I surveyed a Hi Fi shop the other day, on arrival the manager was demonstrating a system to a customer so I took the opurtunity to listen in whilst I waited.

He was selling a system called Sonos, its a cool bit of kit works using your LAN in the house with a little wireless keypad.

Website explains all http://www.simplysonos.co.uk/

Pete

Good idea pity about the price, give it a year or so and everyone will be making similar things at cheaper cost

Phillips do a similar item but not as good, but theres always ebay!! LOL

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/BRAND-NEW-SONOS-ZP-80-BUNDLE-WIRELESS-DIGITAL-MUSIC_W0QQitemZ180098086230QQcategoryZ39821QQssPageNameZWDVWQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

Funny enough, Ive been thinking about something similar myself.

I know nothing about these things, but was thinking about speakers in all rooms with control at various points. Not sure about the need for a LAN and I take it the sonos things are wirefree speakers which plug in for power? i would have issues with the standy-by power consumption for one thing.

Id prefer a wired system if I was starting during the house build stage.

Do the online demo it explians better, but basicly the box plugs into the lan you can then get all your mp3's from your pc to play through the amp. you can control which amps play what music from the rkp you can control what amps are on or off.

And if you're worried about the standby then only switch on what your using that what I do

Pete

I've got a somewhat more simplistic, and cheaper, version of that. All of my media (videos, music, pictures etc...) are sat on the fileserver on the network and I have a couple of Hauppauge MediaMVP's connected to TV's and amplifiers to stream music pictures and video over the network.

You can mix and match bits from different manufacturers, Buffalo do (or did) a DVD player with built in media client that plugs into the network so you don't end up with loads of different bits piled up under the TV.

I'm currently trying to find time to build a PVR using GBPVR (www.gbpvr.com) so I can stream recorded and live TV across the network. Been playing with a setup at my mates house but he has a Windows MCE machine, which records in some format that on Windows can read so pretty useless really unless you want to sit in front of your PC to watch that film you recorded the other day! GBPVR records in a format that most networked media players can deal with.

I've also got an eye on a system from Schneider, LexCom. This does something like the Sonos, but over a cat6 network, and uses pairs in the cables for transmitting video and remote signals rather than encoding everything to be transmitted across an IP network. It does also link into a network to distibute networks and telecoms around the place and is also easily altered as you can set it up so all sources (hi-fi, DVD players, Sky boxes etc...) are all in one location and these can each be controlled from each room as if they are there by the TV you are watching. They also do some active speakers that link into the system to pipe all the music and surround sound signals around to where you want.

I do believe I was mentioning some of the above to RICHL once, but he fell asleep!

myth tv?

I looked at MythTV but I've not fully got my head around Linux yet. I'd prefer to use it if I had the time to spend on a getting decent Linux installation working.