Re: Whole House Audio & TV Control

I am part-way there.

PC: P90/32MB Win98 box under my TV hidden inside the entertainment center.

LAN: PC is connected to the house-wide ethernet LAN, allowing any of my PCs to run CDJ or any other slinkx program to control the Slinke remotely using DCOM. (Yes this works!)

Internet: accessed via the LAN through a 3Com ISDN LANModem. The lanmodem is fantastic BTW, very transparent and ISDN connects in < 1 second. No popup "dialing" dialogs or anything and it can serve 25 PCs over one account.

Input: Versapoint wireless IR keyboard with built-in touchpad, another great product, it never misses a keystroke no matter where you point it.

Video: The video output feeds into an AverKey 5 VGA-to-TV converter. An SVideo output feeds into the main TV and a composite video feeds a modulator that puts the video onto an RF TV channel. This in turn feeds back to my coax head-end for distribution to all TVs.

Sound: sound card feeds into house-wide audio system so I can play MP3 versions of stuff I can't fit into my changer.

IR: Xantech hardwired IR network for control from each room. Niles Intellipad in one of the rooms. Connected to all AV equipment in entertainment center but not yet slinke.

Audio: a second independent line-level output from my main AV receiver feeds an audio amp for the rest of the house. output of that amp feeds into a Niles remote IR controlled switching/volume control box for 6 speaker pairs. happy with it.

Impressions: Local SVideo signal is of course best, composite only a small degradation, modulated RF a noticeable degradation. Dense text screens are too fuzzy/hard to read. I will use CDJ from PCs, and to build playlists, libraries, etc. but it is too info rich for remote TV/handheld IR use. I will write or preferably someone else will write a more point and click frontend for TV use. Converter does 800x600 but it is not useable. At 640x480 you can either overscan which is clear but doesn't quite fit onscreen, or fit it all which tosses certain lines making small text hard to read. Solution is to use big graphical stuff, not text-rich apps like outlook. I will probably switch to an All-in-wonder card soon, I think they do a better TV out. And I will be adding a Pronto remote.