What's cool to do in a house wired with RG-6 and Cat6?

August 31, 2006 10:49 AM

Home networking wizards: What cool stuff can be done when a house is wired with RG-6 and Cat6? Not just vanilla internet and file sharing. What wired activities and equipment do you love or covet?

Living room and two bedrooms are already connected to ordinary cable TV, but the study is not. The living room CATV cable has a splitter > internet cable modem > wireless-capable router.

In addition, the bedrooms and the study each have one RG-6 and two Cat6 cables running from the living room. These are not yet connected to anything. (Should there have been a second RG-6 for each room?)

What cool things can be done with this? It's not my money. It’s my brother’s house. What equipment should I persuade him to buy?

posted by Dave 9 to computers & internet (8 comments total)

You can set up a damn fine entertainment system.. the ability to pull music and video from a central fileserver would be awesome.. especcially when it's easily scalable across the whole house. I'd recommend that he build a MythTV system and start doing that.

Also, he may be interested in projects such as remote home controls for fans and such. Setting up a array of webcams can make a decent security system, or a voyeur website.
posted by triolus at 10:54 AM on August 31, 2006

Macs have this voice control thing. You could hook up microphones in each room and command the computer to do shit, like on a popular space-themed television programme what I don't wathc.
posted by bonaldi at 11:15 AM on August 31, 2006

My friends' house has a touch-screen jukebox in the living room that pulls from all the housemates' music shares. It's great at parties. It uses the software MediaMonkey, which is free. In addition, you can pass VGA signal over Cat6, with some creative wiring.
posted by potch at 11:36 AM on August 31, 2006

Use it to connect wireless APs on every floor, and then all the commanding of computers and touching of screens and camming of webs won't have to be located convenient to a network jack.
posted by mendel at 12:50 PM on August 31, 2006

I have a server PC in a cabinet where all my wiring goes running XP Media Center Edition as well as slimserver (for music).

It has 4 tuners and streams live and recorded TV to any room (via xbox/xbox360/pc as a client) as well as over the internet.
posted by mphuie at 3:25 PM on August 31, 2006

Webcams in every room!
Ethernet controlled power, for that switch on/off goodness using motion sensing, timing, etc.
posted by meehawl at 6:14 AM on September 1, 2006

Thanks, everyone. He's all Windows, so MythTV might not make the cut ("It does not run on Windows."), but I know he's looking at BeyondTV which, while not free, seems pretty flexible.
posted by Dave 9 at 8:55 AM on September 1, 2006

mphuie -- I meant to add that I have a squeezebox, though my brother doesn't (yet?). Can you take a minute to tell me more about your setup, and how you use it?
posted by Dave 9 at 8:58 AM on September 1, 2006