hi guys , newbie here , my set up

[newstuart]

Hy guys

Followed the AV forums thread for a long time and took some inspiration from it for my set up, elootos has done a fantastic job.

Here is a few pics of my house,

Firstly the living room, the amp and pc are in the office upstairs (more pics to follow), all the living room has is the plasma, PJ and in wall/ceiling speakers controlled by a Gyration MCE Remote

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Rough specs are, 50 " plasma, HD65 pj and ebay electric screen - All media viewing for household is via 1 main mce PC running the living room set up using 20m VGA, DVI and USB leads then extenders for the rest of the house, the pc has a HD sat card in (soon to be 4 as soon as I fit a quad LNB as we can not get normal tv where we live)

As for the rest of the house, I have recently bought 2 linksys DMA2100 for the bargain price of £50 Each and have these in the dining room (small enough to sit behind plasma with a tie strap holding it to the wall bracket) and one to go in the bedroom which is a work in progress at the moment. I had 3 different PCs running for each room previosuly as I was unsold on extenders with my only epxerience being Xbox 360s, I tried a DMA 2100 as they were so cheap and with Windows7 and My Movies 3 they work really well and are so simple to use.

I then have an xbox 360 as a mce extender in my sons (and mine) playroom.

Lastly is one of the office which has the following equipment in my home made "in wall" av rack, I work from home so it was important that this room was well set out as I spend alot of time in it.

1) HTPC
2) Dock for work Laptop
3) old Dell for general surfing etc - all on a 4 port kvm switch controlled by a hotkey on the keyboard)
4) patch Panel for whole house cat 5
5) Modem + Switch
6) Amp
7) Printer
8) Phillips Skype 3021 phone

The htpc has 4tb of hardrive space which has my movie collection, i use windows 7 with My Movies 3 for including movie streaming to the extenders. I also have Mcontrol installed and am just getting started on trying to automate the house via X0, set up cctv and a alarm system all to be controlled within the mce interface in each of the rooms via Mcontrol.

I am also looking into adding some sort of touch screen remote at the moment, i have a tablet pc which I would like to use for this and also a 6" touch screen monitor which I may look at building into the wall at some point to display alarm status, cctv images and light control etc

Any comments would be great

[elootos]

Hello and welcome!

Good to see you came along and posted your 'media center home' on here.

It looks good and sounds like you've everything covered; the Linksys extenders sound great for the money. I played with My Movies 3 over the weekend and found it just a little too exhaustive on its features for me, i.e. it does too much for what I need. But for those with extenders it sounds like it does the job nicely.

Don't know about home automation, but I want to look into CCTV monitoring soon as well. Not that I live in a crime hotspot, but a camera in the soffits for front and rear coverage would be nice.

What would we do without technology, eh?!

[newstuart]

Hi

To be honest I live in a very rural area (hence no tv reception) with low crime rates also, I dont actually need CCTV (as my wife keeps pointing out) but I do think it would be a good addition to add to the set up, and a cool toy.

Have you looked into intergrating the CCTV with media centre? I am looking at the Mcontrol package as this give the facility to do this but needs IP cameras to implement.

All I would like to do if possible is get a cheap CCTV package from ebay (ie 4 cheap cameras and a pci card), install them in the soffits looking to the front and back of the house and possibly one in the nursery to keep an eye on baby without disturbing them.

With regards to My Movies 3, it is a little over complicated for my needs but the intergration with extenders is very good with it and the new package has built in transcoders which seem to work very well, I am not sure I wouldve paid for it if it wasnt for the extenders but they are so cheap at the moment it seemed a shame not to take advantage.

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I also have one of these lying around that I got cheap and would like to implement for touch screen control of the media centres, remote viewing of cctv and light control. It is a Advent U1A tablet pc runing windows XP.

Basically a Crestron type whole house controller for a fraction of the cost hopefully

[northan]

(11-22-2009 07:59 PM)newstuart Wrote:  I also have Mcontrol installed and am just getting started on trying to automate the house via X0, set up cctv and a alarm system all to be controlled within the mce interface in each of the rooms via Mcontrol.

I am also looking into adding some sort of touch screen remote at the moment, i have a tablet pc which I would like to use for this and also a 6" touch screen monitor which I may look at building into the wall at some point to display alarm status, cctv images and light control etc

Any comments would be great

I looked into this recently, as a project to do my self when I found that my car got vandalised, but soon got a big headache. (partley from the american x10 site)

I would love to know what setup you finalised on getting?
I was torn between harmony pro 2007 and mcontrol (not sure how good the support is on win7)
Are you looking to have x10 control and cttv to be done under the same package within mce?
Will the gyration remote able to control the lights and so on?
I thought that dedicated itouch would be good to control the system, but its just akward for the missus to get.

I found no matter what setup you go for there always seems to be a compramise.
A few more details would be fantastic
Btw great setup