i need a real genius to solve this setup problem...try it!

[simisimisimi]

hey guys,

i have the following problem (look at the picture of my appartement below):

1) i have a cable-tv socket in my bedroom (the only one around)
2) my pc running sagetv is in my bedroom
3) in the next room, i want to build a home theatre where i want to use sagetv for watching/recording tv, watching videos
4) i want to use my pc for office applications in my bedroom, too
5) there is a hole in the wall between my bedroom and the home theatre room, to let cables go through
6) sometimes, i might be working on office applications and my girlfriend wants to watch tv in the next room (not necessarly with sagetv)
7) i have an old pc around somewhere

how would you solve this problem? what could the announced sagetv extender do? what could the sagetv client do? is there a way to let the tv signal go through the pc, so i can work on office apps and my girlfriend could watch tv?

thanks a lot for taking the time!

simon

[pen25]

unless the extender supports up-converting to hd i wouldnt buy it. and i am sure it would prob run as much as a client pc you can buy and use wifi to feed it. move the room around to where the computer is by the outlet. if this wont work then youll be running some cable. you can do this around the baseboards. then you can penetrate the wall(at your own risk) and run the cable. but again youll have to swing your room around and project on the other wall.

again dont waste your money on any analog extenders. no dvi and no upconverting no purchase for me that is.

[aperry]

The only way I could see you pulling this off is to take video (from your graphics card) and audio cables (from your soundcard or motherboard if built in) from your PC and run it to your home theater. Run the video to the projector, and the audio to the stereo (not in your picture). Since you already have a hole in the wall, it should just be a matter of running the cables.

Depending on the connections you use and the distance that the cables have to run, you may be limited as to which cables you can use for this.

If you're not all that concerned as to the quality of the menus and such, you could get a MediaMVP and a wireless bridge and run those to your projector. Then, just use the software that comes with MVP to display the list of available videos and watch them that way. Once 3.0 comes out, I would imagine you can get the "extender" software and run it to drive the MVP. I seem to recall there is some support for viewing Sage with the MVP already, but I'm not sure. Do a forum search for "mediamvp" to see...

If all you're doing is watching TV programs, non-HD, then the MVP solution would probably be your best idea, IMHO.

[zoundz]

A few solutions come to mind.

If the "old pc" you have lying around is capable of decoding mpeg files (at least 1.5GHz CPU - maybe a bit less) then you can put that machine in the home theater room running SageTV client and driving the projector. The machine in the bedroom can run the SageTV service and just do the recording. The bedroom machine can also watch TV on its monitor and when not doing that will show virtually no load other than memory from having SageTV running as a service.

If the "old pc" is not very capable, you can use any of the iterations of VNC to control the bedroom machine from the home theater room using the "old pc" as a VNC client. The projector gets connected to the SageTV computer in the bedroom. The downside of this is that the bedroom computer is going to be a little bit busy when someone is watching SageTV in the home theater room. Not that it can't do other things, but depending on the mix of other things you want to use it for simultaneously, there may be interactions and glitches of the SageTV playback. Depending on the video card in that machine, it may or may not be possible to have full screen video out to the projector without having full screen video on the computer monitor.

As a third alternative, you could use the "old pc" for your office applications in the bedroom and run the cable from the cable tv outlet through the wall to the home theater room. Put the SageTV computer in that room and walk away. Only one cable between rooms (not counting network if you want to network them together).

[stanger89]

You say you've got a projector huh?

You need to build a kick @$$ SageClient for that HT room, then, absolutely 100%. This is quite similar to what I'm doing (although I don't have my PJ... Yet ).

1) SageTV server - mine is an Athlon XP 1800+ with a PVR250, and 200GB for Sage to record on (oh, and 1.75TB for DVDs)

2) In the HT - P4 2.4B (Zalman CNPS-7000AlCu), 512MB, Geforce 6800 (fanless), M-Audio Revolution, 40GB Toshiba laptop HDD, in an Ahanix D.Vine 4, powered by an Antec Phantom 350 (fanless PS), with all fans controlled by an M-Cubed T-Balancer (awesome).
Right now it's feeding video, upconverted to 1080i to a 46" Mits RPTV, and audio via S/PDIF to an Anthem AVM 20/MCA 50 driving a set of Klipsch Synergy's and a Velodyne sub.

As pen25 said, anything but native resolution via DVI, or at least VGA is just not right with a projector.

[mdmint]

Originally Posted by stanger89

You say you've got a projector huh?

You need to build a kick @$$ SageClient for that HT room, then, absolutely 100%. This is quite similar to what I'm doing (although I don't have my PJ... Yet ).

I'll ditto stanger89's suggestion. When I was researching building a Sage solution at first I'd thought to run long audio and video cables from a Server to TV Theater room. Then would also need a room to room remote repeater solution. Could work but just didn't make sense. Cost of long high quality cables way expensive. Plus having a Sage Client separate from a Sage Server is a more stable scenario. Screw around and lock-up the Client no biggy, Server keeps going, which could be an issue if happen to be recording! Been working great for over a year.

[judoGTI]

your house has no doors, you're screwed.

[mdmint]

Originally Posted by judoGTI

your house has no doors, you're screwed.

[x[corwyn]]

I use a Hauppauge MVP player as an extender into the big TV room right now. Cost is about $115.00 total with the MVP and the client to get it working. Cheap and good for SDTV. HDTV isn't really supported all that well with Sage anyway so why not use a cheap client if not the MVP then one that uses the xcard which will go out to a component video. I use both those solutions at home. Both of them rock.

[simisimisimi]

thanks a lot for your help!!!