Re: RFC: I need coax in every room vs. distribute TV via network

[Kim Wall <kim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Peer Oliver Schmidt wrote:

> Living in an old house myself I used to follow the rule of one coax
> cable whereever someone wants to watch TV. Lateley, however, I am
purely
> using the network connection for my TV watching pleasure.

Similar story here...  There's only the two of us in the house, but
pretty much all our TV watching takes place via MythTV over the network,
either on dedicated frontend hardware connected to a TV, or on a desktop
PC.


> Now, all the coax in the house is no longer needed.
>
> Do you guys think, this is a good way to go, or do you prefer, to have
> dedicated wires for dedicated services?!

I'd probably want to keep a single coax run to get basic live TV, if
only so that when the mother-in-law[1] comes to visit, the telly works
as expected.  Or perhaps for radio (FM, DTT or DAB), if you're not
interested in doing the whole-house audio thing.

There might be scalability issues, too, if you've got a large number of
televisions or family members.  How many TV streams can the network (or
more likely the server) handle without issue?  The 'client' for analogue
A/V distribution (baseband or RF) comes 'free' with each telly,
additional hardware to play digital video over the network will be a lot
more expensive.  If you've got a large family, you're going to need more
tuners and storage to be able to record everyone's programmes.  You'll
also need backups so that you don't get lynched when the inevitable bug
or hardware failure takes the whole thing offline.  How do you stop
people accidentally deleting each other's programmes?  How do you
persuade the resident luddite to stop worrying and learn to love the
scheduler, as opposed to tying up tuners with live TV.

I don't think any of this is unresolvable, but I can see how it could
start to become impractical.


Kim.

[1] Substitute with relevant shouldn't-be-allowed-near-technology relative.


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