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Best Strategy for new home??

post #1 of 6
8/7/12 at 8:37am
Thread Starter 
Let me begin by saying I have read several 'I am building new home and...' threads but being as though each new home is invariably different, my questions end up a little different too, so...

House will be 2 story with upstairs dedicated media room, with 2 planned additional stereo speakers (one in kitchen/dining, and one on patio). Media room will have enclosed closet for most or all media components, a wall-mounted TV, a projector, and wiring for 7.2 surround.

I would like to keep as many of the components for the home in the single media closet as possible and have wires run accordingly (yes i know it will get HOT, planning to have an A/C vent installed at the bottom of a wall in the closet with a vent to attic. I plan to run a Cat5 to study, and then another Cat5 to a centralish location downstairs to run a WiFi extender to provide good wi-fi coverage to the entire house. I am planning to run an IR wall sensor to a IR repeater in closet so I can control everything with the door closed.

Questions:
What is the best method of getting HD signal from media closet to other locations?
Is it possible (within reason) to send a combined Audio/Video feed from Media PC to all locations outside of media room while sending them separately in media room (for Surround Sound)? I was looking into 4x4 HDMI switches but am not sure what will happen if i run an optical audio from PC to Receiver.

I want to be as reasonably future-proofed as possible, but am not looking to break the bank with full on home automation. I am sure there will be more questions to come.
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post #2 of 6
8/7/12 at 10:00am
You'll need a lot more wiring. Focus on the pre-wiring, it's so cheap to do now, as opposed to later. The equipment will change, and is very likely to change before you finish construction...

- Think about pre-wiring for more speaker locations (bedrooms, study, master bath, etc.). The wires can be completely hidden/buried for retrieval later (years, if ever),. Running them in the future is a major hassle and expense, which will likely prevent you from actually doing it. But if you can just buy equipment and attach speakers, it's something you'll consider!

- HD distribution is most likely to be done using 1 or 2 cat5e/cat6 cables per potential display location. I'd recommend running 3 cat5e/cat6 cables, but 2 may be sufficient going forward.

- Use WiFi for true wireless devices, but run enough category cable so that anything 'fixed' can be hard-wired. Much easier, faster, and more reliable.

- Post a floorplan and we'll give you some ideas about where cables should be added.

- Read (in small doses) the Wiring Your House wiki pages over at cocoontech.com

Welcome to the madness... biggrin.gif

Jeff
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post #3 of 6
8/7/12 at 11:43am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by jautor View Post

You'll need a lot more wiring. Focus on the pre-wiring, it's so cheap to do now, as opposed to later. The equipment will change, and is very likely to change before you finish construction...
- Think about pre-wiring for more speaker locations (bedrooms, study, master bath, etc.). The wires can be completely hidden/buried for retrieval later (years, if ever),. Running them in the future is a major hassle and expense, which will likely prevent you from actually doing it. But if you can just buy equipment and attach speakers, it's something you'll consider!

Yea I had been debating this one already, I will definitely go ahead and have them run the wiring. How does volume control work for that?

- HD distribution is most likely to be done using 1 or 2 cat5e/cat6 cables per potential display location. I'd recommend running 3 cat5e/cat6 cables, but 2 may be sufficient going forward.

So you can transfer HD over Cat5/6? Is there some sort of conversion from HDMI to Cat5 or what? Why two (or three) Cat5s?

- Use WiFi for true wireless devices, but run enough category cable so that anything 'fixed' can be hard-wired. Much easier, faster, and more reliable.

Right now my BluRay player has a Cat5 connector and I could get a wireless dongle for it but I haven't. My TV has wifi built in and most of the projectors I've looked at have it to, so I am assuming going forward it will be a pretty common inclusion. So with that in mind should I worry about running a Cat5 for hard-wiring for the TVs, I can definitely see it providing a big boost to streaming things from a Media PC.

- Post a floorplan and we'll give you some ideas about where cables should be added.

http://www.c-rock.com/communities/popup.asp?MID=14455&imgType=Flp

- Read (in small doses) the Wiring Your House wiki pages over at cocoontech.com
Welcome to the madness... biggrin.gif
Jeff

Responses in Blue, thanks for the response!
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post #4 of 6
8/7/12 at 2:09pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by verti89 View Post

Yea I had been debating this one already, I will definitely go ahead and have them run the wiring. How does volume control work for that?

You loop the speaker wire through the volume control location (switch-height on the wall), and run a cat5e to that location as well. That allows the use of either a passive volume control knob, digital in-wall amp, or keypad with a (remote) distributed amp.
Quote:
So you can transfer HD over Cat5/6? Is there some sort of conversion from HDMI to Cat5 or what? Why two (or three) Cat5s?

Yes. Lots of products that extend HDMI using category cable. Best tech is HDBaseT which does it with one cat5e. Less-expensive and more available products generally require two cables to do all the functions (HDMI, IR repeating, etc.). So two category cables to cover HD distribution. Third for Ethernet or any of a dozen other possible uses.
Quote:
Right now my BluRay player has a Cat5 connector and I could get a wireless dongle for it but I haven't. My TV has wifi built in and most of the projectors I've looked at have it to, so I am assuming going forward it will be a pretty common inclusion. So with that in mind should I worry about running a Cat5 for hard-wiring for the TVs, I can definitely see it providing a big boost to streaming things from a Media PC.

Yes. Hard wire everywhere. Faster, easier, more reliable, and usually cheaper... Wireless is great especially for retrofit needs, but I think most experts would agree that given the choice ahead of time, they'd all run wired...

Jeff
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post #5 of 6
8/9/12 at 10:29am
Thread Starter 
OK so question regarding IR repeaters, if I have a single dual-band wall-plate IR receiver, connected to a repeater that can send out up to 8 outputs, can i use like my harmony remote to control those 8 devices through the single wall plate, or would i need 4 dual band wall plates to control the 8 devices?
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post #6 of 6
8/9/12 at 12:47pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by verti89 View Post

OK so question regarding IR repeaters, if I have a single dual-band wall-plate IR receiver, connected to a repeater that can send out up to 8 outputs, can i use like my harmony remote to control those 8 devices through the single wall plate, or would i need 4 dual band wall plates to control the 8 devices?

If you can control the 8 devices with a Harmony while standing in front of all at them at the same time, you can do it with one IR receiver/repeater...

If there are duplicate devices (e.g. two set-top boxes of same make/model), you will need to investigate whether those products support multiple IR codesets. Otherwise "changing channel on one will change them all". This is a common problem and many "likely to be duplicated" devices have this support.

Jeff
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