Need help planning a whole house system

[mwelkins]

Hello All,

I could really use some help understanding what I need to use to handle my family's audio/video needs.

The house has six televisions. One in each of four bedrooms, one in the family room, and one in the bonus room. I would like to have access to all recorded audio and video stored on a server, as well as the usual access to cable programming and pvr functionality at each tv. I would like each tv to have this full access independently, meaning all tv's could be on simultaneously and accessing or recording at will.

What will it specifically take to do this? Will a single SageTV server with a Media Extender at each location get the job done? Will this require six tuner cards in the SageTV server? What kind of horsepower would this take?

Any help or recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[mightyt]

Well ... First, it depends on what combination of viewing you want to have ... the more LiveTV feeds at one time, the more tuners you will need ... Of course, keep in mind, if all 6 are watching LiveTV for pausing abilities simultaneously, then you will have no tuners left if you want to record something at the same time that all 6 are watching ... Now if they are watching something prerecorded, then a tuner is not being used. There are several things to consider ... Besides, the Media Extender vs. Sage Client PC. with 6 TV's, "to me" you definitely want a CAT5 "wired" network ... trying that wirelessly will likely not be satisfactory. Oh, another thing to consider is if you have 6 tuners, you will want to amp up (boost) your cable signal since splitting it that much will have a negative impact otherwise.

Besides the pipe you have to push all that video across, you want to consider even if all 6 are watching already recorded TV, which means your drives will be working overtime! So, in my experience horsepower means something there.

I have had as many as 4 tuners at a time, but didn't really care for client access over my WLAN ... even with 11g ... I have gathered up everything I need to install a switch and run CAT5 all around the house, but haven't found the time to do it yet. When I do, I may just try the media extender even though I have PC's in just about every room.

Hope that helps a little ... T.