5punk

We have 5 TV's spread around the office, one DVB-T Aerial, a LAN (Wireless and cable), and a bunch of laptops.

The basic setup would be to give each TV (that doesn't already have one built in) a DVB-T box (terrestrial digital, not bothered about Sky just yet) and wire them all up to the aerial. But that's boring.

I want to wire it ALL up, so we can play downloaded stuff on the big TV screen or vice versa, watching TV in a window on our laptops without installing TV cards in them all.

Do I need a media centre to do this or is there a simpler way? I've looked at NAS and media centre software, but they all seem to only work one way (i.e. Watch media on the TV screen or turn your laptop into the media server which I don't really want).

What media centres are available, how much do they cost etc?

Summary:

- All 5 TVs to have independent (different channels at same time) DVB-T
- Audio/Video Server so Laptops can access stuff over LAN, including TV if poss
- HDMI output for the big assed flatpanel TV
- Possible Blu Ray? Might be a bit pricey though so not important

Oh, and who the hell would know how to set this all up? A TV shop person or do I need someone more speshul?

What's your budget?!

Is it like £500 bodge it yourself

or £10,000 do it properly?

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We've got one of these in the office for viewing media stored on a network server

It's alright, does the job

Edit: You see what I did there?, I didn't say what is was, so here it is

http://www.tvix.co.kr/eng/products/PVRM41104130SH.aspx

This is the sort of badger that I'm thinking about. It's basically a PC in a box with a DVD player, DVB-T/S encoder and a couple of TV cards in the boot, all running on Windoze XP. Only negatives with this particular one is that it apparently as no HDMI port and and you can't copy TV stuff over the LAN (you have to burn it to DVD and transfer it that way). These proprietory Media Centre devices seem to be fairly new though so it may be worth waiting for a better one.

Fair point ref only one channel per decoder tho, so I think my plan of streaming TV across the LAN is a non-starter. Still, it's company cash so might just get one anyway.

Btw Amblin, for your needs you might consider the cheap and cheerful option my mate has running: old style X-Box running XMBC, £30 NAS and a switch or something for the network bridge.

Oh, and the boss said why don't we get a PS3

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Some network guys at our place had a (probably Axis) thing that would stream video over the LAN just by plugging it into a video feed and an ethernet port, but it's probably old tech now as this was a couple of World Cups ago.

For sending TV across the lan, you probably want something like a slingbox.
Check out http://www.slingmedia.com

To play stuff back on your bigasstv, you probably want something like:
http://www.hushtechnologies.net/
they make nice media centres.

..if you can afford it all that is.