Comment Keep distribution simple (Score 1) 425
I'll narrow my comment to just the distribution side: When I bought my home a few years ago I knew going in that it wasn't wired for coax and most certainly wasn't wired with CAT5. Rather than try and cable to all rooms across 3 levels which would have been a huge pain or try to use the 2.4GHZ wireless video senders (which don't like the "cutting edge" 802.11b equipment I had just bought) I purchased some of the Terk Leapfrog HomeNetwork devices to distribute sound and video throughout the house over the existing telephone cabling.
This works very well and video quality is high - nearly equivalent to coax. This approach is cheaper than a full cable install, and without the hassle. Best part about the Terk devices is because they plug into a phone jack if you want to move them to a different area, that's easy enough.
Additionally, these devices solve another problem that anyone with centralized A/V sources has: In addition to moving the video out to the other rooms, you need to be able to relay the IR control signals from the remote room back to the main A/V cluster. These Terk devices also do IR relaying, and they do it well.
For anyone trying to use these devices, here's a small tip: Because they use phone lines to send the signal, if you have lots of phones or stuff like DSL on the line the signal will degrade. Any twisted pair cable will do, however - the cable does not need to have telephone company voltage on it. Because the telephone cabling in most homes has several twisted pairs, you can oftentimes get very high quality by just using one of the other unused pairs in the phone cabling.
In all I was able to hook up 3 remote rooms for AV distribution and remote control relaying, keeping the cost to under $400 and the house intact, making for a happy wife.
This works very well and video quality is high - nearly equivalent to coax. This approach is cheaper than a full cable install, and without the hassle. Best part about the Terk devices is because they plug into a phone jack if you want to move them to a different area, that's easy enough.
Additionally, these devices solve another problem that anyone with centralized A/V sources has: In addition to moving the video out to the other rooms, you need to be able to relay the IR control signals from the remote room back to the main A/V cluster. These Terk devices also do IR relaying, and they do it well.
For anyone trying to use these devices, here's a small tip: Because they use phone lines to send the signal, if you have lots of phones or stuff like DSL on the line the signal will degrade. Any twisted pair cable will do, however - the cable does not need to have telephone company voltage on it. Because the telephone cabling in most homes has several twisted pairs, you can oftentimes get very high quality by just using one of the other unused pairs in the phone cabling.
In all I was able to hook up 3 remote rooms for AV distribution and remote control relaying, keeping the cost to under $400 and the house intact, making for a happy wife.
