Analogue HTPC

[tamm]

So I wanted to know if this is possible.

I`m interested in building a single whole house HTPC.

My design intent is to build the HTPC with both HDMI and S-Video output (+ analog) for the whole house.

HDMI would be easy, S-video thoo.... is hard to establish. So the other idea was out there but worth a shot to see if anyone has any thoughts on this:
Output the video of the HTPC thru RF/antenna? Anyone know possible ways?

 

[nForce2]

Output the video of the HTPC thru RF/antenna?

Yep, you could certainly do that, and for MUCH cheaper than tearing up your walls and wiring the whole house for analog video/audio. :thumbsup:

But what are your needs for this "whole house HTPC"? If you do the above, then everyone else in the house is seeing the same thing... and you'll have to figure out how you control it (RF remotes? Walking to the other room with the computer in it? etc.). Are you OK with that?

 

[tamm]

The assumption i`m going on is running Ubuntu server for multiple simultaneous logins. Would that work?

 

[nForce2]

Would that work?

You'll have to tell us what you want to do before we can answer that.

 

[nsafreak]

The assumption i`m going on is running Ubuntu server for multiple simultaneous logins. Would that work?

You'd still have the problem of having the same video output across all of the remote screens. You couldn't have it set so that on one TV channel 3 gives you one video output selection while channel 4 is showing something different. If you're trying to do a whole home solution there are a couple of ways to do it off the top of my head, and potentially it could be quite expensive depending on the number of remote TVs:

1) Have multiple video cards hooked into the system and outputting via composite and feeding into something like this Multi Channel Modulator which would then feed to the remote TVs. I'm not entirely sure if it's possible to set a different video card for each Linux session but it's one possible approach

2) Setup the HTPC to act as more of a server than trying to send out the video via composite outputs. With this method you'd need a client PC at each remote location hooked into the network to get the streams from the HTPC. This would be done cheapest with Rasberry Pi units.

 

[Charlie98]

2) Setup the HTPC to act as more of a server than trying to send out the video via composite outputs. With this method you'd need a client PC at each remote location hooked into the network to get the streams from the HTPC. This would be done cheapest with Rasberry Pi units.

I can't imagine the signal interference you would have with an RF system... D: ...and then there is the issue of all those separate 'channels' for each receiver.

I think the 'server' idea has some merit...

 

[powerhouse65]

I would go with a server and client PCs on the remote. In fact, I'm running something like that. Built myself a Linux Mint media server running XBMC that is hooked up to the main screen. It's also a fully functional PC with wireless keyboard and mouse. Any remote PC can hook up to the server via SSH and view movies or whatever. The media server is connected to a gigabit router (get a good one - Cisco/Linksys 3500 for example) using Cat5e (Gigabit cable), so are some other PCs. But several iPADs, notebooks etc. use the wireless link and I can easily watch movies over wireless.

Many modern LED TVs are actually "smart" and have an Ethernet connection, so you could just hook them up to your LAN. Another option is to get some Raspberry Pi and build your own small footprint micro-PCs running Linux and XBMC. You can also buy ready made Raspberry Pi boxes if you don't want to build the hardware. See http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Raspberry_Pi for more.

Even though this will take some days to build and setup everything, it might still be a faster way than pulling RF cable. If you have already RF installed, just tie the CAT5e to it and pull it through using the RF cable. I've replaced most of the RF cable already, with the benefit of having wired Internet in most rooms. If you're lazy use Wifi.

Edit: Just installed a little web server called "boa" on the HTPC to allow the kids to watch their favorite movies on the iPAD via browser. Works nice, though I hoped VLC would also work. Somehow it is only looking for UPnP. Oh well.

P.S.: My media server also serves me as a backup server. I run LuckyBackup over ssh to backup/sync PCs. Just put in enough storage. If you use LVM as disk format, you never run out of storage. Just pop in another HDD, add the HDD to your volume group and expand your logical volume, resize ext4 and you just increased your virtual HDD by whatever sized HDD you installed. Great for large movie, music, whatever libraries.