Multi-room Home Entertainment Record and Playback Setup

[shmee150]

Hi,

We have for a while wanted to organize our home entertainment setup, and it is very complicated. We're in an old house so lying cables around would not only be very expenive but is diffficult to do.

We have tv sets in multiple rooms and are looking for whatever solutions we can find to provide the following functionality:

• Ability to record up to 2 channels at once onto a central system that can be watched from any room at any time
• Sky HD, if this can be connected up at all? Otherwise just in the main room.

We currently have individual sets, some with DVD recorders, some with hard drive recorders, but no service over freeview. We're anticipating putting Blu-Ray players in a number of places, but the key feature we're after is the ability to record freeview channels onto a 'server' somewhere.

So my question is mostly what retail systems can do this?

Can some sort of dedicated wireless network handle streaming properly? Slightly worried about signal strength, our standard broadband router strength is very weak to non existant at the extremes of the house.

Is the way to do it via a dedicated PC server? I know you could do something with Windows Media Centre of sorts.

As you can tell I don't know much about what's available to me, but am happy to take quite a few months coming up with the best solution and am open to solutions of all budgets.

Any advise about products that might help, or companies who could help would be very appreciated!

Thanks,

Tim

[turk3y]

if you want to share a digital tv tuner (sat or otherwise) i think you need to go linux, myth tv is quite clever, setting up sky on something like this would be difficult but not impossible (pretty sure as you can get it on a dreambox), Linux mce looks very advanced but probably is hugely picky about hardware, is an old video of what it can achieve.

otherwise its big money time i would imagine.

as for streaming I would say if worried go with the homeplug type things (wireless would struggle with hd), lan over the power wiring via 3 your regular power plug sockets, these can go up to 200mbs so should handle all your media, raw bluray rips might struggle here if using hd audio, not 100% but sky hd quality type stuff would be fine.