newer console at some point but if I do it will probably be a WiiU, the 360 and PS4 are nice but with a PC you pretty much get everything anyway and cheaper so when they drop a chunk I will look into it.

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I'd love to have hardwired network ports in each room, likewise the 19U rack in the garage! :thumbs:

It's only really viable if you're incredibly handy, or are just moving into a new place. Luckily for me, it's the latter and I've got a mate who's a spark. Otherwise I'd be using powerline adapters everywhere :D

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I was using OpenElec on a Raspberry Pi for media streaming stuff too, but got sick of the performance (don't have a Pi2 yet!). I'm now using the Plex app on the PS4 which works great.

 

The Pi is now a home front end server which monitors everything else on the home network, so I can see when my wife gets in and sticks the TV on etc. :D

 

We also have an old android phone on a mini tripod mount on top of the fridge in the kitchen which we can keep an eye on our dog when we're not in. The Pi monitors the audio feed from that for loud noises, so if he barks at something in the garden for example, it'll log that and record a mini video clip.

 

It's also logging temperature in the living room, and I'm going to be setting up a new energy monitor (probably http://openenergymonitor.org/emon/) which the Pi will log, and I'm also looking at getting a couple of external IP cameras looking at the garden and drive/garage.

 

Poor little Pi is already overstressed though, so need something else to replace it. Might go Minnowboard max (http://www.minnowboard.org/meet-minnowboard-max/), or just buy a HP Microserver.

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An early screenshot of a front end on my Pi, I'm still tinkering and adding stuff...

 

 

[ATTACH=CONFIG]199983[/ATTACH]

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

These HP Micro servers are a bargain at the moment with the cash back offer :-

 

http://www.ebuyer.com/517760-hp-proliant-gen8-g1610t-microserver-712317-421

 

Yeah they frequently do cash back deals on them, great bargain little things.

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Yeah they frequently do cash back deals on them, great bargain little things.

 

They can also run ESXi which is a bonus, plus you have an internal bay so could run the Hypervisor or OS on that and then keep the four other bays just for storage.

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They can also run ESXi which is a bonus, plus you have an internal bay so could run the Hypervisor or OS on that and then keep the four other bays just for storage.

 

Yeah that's the other thing, currently have a USB hard disk connected up to the back of the router which shares that out on to the network, but it's not very big, used mainly by the Pi to store stuff. All the movies are streamed from my main PC. It would be nice to not have the main PC on all the time so fill the microserver with disks (think it'll take 4?) and stream all the movies off that too.

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Always good to know you're a mid-level nutter :D

 

I was actually looking at a raspberry pi to make a total control brewer/boiler. I doubt I would have the time to figure it out though, nevermind actually implement it.

 

Johnny, with regards to using the pi2 in the bedrooms, when you use the PVR function, does that mean it records to the server storage? Will that not take a helluva lot of bandwidth if multiple recordings are going on at any one time? Will 2 NICs be enough?

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Yeah that's the other thing, currently have a USB hard disk connected up to the back of the router which shares that out on to the network, but it's not very big, used mainly by the Pi to store stuff. All the movies are streamed from my main PC. It would be nice to not have the main PC on all the time so fill the microserver with disks (think it'll take 4?) and stream all the movies off that too.

 

Indeed, could run Plex server on top of centos minimal, would have enough power to transcode HD if needed too, if you run SMB and create a media share it would be far easier to copy over your media and then just run an update from the Plex admin pages ;)

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Johnny, with regards to using the pi2 in the bedrooms, when you use the PVR function, does that mean it records to the server storage? Will that not take a helluva lot of bandwidth if multiple recordings are going on at any one time? Will 2 NICs be enough?

If you use the Live TV function, it doesn't store anything until you enable Timeshift. The default recording directory is a 1Tb disk inside the IPTV Server, not the QNAP. I have a post-recording batch file which pipes the program off to Handbrake and converts the .TS file to an .MP4 suitable for iPad (it also converts the .TS to an MKV and then deletes the source recording).

 

Because of the latest technologies (read: encryption), all of my non-FTA Satellite content is HD. Only my DVB-C stuff is HD. The SD

 

In it's current guise, though, the picture is still very good for SD.

 

At a glance, I'm seeing ~

12.5Mbit on Sky Sports F1 HD through DVB-C

3.3Mbit on Sky Sports F1 (SD) through DVB-S

2.1Mbit on Sky News (SD) through DVB-T

 

I've attempted to record 3 simultaneous HD streams, it seemed OK. I'll press it more once the work is all done, though.

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Indeed, could run Plex server on top of centos minimal, would have enough power to transcode HD if needed too, if you run SMB and create a media share it would be far easier to copy over your media and then just run an update from the Plex admin pages ;)

 

Yeah that would be the idea... I'm more of a Debian guy though. ;)

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Can't believe you've gone for a wired network, just the thought of all those cables would give me panic attacks!

 

Wired is FAR better than wireless.

 

Don't get me wrong, I have 2 wireless networks in my house and I will soon have 3. They're great for browsing around and general day to day stuff, but for full HD streaming to multiple clients WHILE browsing around and doing day to day stuff.... wireless just doesn't cut it.

 

Especially if the Mrs wants to use the Microwave at the same time :D

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