Hi all

Maybe someone here has seen a solution to this home entertainment problem:

My new apartment has a HD sat dish installed, the antenna socket for it is in the living room. No cables going anywhere into the two other rooms. I want to do two things:

1) Take a dual channel HD digital sat reciever (DVB-S) and put one channel streaming onto WLAN so I can watch with the notebook in the other two rooms. 720p would be enough for that, given the notebook resolution. I've seen that there are a handful of very pricey recievers acting as streaming servers, but that's way over budget.

2) Preferable I also want the ability to stream my gaming computer signal (1080p) to the living room screen so I can use wireless controllers for playing in the living room. Again I guess 720p would also do but the PC can easily push 1920x1080 so it would be a shame to lose the resolution on the 1080p TV.

There should be a playstation 3 involved right next to the TV set and sat reciever, maybe that one can be abused?

Merely a suggestion to consider: One could run discrete cable(s) along the baseboard and through small holes in the wall (to get to the adjacent room). We've done that for HDTV and LAN (our house is in-wall wired now, but that's recent). Hard wire transmits a quality signal, is trouble free, cheap, not ugly when routed carefully, and easily done. Of course, I can't know if it really meets your needs.

I agree on principle, but I'm not sure our "baseboards" will be easy to remove, replace and fat enough to hold a cable. It is actually beyond me why a modern apartment built 2006 does not have complete cabling in the walls...

Also, which cable would I run - the "pure" antenna signal pre reciever, and add a second reciever in the other room? I actually have a spare low-definition sat reciever laying around, but it won't feed the laptop screen (no usable input on the laptop), meaning I'd need a new small TV. And again it's not portable, I'd either have to do two installations ("hobby room" and bedroom) or stick with one.

Putting a stream on the air would make things easier and more portable, there are two notebooks available we could use for display.

Looking around however it doesn't seem like there's a readily available solution around. The best I found so far is a suggestion to run a DBox2 (former Sky/Premiere Sat Recievers now being sold refurbished) for which a very powerful linux based firmware is available that supports streaming to LAN. These boxes are supposed to be sup 200EUR, whereas a Dreambox or Reelbox with all the features costs 500+.

Actually, we did a "less neat" job than you suggest

We simply ran the cable along the edge of the molding in view. Though, because of furniture and where the "pass throughs" are placed, the wiring was not all that visible -- except in a couple areas. Of course, some standard lamp cords and wall plugs are "visible" in places. Only in one place did we actually put the cable behind molding -- that was where the holes came out at the ceiling and we ran them behind crown molding around the room -- then back down inside the wall to floor level. The crown molding was easy (space wise) and we bundled 4 cables behind them.

As far as wireless, I don't know anything but standard black-box wireless to connect computers and hand-held devices -- I am sure you know more than I do on that

Just clarification, FWIW.

1080p is never transmitted over the air. It's always 1080i60. Some sat receivers can download 1080p content, then play... But they are never real-time broadcasts.

But if I want my PC to play on the big screen surely that is 1080p?

It's only 1080p if it's a hard connection (HDMI/DVI). Even then, your TV service provider doesn't allow for 1080p broadcasts to the TV receiver box over the wire. That too is 1080i. Only on-demand movies (Which are precached first much of the time) are 1080p from the service provider.

Now, watching Blue-Ray movies or HD-DVD movies on the other hand of course are 1080p over the HDMI cable. Regular DVDs are up-converted however... In which case you lose picture quality anyways on larger TV sets. If you want to watch a movie from your PC to the TV - Be sure the movie you download is HD (1080p) and/or that you have a Blue-Ray player for the PC. A normal DVD player for the PC won't give you HD picture quality.

Slingbox works on Dish Network. I think Dish bought Slingbox.

Looks interesting, the LD version is fairly cheap too. Can't find much info about image quality over WLAN speeds...

But yeah, seems the best product to put a single TV channel onto WLAN. Thanks for the pointer!

I was reading a little about it's ability to stream your recorded videos from you Dish Network DVR to your phone, but the Slingbox apparently does all the work.