spec me a full home setup!

[kaktus]

Fellas

I'm doing a major refurb on the house at the moment and one thing I haven't sorted out at all is the A/V and home network

At present I use a laptop connected to my TV to stream things like Netflix or Watchseries. I control the laptop via a wireless USB mouse and keyboard.

In as simple terms as possible, can someone explain the ideal setup? Complete novice in this arena.

I am having installed Cat 6 Ethernet cabling around the house with 1 port per room and 1 HDMI port per room though I have absolutely no idea where these ports will actually end up connecting to. In the simplest terms I imagine the Ethernet ports from 10 different rooms will all end up coming into a cupboard and then will need to be connected to something, probably my router? and the HDMI ports probably into a sky box or a media laptop/PC? but then these are 10 cables trying to fit into one port? How does that work?

Questions I need to answer are:
- What cabling/ports do I need in each room and where do they ultimately feed back into?
- What units do I need and how do they all work together?
- How will I end up controlling and using this to its full potential?

 

[kaktus]

That is really really helpful - thank you very much. You kinda lost me on the second paragraph about AV over Ethernet but the rest is quite straight forward.

I've made a little drawing to see if I've understood everything correctly - would you mind having a look and letting me know if that's the case?
[url=http://postimg.org/image/pludx9nb1/][/URL]

If I have understood it correctly then basically it doesn't really make any sense for me to have either Ethernet ports in each room or Coax cables.

The sky boxes/other boxes would be centrally stored in the 'electronics cupboard' and I'd basically need to have them just connected to an HDMI cable which will feed into the respective TV's in each room. So 1 HDMI cable for 1 box for 1 TV. Coax cables only need to feed into the boxes and only to the electronics cupboard.

I guess the only other thing I'd need is the Infra-Red ports to control each box separately via a remote. Any idea how that might work? Is each port specifically 'plugged into' one device?

Networking:

On a basic level you're aiming to do two things

• provide an in-house network so that data can move between connected devices: So this is your Ethernet connections all wired back to a Network Switch which then manages the flow of traffic within the network
• provide a means for communication to and from the outside world: This would be your current router which then connects to the switch. Now all your wired devices have access to the web/internet if that's what you want.

Since many routers also have a wireless function, then any portable devices such as tablets and smart phones will be able to connect to both your home network and the internet via the wireless router.

Network switches come in various sizes: desktop 4~8 port, and rackmount generally in multiples of 8 ports (8/16/24 ....). They also come in managed and unmanaged forms. Unmanaged is plug 'n' play networking. It allows all the gear to talk to each other and takes not special effort to set up. Managed switches give more control of how traffic flows in a network. This means you can prioritise flow for high and low demand devices more effectively.

Unmanaged switches are a bit cheaper.


AV over Ethernet:

At its simplest this is just a replacement for long HDMI and AV cables. The Balun boxes convert HDMI to and from a format that will travel over twisted pair (Ethernet) cables. If you wanted to distribute the signal from the house Sky HD box to several TVs then you'd use a HDMI splitter/amplifier to multiply up one signal to many. Each TV would have a window on what the main (lounge) TV sees though; it wouldn't provide different Sky channels. For that you'd need multiple boxes and a way to switch sources remotely as well as control the Sky box being viewed without accidentally controlling the one(s) that you aren't.

HDMI over twisted pair cable has nothing to do with home networking. The signals can't be sent through a switch or router; and you should keep the house IP Ethernet network completely separate from any HDMI/AV over twisted pair cable.

There is an IP version of AV over twisted pair. 'IP' means turning the signal in to something that can travel through a network switch. However, you still need to keep IP AV away from IP data.

IP AV done right is pricey. IP AV done on the cheap can be a huge headache.


Planning what you need:

Start off with an idea of what you want to do. If it's simply to watch Sky in the bedroom then that can be done with a simple HDMI splitter and some infra red relays to make the Sky remote work. Apart from the Baluns the rest is all pretty low cost.

Streaming your own media from a NAS is relatively cheap too. This is done via the IP over Ethernet network. You just need to make sure that the files are in a compatible format for the player device to understand.

Don't overlook the basics such as Freeview. Aerial coax cable might seem very last century but it is high bandwidth and has a lot more in common with data networking. The TVs are decoding a digital Hi-Def signal for some channels that's not far off the data rates required for a basic Blu-ray signal. That's not bad for system that has its roots back in the 1920's.

 

[kaktus]

AV is short for Audio Visual, so its sound and pictures. AV over Ethernet is your AV connections (HDMI in this case) carried by something other than long HDMI cables.

The reason for mentioning it is that HDMI signal reliability diminishes with distance. The longer the cable then the less likely you'll be to see a picture out of the end of it. The distance a signal will travel is related in part to the quality of the cable and in part to the resolution of the signal. If you're running cable around a house then you can easily get in to single cable lengths of 30/40/50+m. Some of these are too long even for the lowest resolution signal (Standard Definition: SD) which is what you get from non-HD sources such as basic Freeview boxes and non-HD Sky channels and DVD). If you're looking to run HD signals (1080p) then even cable lenths of 20m could be a struggle with a lower quality cable. This brings us nicely on to cables....

Nearly all HDMI cables are made in China. There's all sorts of qualities and prices. At one end you've got cables using thicker 100% solid copper conductors with highly effective individual and combined shielding. At the other end there's the cheap stuff made out of thinner copper clad aluminium (CCA - Google it) conductors with poor shielding. The problem is knowing one from the other. For short cable runs (<5m) the difference isn't so important. When you're getting past 10m then it starts to become quite significant. CCA cables are cheaper but more fragile and the signal craps out at shorter distances by to voltage drop and crosstalk.

The other issue is the material used to make the outer cover. Stuff designed to be buried in walls has an outer jacket construction designed to impede the spread of fire. Looks for LSOH (Low Smoke, Zero Halogen).

Once you get past a certain length then HDMI just won't work. There are "active" HDMI cables that include boosting technology, but even they can only do so much. That's where AV over Ethernet comes in.

Ok got it.

Your tellies have Freeview, so you should have an aerial distribution system. That means TV coax cable (WF100) to each room. Since the fashion is to install TVs on wall brackets then you should think about have a coax cable point put mid-way up a wall where a TV might go. That position will also need power and you should have at least one data Ethernet port, but preferably two. If you want to distribute a signal from a Freeview recorder/Sky box then you'll also need two AV over Ethernet ports in that location.

Wait a sec - why would I need Coax to each room instead of just to the hub?
Are you saying that it's Dish > coax > sky box > coax > TV?

And then HDMI only locally (i.e. 1-2 metres at most)?

Your hub location needs aerial cable x2 (one live, one backup) from the loft/roof or wherever the aerial is likely to be. Sky HD requires two coax (WF100) per box for full functionality. It's sensible to wire four cables + 1 backup from the dish to the hub. Aerial coax's to each TV point run back in to the hub. Leave loooooooong cable tails... 3m+. Sods Law is that if you leave it to the spark then wherever you think the gear will go then at least some of the cables in the hub will be too short. Same goes for Ethernet cables.

So if I plan on having say potentially up to 5 or even more boxes in the future (sky multiroom or whatever) then I need 2 coax connections per box so I should have them wire at least 10 (+2 backup) coax cables from the aerial point to the hub point?

Final thought.... Don't leave it to chance that your spark will use decent AV and network cable. The odds are against you.
a) they rarely understand AV and networking.
b) their wholesaler probably won't understand it either, and because they don't then they'll both gravitate towards the cheapest choices. They'll use CCA network cable rather than copper because it's less than half the price. They'll use copper clad steel (CCS) coax cable called RG6... or worse... because "it's only telly" and the cable is cheaper.
c) you won't know any of this until it's too late.

Understood - I will look around for in-wall grade cabling. It's my responsibility to provide all cabling to the contractor anyway as they don't want to get involved in that.

 

[kaktus]

guys I appreciate the efforts but with every response I'm getting more confused.

To be clear, this is not a DIY job. I've got a Design & Build company that is doing the renovation but they (and their architects) don't get involved in anything whatsoever to do with tech. They've basically told me, it's my responsibility to get the cables, devices etc and they will just put them into the walls and thread them to where I want them to go.

I have zero experience with this and I don't understand what you're talking about when you say don't put dish feeds into amp distribution boards and whatever else. It might as well be in Latin.

I get the Ethernet part, that's straight forward. Cable > switch > router. Done.

I get the HDMI part.

I still don't get the coax/aerial/distribution etc part at all. That could be because I don't actually know what a coax cable does. As far as I know, it's a cable that just goes from my satellite dish into my receiver box. It seems from what you're saying that it's capable of doing a lot more than that, though I don't understand what or how?

I also have unresolved questions around the NAS and HTPC which hasn't been addressed yet.

From my perspective, I want the following:
1. Live feed for any TV in any room to access at will (even if a TV doesn't exist there yet - I should be able to just install a TV, plug in a cable behind it into the wall and connect a new receiver box in the hub room if I have to)
2. A centralized NAS which will store music, movies and files
3. An HTPC connected to the network and the NAS and all the TVs. The HTPC will serve on-demand content to any TV in the house or will be able to stream from the net for any TV in the house)
4. No cables/boxes in each room. Just a clean neat look with only a TV hanging off each wall.

I don't even know if this is possible - it might be that the 'ideal' setup is to have local HTPC's under each TV but still connected to, and reading content from, the centralized NAS. It might be that I need one receiver box which somehow permits 5 different TV's to watch 5 different channels at once. I don't know but that's the answers I'm looking for, followed by a very specific list of: you need 10x X, you need 12x Y, X needs to be connected to ABC etc.

Maybe it makes more sense to pay one of you to do the plan instead of me fumbling about trying to understand it while time is running out. At least then I'll learn it from a perfect example while it's being done?

 

[kaktus]

Asking for advice on a forum is one thing. But if you are a complete novice then it's unrealistic to expect to go from zero knowledge to competent in the space of a few pages of a post.

Yes I think I underestimated the complexity. As I mentioned in my first post, I use a laptop connected to a TV and control the laptop wirelessly and assumed the next step up would be simple:

NAS, store all the files there, connect it to an HTPC and then have the HTPC connect up to the TVS. Oh and I'll probably need Ethernet cables and and HDMIs running along the house to get the picture across. I didn't expect to have to deal with coax and distribution boards and what not but I will reach out to a local AV installer and go from there.

Thanks for your help