New set up from scratch

[tlvranas]

I am moving into a new house in a couple weeks and want to put in a HA system. I am looking for some help in picking the items to make the install as easy as possible, but more importantly, stable. I want to have multi-media in several rooms, video surveillance (wireless), (light controllers and climate control to be added later).

I will have Verizon FIOS and hope to only have to use one DVR box for the living room and cable cards for the rest of the TV's.

Living room - large screen TV, 3D, 7.1 sound, DVR, streaming from internal and external sources (Netflix, Amazon, etc.)

Office, Patio and Game Room - TV with live HD, stream internal and external video, stereo sound

3 Bed rooms - TV live, stream HD internal and external sources

There is also in wall speakers throughout the house that I would like to control as we wll. Stream music, have the computer talk to me, read my e-mail, great me in the morning, and any other crazy things I can think of.

In the end I will have 6 HD TV's and one 3D TV.

Q1 - How many MD systems are needed? One per TV?
Q2 - How many cable tuner cards are needed?
Q3 - The core system, what type of power is needed if I wanted to have all TV streaming at once? (Not that it would happen.)
Q4 - What is the best way to control the TVs, BluRay and other devices? IR or through service ports?

If you were building this from scratch what components would you use?

Thanks for any feedback.

[Armor Gnome]

Q1 - How many MD systems are needed? One per TV?

Correct, though you can do some tricks to move audio/video to multiple rooms the best solution is a MD at each location.

Q2 - How many cable tuner cards are needed?

One tuner per MD, now there are cards/usb devices that have multiple tuners in one.  The HDhomerun has 2 per, so 3 of those.  Do not forget that with tuner cards its 1 per MD PLUS one for every scheduled recording you have.  To stream to 6 MDs at once and record 2 shows would be 8 tuners.

Q3 - The core system, what type of power is needed if I wanted to have all TV streaming at once? (Not that it would happen.)

  A valuable lesson about "power",  think in terms of I/O and eliminate bottlenecks in your core hardware and you will be very happy with less than TONS of ram and proc power.

Q4 - What is the best way to control the TVs, BluRay and other devices? IR or through service ports?

I personally am a fan of RS-232 (service ports) but to ask for devices with it in an electronics store always gets deer-in-the-headlights look.  IR works, if the device comes with a remote then lmce can send it commands.  If you want to try alternate means of connection such as ethernet and usb then I am sure you will find the help you need here. 

Welcome to LinuxMCE.  I look forward to hearing how your system comes along.  One last note,  you WILL use more storage than you thought possible.  If you want a impressive DVD collection, HD recordings, a couple thousand songs the storage space goes fast.  My very small lmce setup already has more TB than my last corporate jobs' server.  If you are wanting to get the core/MD/AV all going at once I would go ahead and either get a large oob NAS or build an expandable one.  Keeping my storage on my core is one of my regrets and will have to be resolved before I run out of powersupply or case room.

[tlvranas]

Thanks for the information. I will be phasing things in but it is good to have an idea of where I want to be when done.

As for storage, I have room for 9 more drives in my NAS so that is the one thing I do have covered. Built with FreeNAS a 4U case that holds 20 drives. Plus the core system can hold another 8 drives

It will be a few weeks before I start building everything, but now I have a better idea of what to shop for. I will post how things go, and if I make it look nice a few pictures as well. I am sure I will have a lot of questions once I get started.

Thanks again.

[Stash_CEO]

How's this project coming along, hope all is well.