[sriramc]

You would save a ton of money if you relax this rule

Quote:
I do not want any other a/v equipment in these rooms.

Its a complex & tough requirement. Each room with a 5.1 setup will need its own AV receiver and an htpc or media center extender(e.g. xbox). Putting everything in the basement will complicate cable runs, and will need repeaters to accomplish this at which point I doubt t will be a $3000 project, not to mention programming a universal remote that would work for each room.


I recommend that you atleast keep the AV receiver + htpc( or extender) in each room, and wire the house with a gigabit network. A windows home server could be placed in the basement, to host your DVD/ CD collection, a windows 7 media center at the main viewing area, and xbox 360s as extenders at other tv locations to distribute the media throughout the house.

 

[sriramc]



Quote:
Why not put the server and media center in the basement and let the matrix switch handle the rest

Unfortunately a media center htpc can only feed one tv at a time. So for 3 TVs you'll need 3 htpcs(or 1htpc + 2 extenders or another similar combination).


The xbox 360 works as a media center extender. An extender can connect to a existing windows media center pc on the home network and stream all its media(w/ some audio/ video format limitations), including live TV with program guide, act as a DVR, netflix support etc.