Original thread from my old forums
Well my parents new house is pretty much completed. All that is left is for some appliances to be put into place and for some touch up paint work to be done. As a result it was time for me to start finishing up the Television system and Computer network. The phone system piggy backs onto the data wires so it gets done as well. The television system is actually a fairly complex system. There are really two completely separate systems in the house. dad and I ran over 500 feet of coax in the attic, which was kinda cool since I was running it when there was no ceiling underneath me. Since it is too far out of town to get cable television they have DirectTV dish and have two of the receivers. In order to hopefully allow more people to watch what they want one receiver is setup in the master bedroom and the other is (currently) setup for the great room. All rooms will be connected to both of these though. This allows all the rooms to watch either of the receivers. It is pretty cool and I did a decent job of designing it out and everything I think. When we plugged a VCR into the uplinks and then tested it out at the jacks that I got done, it seemed to have a really clear picture. Means I did a good job of making sure all my connections were grounded and all that. I think I will go back up into the attic and ground all the splitters so that the whole system will be directly grounded, instead of being grounded through the receivers. I think that if there is anyway to make the pictures look better then this is it.
The final end result of what I think would be the coolest thing ever is to take both receivers and place in the in a central location connected to 1 or 2 Linux machines running mythtv. Then out at all the televisions place a modified Xbox running MythTV frontend. With these everyone can schedule programs that they want to watch and the Linux computers will record it. Then anyone can watch it anywhere, anytime, and pause it as well. This would allow people to watch as many programs as they had recorded. Having only two receivers wouldn't really be an issue anymore, since the chances that three people would want to watch something at the same time that was on live tv would be slimmer. Instead you just schedule your shows and then come back later and watch them wherever you want with the commercials automatically edited out not causing anyone else any grief. It would also allow Movies and Mp3s to be delivered to whatever room that was needed, independently of what was going on in the rest of the house. It is pretty much the end-all-be-all of content delivery systems in my book. Two good computers at about $900 total and then say four or 5 Xboxes at $149 might seem high, but I think it would be worth it and if you did it a little bit at a time might not be too hard. You might be able to find the Xboxes somewhere cheaper than that too I guess.