AV setup - 2 rooms/ 5+ media sources

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stevonz

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#28901 15-Dec-2008 19:34

Hi,

Just purchased a new house and my kids a re trashing the lounge with new furniture already (kids + TV + food = angry Mum & Dad). We have a massive space available in a separate living area to be dedicated to the kids.

We have in lounge 1: x SD CRT TV, PS3 (mainly used as media centre), Sky, VCR (rarely used), DVD home theatre - currently utilise a AV switch to flick between VCR/ Sky/ DVD and PS3 has its own AV channel (or something simialr to this setup).
And living area/ lounge 2: 1 x SD CRT TV, PS2 (and probably the VCR from lounge 1)

We also have a portable HDD AV jukebox, but I guess that is irrelevant!

The plan is to get a AV sender to broadcast the media content from the PS3 (kids TV/ movies)/ Sky (kids TV/ movies). I like the look of the Coocoon 5.4 GHz jobby available at DSE.

The issue: how can we also watch something in the lounge (possibly on the PS3 or Sky) at the same time???

Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

No - I don't want to get into a discussion around parents using TV to babysit the kids. We give them a small window after dinner to chill out before books & bed - however food always seems to come into the equation too. So we plan to have one of us monitor the little monkeys in lounge2 while the other can catch up on news/ recorded TV...

Cheers, Stevo

Regs

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Snowflake

#184415 15-Dec-2008 23:34

with SKY you could always look at renting an additional box for the second room... you used to be able to rent either UHF or satellite box for $10 or $25 extra per month (check their site for current offerings). I'm not sure if the MySKY HD can be split to server two rooms from the one box - perhaps someone else can answer that

as for the additional content - if its DVDs then you can pick up a cheap dvd player, brand new, for the kids for sub $50.

i believe that you can also set up a PC as a DLNA media server and use the PS3 as a DLNA client to play files off the PC over its wireless connection. there are also other boxes around that can do this that may be cheaper than the PS3 so you could potentially put one of these into the second room - e.g. popcorn hour (see own forum). That way all your DVDs, Music etc can be served up from a PC to either/both rooms.

another option is a media center software + extender hardware

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stevonz

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#184429 16-Dec-2008 00:27

did I mention that ~I just bought a new house...

Money is tight... looking for a simple & low cost solution if possible. We still wanna watch the PS3 content too... we DL a heap of TV & movies...

My plan was to broadcast the content from lounge 1 although I think I'll be pulling cables etc to make this so...

Cheers, Stevo

Jaxson

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#184444 16-Dec-2008 08:45

If you can do what you want to do by simply using signal splitter cables/boxes and pulling cables into new room, then do this. It will be cheaper and will probably work ok too. My experience with av transmitters is that you need to spend a bit to get one that wont suffer interferance. The cheaper ones use the now totally cluttered bands used by portable phones etc and they can be rubbish if there's anything else using this band in your area. Dick Smith is good though in that you can return fairly easily if doesn't work for you.

stevonz

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#184464 16-Dec-2008 10:53

Cheers - yeah I think I'll use the AV1/ AV2 options ont eh TV in lounge 1 to watch something separate from AV sender to lounge 2...

Cheers, Stevo

richms

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#184533 16-Dec-2008 14:25

There are combined AV senders and input selectors that have a couple of remotes to choose the local source and the remote source independantly, the one I saw was all scart based and didnt pass the other pins thru so you are stuck with cruddy composite on the local end as well.

This one on trademe looks to be the same as the one I saw but with RCA sockets so no need for a plethora of scart adapters. It is 2.4 so you may have wi-fi coordination issues.

http://nzoab.info/product/375/

http://www.trademe.co.nz/Electronics-photography/TVs/Other/auction-192599169.htm

Otherwise you will need to look into running cables if you want quality at the other end. The 5.8Ghz senders seem worse then the 2.4s for thru the walls when I tried them, makes sense since they are a higher freq, and we all know how crap 802.11a is at covering a house compared with g.

Richard rich.ms