[settle]

Many have us have not-so-old houses but are stuck with RG-59 wiring. The result is that we can not wire our dishes into the existing house wiring and have the satellite receiver next to the tv. My current solution is to have the dish feed the receiver and the receiver output going into the house wiring. An effective solution when combined with an IR transmitter / receiver, but at degraded quality.


One solution would be to have a reciever that would output TCPIP over Ethernet and a decoder for the other end. Then all recievers could go in the head-end when combined with remotes signalling the decoder over IP. Or we could easily implement a PC based show recording scheme using the ethernet connection.


When combined with wireless ethernet, this solution becomes even more convenient.


Any reason this would not work? Anybody listening?

 

[David Richardson]

Jeff


Satellite will run on RG59. The issue is distance. With good connectors you should be fine with 100ft of total length from dish to receiver. Try that first before other expensive options are explored.


Dave

 

[settle]

What you say is true, until you realize that you may be stuck with splitters inside the walls, as I am.


At this point, I am network connected in my bedroom, but not dss connected. An ethernet solution would simply run on existing infrastructure and not require more wires.

 

[jhill32]

settle,

I like this kind of thinking. I look forward to the day where there is a kind of "media conduit" available throughout the house, and you simply attach endpoints (both sources and sinks) where they are available or needed.


However, there a few things to keep in mind when trying to accomplish this.

• Although the coax used for ethernet (thinnet) is categorized as RG59, it is only 50 ohms, not 75 ohms like cable TV. I have never actually tried it, but I don't think the RG59 in your walls, used for Cable TV, would work at all as an ethernet network.
• Digitized video and audio, due to their time-based nature, don't lend themselves to a packet-based transport (TCP/IP or ethernet) without a lot of buffering and time-stamp manuevers.

But, the good news is that there are companies working to address these kind of capabilities. Concepts like Quality of Service (QOS) for networks deal specifically with allocating isochronous channels (guaranteed bit-rates) for different media streams.