This is my network. What is yours?

[soongmak]

This is a tech forum, and I want to spice it up a bit by talking about my home network/media entertainment set up. A couple of months ago I finally took the decision to get a home network, and it’s about the best decision I ever made. I am a movie buff, crazy about music and computers, and I was craving for an ace solution to store all my music, movies, tv series, pictures and be able to stream it to my tv and hifi stereo equipment without ever having to get up out of my chair, and I have found a solution that works like a dream! I thought I would share it with you all. I hope it encourages you to share how you handle your home entertainment needs as well.

 

Well, this is what I’ve got.

 

First the basics:

I needed a router that would be able to perform several tasks reliably:

• - A reliable wireless connection, so my downloads would not suffer from downtime of the wifi-network.
  - The router needed to be dual band, so I could connect with several machines operating on the g-band, and not bring down my internet speeds on my laptop (n-band).
  

 

I got myself a Netgear WNDR3700 , and it performs beautifully. No downtime at all. No dropped connections and only one hard reset in five months.

 

Here are the pictures of my netgear in operation. I put it on the floor, underneath my tv and stereo equipment.

 

 

 

 

The next thing that I needed was a network attached storage server (NAS) to put all my music and films and pictures on. I chose the Qnap TS-419P , with room for four hard disk drives. I have 4 Samsung Ecogreen 1.5 TB discs running in a raid 5 configuration. If one of the drives fails, I don’t lose any data. The thing is though, I lose two drives at the same time, all my data is lost. Still not sure what is the perfect solution here.

 

Here’s a picture of my Nas.

 

 

 

To play all my movies, I got myself an ACRyan Playon!HD , a network media player that can play all kinds of video and audio formats. Xvid, Divx, mpeg2, mp4, avi’s, wmv, wmvHd, avchd, iso, mkv with embedded or loose subtitle tracks, the ACRyan plays it all. It is also excellent for playback of all your homevids and pictures. It can play slideshows with any music you want to put under it. Great for showing your pictures to friends and family. To make sure I could also play back HD videos, I have hooked up the ACRyan to my router with a Lan cable. Wireless doesn’t work too well with high bitstream 1080p mkv’s.

 

Here’s a picture of my ACRyan:

 

 

 

Although the ACRyan can play all kinds of music files like mp3 and flac, it’s not really well suited as a music player, especially if you are used to the usability of an ipod. Also, you need your tv running all the time to navigate your music files, and that will not do in my book.

 

I finally decided on a Logtech Squeezebox Duet as my dedicated music player. It has all the cool features I wanted: it can play virtually any internet radio station over my hifi equipment, it can play mp3’s and flacs. It has a beautiful remote that lets you navigate your music in ipod fashion, with a scroll wheel and a colour screen that shows of the album art work. It also has a great d/a converter that makes the sound quality on par with a very good cd player.

 

Before that, I used my iPod Classic with a docking station and apple remote as my music player, but the sound simply wasn’t good enough. The Squeeze box is excellent. Especially the remote. It operates on wireless, so you don’t have to point your remote to the receiver anymore. A beautiful construction.

 

Here are some pictures. Here’s the receiver:

 

 

The remote:

 

 

A close up of the screen with album artwork

displayed. Like an iPod it can also display the lyrics of a song and all kinds of other info like bitrate etc.

 

 

 

One last geeky feature I like to show you is that I’m scrobbling my music. This basically means that all the information about the music I play is sent to the Last FM website. It keeps track of all the music I listen to.

 

It shows you a list of my recently listened tracks, but also what my favourite artists are, and my most listened tracks.

 

 

 

 

Last but not least, here’s my laptop, that can control all the machines in my network. It’s a Samsung Q530 , and I usually operate it from the comfort of my couch.

 

 

 

All things put together, it looks something like this:

 

 

 

Okay guys, tell me, what is your set up to handle your home entertainment. How do you satisfy your geeky needs?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Pom Michael]

Nice! Estimated how much?

 

I sure part of the excitement is to put it all together - but for someone like me I need an all in one solution or someone to come set it all up.

[soongmak]

Let me see:

 

Nas including 4 1.5 TB hard drives €780

Squeezebox duet €290

ACRyan Playon!HD €130

Netgear Router €100

 

So all in all together €1,300 and i guess probably the same in dollars. Everything pc-related seems to be cheaper in the U.S.

 

I guess you already have a pc, receiver and tv, so these are not included in the price.

 

Setting it up was surprisingly easy. I had no previous experience with putting together a network, and nowadays, it's not difficult anymore. I had the shop prepare my Nas though. Put in the hard drives and load it with the squeezebox software, so all I had to do was connect the wires and let every machine communicate with the router. It is definitely not as hard as it sounds. If you are computer literate, you can do this, no problem. And the satisfaction of putting it together yourself is immense, I can tell you!

[kamui]

Nice! Estimated how much?

 

I sure part of the excitement is to put it all together - but for someone like me I need an all in one solution or someone to come set it all up.

 

If it is only for music, Sonos is currently the best known system. Extremely easy to set up, equally easy to run, but not cheap.

[soongmak]

Sonos is nice, but doesn't offer an all in one solution. You still need network storage and a video player and a router. Also, the premium you pay for Sonos is extravagant - a Squeezebox can do all a Sonos can do - for a fraction of the price.

[Redbaron]

Looks good! Believe it or not I've been surviving on "Mobile Broadband" the past few years, 5GB/month! Making the jump on the 15th this month.. Got myself a modem/router wireless (Belin 'Surf' I think) thingy on the 'N' band from memory...

Idea is to hook up the laptop as well as PS3. Next step when the GL isn't looking is some bigger storage devices for movies etc..

[khunsanuk]

Hi,

 

Pretty neat setup. The music part wouldn't be that interesting to me, but I too like to watch movies.

 

I'm on a much more low-tech solution though . What I do is download the movie, stick it onto USB (sometimes need to convert from MKV to MP4 first) and then plug that into my PS3.

 

Pictures stored on my PC I can stream to the PS3 as well for big screen watching. Don't really use that option often though.

 

Sanuk!

 

[dave32]

All I can say (re: OP's setup) is: nice.

[expat]

I guess I'm super low tech. I just use a 32 inch LCD tv (1080p) as my monitor, and watch all movies/tv on my computer. Don't really see the point of anything else. Oh, a good set of speakers for when I want to listen to music. The only reason run a network is to share my internet connection with the computer downstairs that my wife uses (and to occasionally share files).

[zzzz]

I got 3 routers in series with hardwired and wireless connections to several PCs, TVs (FIOS), laptops, and XBOX360s.