Central media options for new house extension

thatdarnguy

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Hi guys, hopefully this is the right place for this!

We're halfway through our house extension at the moment, and I'm starting to give thought to our options for centralising all of our home cinema, hifi, network, PC equipment etc. I'm fancying some cool gadgetry in all honesty, does anyone have some ideas for some options for a blank canvas?

We'll be extending one bedroom to make it the master, adding an en suite, creating a new bedroom for our baby daughter next to us, then downstairs we'll be knocking down the wall between our dining room and kitchen, and adding a sitting room on to make it a nice open plan space, then beside that we'll have a new study (mancave), playroom and utility room.

I'll be cabling up cat6 (shielded) around the house myself once the electrician has been in and made all the holes! Currently planning on 2 ports in sitting room by TV, 4 ports in study - 1 for each desk, 2 beside TV/consoles, then 1 port in the two bedrooms upstairs, and 1 port beside the router in hallway (as this is where our main phone line is). All of these cables will tie back to a patch panel probably in the cupboard in the study.

The sitting room open plan area will have two sofas and a TV on the wall, then behind that wall will be our new study, in which we'll have another TV back to back with the sitting room, I'd like to have all my game consoles, PS3, Wii, 360 etc. in the study, but also be able to use them in the sitting room and maybe even in the living room (which is located behind the dining room) - if such a thing would be possible! I'd also like to be able to watch Sky in our new bedroom and the other TVs, but not sure I want to bother with multiroom, so any bright ideas for what I could do here would be great!

I'd like to create a central media server for playing music through each room in the house too, creating separate zones, so I'm planning on running speaker cable in the walls for this too, I'm really not sure what my options are here. Ideally I'd like something that we can control and stream from our iPhones/iPads, but also from our PCs, as currently we have a wee central media server (HP Microserver) that I plan to use to store all of our media for streaming around the house.

Really any advice on any or all of the above would be greatly welcomed, I've seen heaps of different options and alot of off-the-shelf solutions but the majority of them break the bank, I don't mind a level of DIY for it all for both the IT stuff and the cabling to save myself some cash.

Thanks folks!
 
I am sure I can assist

First of all I wouldnt bother with shielded CAT6 for a domestic environment.

Also run at least 2 x Cat6's to each room , at the very least this will give you networking to the TV and the potential for distributing HDMI sources to each room as well.

To distribute your sky and possibly games consoles to a number of TVs around the house you will need a HDBaseT Matrix. A 4x4 (4 HDMI sources to 4 TVs in any combination) Matrix is £999+VAT

Budget 4x4 HDBaseT Matrix with 4 Receivers

If you just want to distribute Sky to a few rooms via Cat6 use a 4 Way HDBaseT splitter

HDBaseT 4 Way HDMI Splitter Over SIngle Cat5 6


Control4 is excellent but a bit pricey so you may want to look at Roomie App for ipad instead

If you want to stream from your media server to each TV will have to be a smart TV or have a media player attached.

For separate audio zones you can either use the TVS to play via their smart functions or if not you will need separate networkable amplifiers or networkable speakers.

A few choices

Sonos (probably the best choice)
Pure Jongo

It will all come down to budget but more than happy to help you DIY a solution with some help from us, just drop me a PM
 
Thanks for the reply guys! Having looked at the costs of these systems and devices, I've realised that I'm going to have to go bargain basement! The build itself is starting to drain our reserves with all the extras, so I think my plan for now will be to make sure the wiring infrastructure is there, then when the build is done, I can invest over time.

There are a few things I want to get up and running fairly quickly though; the main one is the zoned audio system. Sonos is far out of my reach unfortunately, so I'm currently looking at using plex server on my Microserver, and having either an airport express or one of these: AirMusic AirPlay WIFI DLNA Qplay Music Audio Radio Receiver For IOS & Android | eBay and mini amp for speakers in the rooms that won't have a full amp. This way I can use airplay (or DLNA) from all of our devices, sounds great on paper, not sure how it'll be in practice! I've heard that the Logitech media server app is a good alternative to plex for music too though?

For sharing hdmi, I think for now I'm going to just worry about the sitting room and study which will be back to back, and I think for now I'll just use a cheap 4x2 hdmi splitter matrix, any ideas on what to go for here? Would like it to be latest hdmi ver and 3d compatible.
 
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