1 Jan
2005
1 Jan
'05
10:36 p.m.
Steve Vanechanos wrote:
New to the group. Please forgive any unintended
breaches of protocol.
I just built a house and had it prewired for stereo speaker pairs in 6
rooms / zones in addition to cat5 in each zone. My intention was to
purchase a
multisource / multizone audio system from a high end integrator.
After reviewing several options - Crestron and Niles primarily - I
ended the review dismayed
with the cost and overall approach of the "main stream" solution
providers.
I'm a UNIX guy going back to 1983 - Altos8600 running a 5Mhz Intel
8086 with 512Kb RAM, 20Mb 8" Winchester hard drive and Microsoft's
version of Xenix.
I'm wondering if the present state of the Intel/AMD powered PC with
Linux is robust enough to control multiple sources (4, 6 or 8) like
digital cable box,
directv receiver, XM radio, CD player(s), etc. and route the output to
multiple zones/rooms (4, 6 or 8) in an effective and cost efficient
manner.
The Crestron approach would cost me around $10K - so I've got some
money to invest on development if necessary.
Once again, my apologies if I've breached any list/group protocol with
this post.
Your best bet would be to look at the "MythTV" project. I'm not
sure
if it will do everything you want but it sounds like the closest you
will get on Linux. Of course the box you run it on would have to be very
fast, especially if your doing some HD viewing from the harddrive. For
$5K you could probably build youself a pretty mean machine. (dual
Opterons, couple 15k scsi drives, 2 gigs of low latency ram)
Rick B