TV (Freeview HD) signal via Cat6 ethernet?

£15

£15

£15

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I've wired my house with Cat6: 4 sockets in each of the 3 bedrooms and 2x4 (a set in each alcove, in case I want to rearrange the AV) in the front and rear reception rooms.

It all goes to a patch panel/giga switch underneath my stairs.

It was now my intention to lay coax to each room for Freeview HD. However, I find myself wondering if there is any way to avoid the expense of buying coax, laying it and knocking more holes in the walls (for a socket) and utilise the ethernet cable instead?

I was thinking some sort of solution whereby I have a box in my cabinet under the stairs where the coax from the roof aerial goes and then this in turn feeds any of the ethernet sockets in any of the rooms, via my patch panel?
 
I've been doing some searching and found this. I can't see a price though. Although, if the price of their RF to ethernet baluns are anything to go by (£76) it won't be cheap.

PS Sorry in advance if I shouldn't have posted a link to another seller's website.
 
That would be really quite useful, but I haven't come across anything plug n' play in the domestic market other than AMX-TDS that will take the wideband RF signal, then IP-ise then decode that at the display end. The AMX system is mega bucks. The cheapest solution I've found so far is a commercial system. Just the head-end gear alone is about £8000. That's okay if you have a hotel or large office building. It's not really practical though for the average home.

I did come across a DIY project to do this. The head-end costs were more affordable - approx £600 by the time a monitor and an aerial distribution system to feed the PC rack were added. You'd still need a PC at every TV end though so it's not a substitute for the TVs own internal tuner. It's was also very much a DIY solution for those who knew their way round Linux and were prepared to do a lot of their own coding and trouble-shooting to both get it running and to keep it running. Fit and forget it definitely wasn't :D

Overall, the RF distribution may seem like old hat but it really does serve its purpose well. It'll be way cheaper and far more flexible to install the coax cable even if you pay an electrician for 2 or 3 days labour.

Edit: I just read BadMojo's link. It's not IP, so you cann't bung this through your network switch. But if you don't mind giving over part of your network so that it can run baluns "point-to-point" then this would work. TV aerial in to comms cupboard. Add RF distribution amp. Add 4 pairs of baluns. Job done.
 
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Server running tvheadend + TV cards + pi at each TV would give live, pause-able, recordable TV to each room. Well that's what I plan to do anyhow. Even though I did the coax to each room too.
 
I just want an RF feed for TV and PVR. The bedrooms have the spare capacity. The only problem would be the living room: 4 sockets - Smart TV, 360, XBMC, Humax - all gone. So I concede installing coax may be the path I eventually take, unless I insert another switch, at the 'TV end', into the equation. I just didn't want to have to do any more crawling under floors, knocking holes in walls and running cables down the outside of the house. The latter being something my wife is dead against.

I found another example of TV over ethernet. Something similar to what I posted above. It costs £750. So I think the other one will be a similar price, which is totally out of the question.
 
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Do you have XBMC in each room, or just a basic TV?

If you've got XBMC already, and a central server (or a machine you can dedicate to it), then TV tuner cards in a PC running either one of the Linux-based backends or for Windows, Argus-TV will give you the ability to watch/record the TV via XBMC.
 
At the moment, in the main living room, I have a basic TV (no ethernet) and a Revo running XBMC. Eventually, I will replace the TV with a 'Smart' version; but with the Revo/XBMC combo, I'm pretty much sorted as far as viewing content at that location.

I have a Humax PVR which meets my needs as far as recording/pausing TV.

I hope to get a Smart TV for the kid's and my bedroom. The kids will have my old 360 (if I buy a new one). I may, as funds permit, get another Revo type PC for running XBMC and have that in our bedroom too. But initially, I'll be happy with just the Smart TV.

I have a NAS from which I download content, store media (photos, music, home movies) and stream all content. I don't really want to introduce more PCs running server/client software.
 
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