This might take a few posts to cover. I have a setup very similar to Lacehim's, but without the monster projector screen. My NAS is off-the-shelf rather than custom-built but my media centre is on custom configured hardware. You have two basic options. 1) Big complex setup with every option under the sun 2) Super-simple setup that's not as flexible Although I only have the one media centre at present, I've been investigating the multi-room setup option for a while in preparation for moving to a house. So, let's discuss.... The Big Complex Setup Hardware required:
- Master media server, with at least one tuner card.
- At least two low-power media centre machines
- Serious network-attached storage, preferably a RAID of at least 4TB in RAID config
- Gigabit ethernet routers and ethernet cable throughout the house
Overview XBMC has plugins for PVR operation and can also be operated with diskless clients - that is, 'satellite' devices near the TVs that boot from a server, not their own internal disks. The advantage of this is that you have a single master library that maintains the database of what shows/movies you have and what has been watched and what hasn't. Start watching on one TV/Media Centre combo, pick up from the same spot in another. Configuration This master machine also acts as your PVR and as the download client for any internet-obtained files. It should be relatively low-power (because it'll be on all the time), but still powerful enough to run the PVR. It probably won't need a connected monitor and should probably live in the garage, along with the router and NAS. If you're wanting to push HD size video around your home network, wireless won't cut it. You'll need cable. The NAS RAID is for storage. If you don't know how a RAID works it's basically a bunch of drives (2 or more) acting together to either be faster than a single drive or have more capacity. In this case, we want it to have more capacity and also keep one drive in reserve in case of errors - if any single drive dies, a new one can be popped in and the data dead drive rebuilt automatically. The system doesn't go down during this time, it just gets slower. The individual Media Centre clients are tiny low-power devices that are designed to run HD video. The new Rasberry PI is a good example - about $25 AUD (not including shipping) for the board. All you need is some kind of case and a USB memory card to run them off. The right kind of case can be mounted on the VESA connectors on the back of your TV. These individual media centres boot from the master media centre and connect to the TV (or head unit) via HDMI. I don't know how they'd deal with your custom DAC requirements KK - while you can get XBMC for Windows, I don't know how it'd perform on low power units, or even if you could get the drivers and XBMC to play nice. You could, in theory, get a Linux programmer to write a custom driver set for you. All up, this is even more complicated that it sounds already. PVR functionality is a plug-in to XBMC and we'd need to choose the right variant of XBMC to effectively support it - which may or may not play nice with the diskless booting. In a setup like this, you'd start one step at a time - find someone to write the DAC for you, build the diskless booting and finish with the PVR. But as complicated as it is, it stands the greatest chance of doing everything you want it to. It also works beautifully with Logitech Harmony universal remotes, plus it now suports Airplay (haven't tried it - but apparently you can stream content direct from iPad/iPhone to XBMC) and can also be controlled by iPhone XBMC remote apps. It also connects to online databases for show/movie info and downloads thumbnails, synopses and more. It's awesome and it's beautiful.
