[jason_easdale]

Hi,

Just looking for some expertise. I have just had the house rewired and just managed to remember in time to ask them to wire the internet through all the rooms. Looking for the best option of a hard drive to store all our DVDS in so it can be accessed through all the TV's or if there are better / easier ways of doing that. We have SKY in the main room, can we use SKY+ on one of the other tv's. Again if there is anyone thinking I should be doing something different please feel free to add a comment.

Many Thanks

[chrisjr]

Point of order. You did not have the internet wired round the house. You had ethernet cabling run in to create a home network which is not the same thing, even though with the aid of a broadband router it may allow access to the internet.

How many ethernet points did you wire into each room? If you only ran a single cable to each location then that means only one device can be connected to the router without fitting extra network switches to extend the number of connections.

To play video off a hard drive anywhere in the house you need a Smart TV or an external media server box with something like DLNA capabilities and a NAS drive that also has DLNA capabilities. Most modern kit should be OK.

The NAS drive and the TV/box both plug into your home network and with a bit of luck will find each other and the TV/box will be able to browse the NAS drive and stream files from it. It need not be complex. I have a fairly basic Seagate NAS drive and a LG Smart TV and with very little in the way of intervention by yours truly the NAS drive appeared as a source device on the TV and just worked pretty much out of the box.

The more difficult (and certainly tedious) task may be getting content onto the drive for the TVs to stream. That will involve ripping the DVDs on a computer and storing the resulting files on the NAS drive. And you may have to play around a bit with file formats to find one the TVs can handle as they can be picky about such things.

There are two ways to get Sky on other TVs in the house. Install a Sky box in each room, as long as there are enough LNB ports to go round. Or distribute the RF out of the main Sky box round the place.

Having separate boxes does mean you can watch whatever you like wherever you like. Using the RF out method means everyone gets to watch the same thing off the Sky box. It's also the lowest quality option.

Basically you take the RF 2 OUT of a Sky box (depending on age of box this may require a plug in dongle) and feed that to the distribution system feeding TV signals round the house. The TV aerial feeds the Sky box RF IN so that gets fed round as well so the TVs can use Freeview as well as pick up the Sky output. If you have a compatible system you can fit magic eye type remote devices at each TV to allow you to control the Sky box.

[Chris Frost]

A NAS drive has been mentioned. That's certainly the way I've gone and I have installed the same for several of my customers. A NAS drive differs from a basic USB-connected hard drive in a box in that it can be accessed from several different devices simultaneously. That's something you can't do with the cheaper option of an external drive.

NAS drives also offer the option of protecting the data they hold if one or more internal drives fail. So, whereas an external drive will contain just a single hard drive, and if that fails then it's hard cheese; a NAS drive is often composed of two/four or sometimes even more hard drives. Depending on the option you choose, the NAS can appear as one big single drive which means the capacity is a total of all the drives, or some of the drives can act as back-up for the others. This means the capacity is smaller but your data is relatively safe if a drive ever fails.

Along with the storage you'll need a network switch. This handles the network traffic and makes sure that playing devices, computers and storage all work happily together. The size of switch is determined by the number of network ports. Multiples of 8 is common. You'll use one port for a connection to your router for internet access and for assigning IP addresses, one for the NAS drive, one spare so you can plug in a laptop locally, and the other ports will be the connections to the wiring going to the various rooms.

MakeMKV is useful for ripping DVDs and BD disc. Handbrake can be used to convert them and compress down if required.

Distributing Sky can be done via RF as previously mentioned. That's the lowest cost method but you forgo HD quality. Other alternatives include long HDMI leads and boxes that convert HDMI to and from a signal format that can travel via CAT cable. This isn't the same as being able to put the signal through your home network though.

[jason_easdale]

Thanks for your reply .We had 4 points put in each room 2 behind TVs and 2 others. So other than getting multiroom there's no way round watching different sky programs?

[Nigel Goodwin]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jason_easdale

Thanks for your reply .We had 4 points put in each room 2 behind TVs and 2 others. So other than getting multiroom there's no way round watching different sky programs?

No - at least at the moment .

[grahamlthompson]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nigel Goodwin

No - at least at the moment .

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/n...t-top-box.html

[Deacon1972]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jason_easdale

Thanks for your reply .We had 4 points put in each room 2 behind TVs and 2 others. So other than getting multiroom there's no way round watching different sky programs?

You could, if in the position, make use of Sky Go until the new technology has been finalised/released.

[Chris Frost]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jason_easdale

Thanks for your reply .We had 4 points put in each room 2 behind TVs and 2 others. So other than getting multiroom there's no way round watching different sky programs?

A Sky box can only display one thing at once. Any TVs using the RF2 out feature will see the same as the TV directly connected via HDMI or SCART. As others have said, Sky multiroom is the only way currently to watch multiple channels direct from the boxes, one per box.

Sky Go will allow you to watch additional channels at the same time but with some limitations. The service doesn't support screen mirroring or casting, so it's not possible yet to stream via a TV that supports casting from a smart device. The Telegraph article linked by grahamlthompson gives a glimpse of what the future may hold In the meantime though if you have two Sky subs or multiroom and access to Freeview and your own home media library and streaming content direct off the web plus any locally connected sources such as games consoles etc then you probably have enough bases covered for the average household

[jason_easdale]

Have had a look at some NAS drives. Any recommendations? Other than storage space is there anything else i should look for in a drive i.e. speed. How many dvd's/blurays fit i a gb?

[chrisjr]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jason_easdale

Have had a look at some NAS drives. Any recommendations? Other than storage space is there anything else i should look for in a drive i.e. speed. How many dvd's/blurays fit i a gb?

It's more a case of how many GB (the capitalisation is important by the way ) fit a DVD or Blu Ray.

A standard single layer DVD is 4.7GB capacity If the movie uses dual layer disks then you are talking about 9GB. Blu-Ray is 25GB for single layer or 50 for dual layer.

Mind you the actual amount of data stored on any disk depends on the length of the movie and what extras there are on the disk, which you may or may not want to copy.

[Nigel Goodwin]

Quote:

Originally Posted by grahamlthompson

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/n...t-top-box.html

Which was what I was referring to - a 'possible' future product.

[Chris Frost]

Quote:

Originally Posted by jason_easdale

Have had a look at some NAS drives. Any recommendations? Other than storage space is there anything else i should look for in a drive i.e. speed. How many dvd's/blurays fit i a gb?

Simple NAS drives from reputable companies such as Buffalo, Netgear and Western Digital will all handle the basics of file storage and delivery. There's often reviews online and it's worth having a look at the support forums for each brand to see if there are any glaring issues. Just be aware though with the forums, they're reflecting the responses from a wide variety of end users from the technically proficient to those who are novices, so you should try to ignore the whingers and focus instead on any major recurring issues if there are any.

I have a Buffalo Terrastation which is a 4x drive enclosure. It does okay for me.

The difference between the simple products and more advanced gear from the likes of Synology and QNAP is partly in speed and slickness of the web interfaces used for set-up and management, but also in the additional power and features they have. Both have the power to run additional software which means that the NAS drives can do on-the-fly file conversion. This is useful where a media file type isn't supported by a player. The NAS can convert it to something that will work. Other features are things such as acting as a recorder for IP CCTV cameras or being a source for a TV.

QNAP is at the top of tree in terms of price. Synology is more affordable but still more expensive than WD, Buffalo, Netgear etc.