Good Home Video Distribution Device (not Control 4)

wschroter

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Just starting down the path of finding a good video distribution unit for my home and would like to stick with a fairly DIY friendly option, so avoiding stuff like Control 4 that is fairly controlled by dealers. Suggestions of where to start? Looking to control about 12 TVs.
 
Can you elaborate further on what you want to do ?

How many and what specific sources, what resolution and audio for each room/tv , how ideally would you want to control the tvs and sources .

What cabling do you have in place ?

Seb
 
This would be a prewire to at least 10 4k TVs with however many cat6 wires would be required.
 
What audio capabilities do you want at each TV

How many sources (ie satellite boxes , streamers etc )
 
However with that many tvs I’d probably recommend HD over IP

One transmitter £399 ish required per source plus one receiver per tv £399 ish

Then a Poe network switch 24 port around £500
 
Mostly what we use now are Windows 10 machines and a NAS but managing 10+ and growing is annoying. We would have external audio (2 to 5 speakers) for each source.
 
So mainly streaming , in that case a player at each tv location linked back to your router

What are you streaming from your nas ?

What issues are you having ?
 
So I'm envisioning a bank of Windows 10 PCs sitting in the server closet right? Can you guys name a few video distribution units that I can Google just to start getting familiar with the hardware?
 
If you are only streaming internet based video all you need is a streaming box at each tv or centrally located . Certainly don’t need a windows 10 pc

Plenty of streaming boxes from Roku, amazon fire stick etc
 
You really are making work for yourself and adding a whole bunch of un-needed cost. I would be very tempted just to stick nVidia Shileds behind each TV. If you have nVidia graphix cards in your PC you can basically replicate it on the shield.
 
I haven't played with the Nvidia shield yet. I wasn't sure if they were continuing that product but I've been thinking about a low cost streamer that has keyboard input. Let me take a look at that again.
 
Maybe better to decide what services you want to watch and then find suitable streamers.

Also remember that many smart TVs already have built in apps so you may not even need streamers at every location again depending what you watch regularly
 
The challenge I have with anything like Roku, Fire, etc is that my only two use cases are looking through file folders on my NAS and surfing the web - both of which are a PITA without a keyboard. So I'm looking for something that has a wireless keyboard (Bluetooth) interface.
 
Intel NuC stick , and wireless usb keyboard ?

Actually the NUC stock has Bluetooth built in so Bluetooth keyboard

As it runs windows 10 also good for you if that is your interface of choice for file viewing and browsing
 
If you want something for surfing the web, then the Shield is probably not the device that you want.
What is your normal front end for video / music - Plex / Kodi / MusicBee ??
 

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