Modding My Home Modding project....I need help

I am looking to buy a place and need bit-techs help with it. The home is going to be a duplex condo. What I want to do is put wifi through out. I would like to have a server that would be connected to my entertainment system, speakers through out aswell. I plan on having a computer in the office, family room, bedroom, kitchen and a couple of laptops. I want to be able to control the music from any of the computers at will. I know this will cost a ****load, I can do the wiring through out the condo myself. Its just setting up the wifi through out and setting up the server and connecting it to the entertainment system is what Im going to need help with. I know I cant do all of this at once and dont plan on it till alittle while after I move. I would like your feedback and any suggestions. Would wifi work in a duplex? The part that is a must is it all has to be supper clean with NO Wires running all over the place. Would being able to control the sound system through out the house on any computer at any time work? I know I have more questions but Ill get them together later. Thanks

 

The wireless part shouldn't be too hard, it's pretty much just a matter of if plugging it in and following the manual. Belkin had wireless routers for about $30 refurbished that work pretty well. You'll also have to buy wireless cards for all the computers, it would probably be quite a bit cheaper (and better performance) if you could run cat5 to all the computers it is possible to run wires to.

As far as the music jukebox goes, if you just want to have music playing in one room and be able to change that music from anywhere in the house, VNC might be the answer. If you want to be able to broadcast music from the server to all rooms, Shoutcast is probably what you're looking for. And if you just want to have your whole music collection available in all the rooms, you could just share the music folder and use winamp on each of the computers.

 

Since you are going to have wires for the speakers, why not wire the whole property with cat5, then just have the laptops communicating through wireless access points?

You could use the cat5 wiring for extension speakers and telephones as well.

Have a look at www.avsforum.com. They have a good home theatre PC section.

Cheers

 

Hooking it up to the stereo shouldn't be too hard either, just get a headphone to RCA cord and plug it into one of the aux inputs on the stereo. Or if you want better sound you might look into those usb devices that have digital audio outputs if your stereo supports that.

 

I've always wanted to realise the dream of a touchscreen control panel in each room to control lighting, heating, music for each room etc.

I know that's not really going to happen but you could quite easily make a nice looking simple piece of software if you can program at all to play whatever music you want in individual rooms. Could of course program something into it so when you move to another room you could press a button in the new one to pick up the music from the previous room and continue it.

 

I've seen a plug-in for winamp that uses a web server and a web page of it's own to control what it's playing (sorry for the really stupid description)

link

that'll allow you to control musicon a computer

 

thanks for the replys guys, I was thinking of checking into wireless Speaker system. Has any1 played with that idea yet?

 

Yea, for the surrounds only though... The thing is even though they're wireless, you still have to plug them into the power, or replace a crap-load of batteries every couple of days. MUCH better to go with a 25 or 70V distributed audio system and matrix controller, if you are going to want the same sources in all locations with the option to select a different source for a location at a different time, i.e. you want to watch a movie in one room while someone listens to music in another... There are some nice receivers that allow 3 seperate "zones" and control the source for each, and they start around $900.

Still, the wireless speakers are not worth the money and potential problems if you ask me. Sound quality also suffers with wireless.

 

I was thinking about it, if you wanted wireless speakers but didn't want any loss in sound quality, you could get a bunch of laptops and have a central laptop that was hooked up to the source, and split the music channels 5 ways and sent them over 802.11b to the other laptops, connected to an amp and a speaker each. Of course when you picked up your cordless phone you'd start losing channels.

(not really. I doubt a wireless card has the bandwidth to send 5 separate streams of uncompressed audio, and the timing would be all over the place...)