I've just been watching this week's episode of Click on the BBC, and in particular the item on digitally connected media, and thought that someone may find it interesting to read about how the media in my house is connected.
The 'hub' is my media server, running mythtv, which has 4 tuner onboard, 3 dvb-t (freeview in the UK), and a pvr-150 connected to my cable box. The server also has slimserver installed for mp3 playback. The server is also a frontend and is connected to the families main TV for playback of media.
As well as tv recordings, it also houses the family's digital photos, the familes music collection encoded to MP3. I am currently about halfway through importing the collection of DVD's to hard disk.
We have 2 laptops connected, both of which have tahe shared media drive from the mythtv server mapped to allow browsing and playback of media wirelessly.
Both laptops have mythtvplayer, which is a small application which allows playback of mythtv recordings, as well as the ability to stream live tv from the server.
I have also installed softsqueeze (slimdevices squeezebox emulator) for playback of mp3 and internet radio streams. and smplayer for playback of video files, and dvd rips from the network share.
We also have 2 Nokia internet tablets which can playback media, either stored locally on sd cards, or stream from the server wirelessly. Recordings and ripped dvds can also be saved onto the tablets storage for remote playback.
