My previous post, focused on some achievable targets in terms of monitoring and controlling devices plugged into the mains around the home. This post is the one which gets me excited — how to watch or game on any rooms which has a display in the house, via a universal interface which all the family can use.
Being able to watch the Boxee box, Apple TV (1st and 3rd gen), Sky+ HD or the Blu-ray in the other rooms around the house would be useful. Similarly, being able to game on the Xbox or the PS3 in different rooms offers flexibility for my family when we have guests and we need to give the kids different rooms where to hang out. It's also seriously good geeking project.
Saving you the long spiel in terms of what I've explored, this post focuses on the solutions now available, supported by relatively new standards and products which require quite a big investment (at least for my pocket) to make this happen. But first, let's zero in on what I'm trying to do here. There are 3 outcomes:
Centralise all equipment in one place.
Simplify all rooms to a single display.
Use common interface to access music, films, energy monitoring, lighting, climate control.
Seeing that I have up to 8 devices and 3 TVs in our family home, the first challenge was to understand what was achievable and how it is best organised to deliver multi-room AV. There are 2 aspects to this and Fig 1 brings this to life:
HDMI Matrix Switchers
The first part is what all the HD devices connect to and then what can be pushed to one or more displays around the home. This is the switching device. It has 2 parts to it a) control of the device via a mounted IR point attached to the source, through the matrix switcher and then onto the display itself. It allows us to natively use the remote control even though the device is not present in that room. The other part is b) feeding the HD source via conversion from HDMI to Cat5e/6 through the matrix switcher and out to the display itself via a HDMI/Cat5e/6 extender unit.
More recently, the multi-room AV market has been evolving from simple HDMI switching units to HDMI over Cat5/6 to now HDMI over HDBaseT as a platform. Over time, the evolution of the matrix switcher has overcome challenges in terms of HDMI cable length, signal loss/degradation and auto-adaptation to the display(s) being driven. The end result as shown in the Fig 1 is that each device feeds into a suitable equipped switching unit which has a HDMI in/out, IR in/out and Cat5e/6 out to each display panel. The more HD inputs in, drives the size of matrix switcher your need. In my case, it gets to an 8x8 which is a beast of a unit (and expensive).
When I first looked into multi-room AV, my thinking was that each source could be left in its original room and I could connect everything on a point to point basis via a centrally located switch. I quickly realised this would be inefficient and a mess to manage. This ended up changing my thinking in terms of where I put it, how the matrix switcher would be wired to all the HD sources and how neatly I can hide it out of the way. Yep, you got it – it would work best, be more efficient and be easy to maintain and support if I centralised the sources and switcher into one main rack (hidden from the family of course).
User Interface
Of course, to tie this all together in a neat and easy way, I wanted a Sonos like way to manage it all and of course, using an iPad or an iPhone. After a number of discussions with my local hi-fi dealer (Musical Images – hat tip), Control4 came up as the platform of choice, which could meet my requirements. Reading up on them, reveals quite an established organisation who built up out the commercial market, are a leading vendor for residential home automation in terms of multi-room AV, Lighting and Climate control. Their wireless control of historically uses the Zigbee wireless mesh design as opposed to Z-Wave, although the platform has an extensible part to it, in which drivers from other hardware vendors can be written to integrate into Control4. My discussions concluded that their premier controller would fit my needs. Going through an authorised dealer network (registered most likely with CEDIA) would ensure the design, installation and support of a Control4 installation. They also take care of the requirements of the matrix switcher alongside all other elements in the requirement and design phase.
And of course, to use Control4 on iOS, there is a license cost which are delivered on a site or single device basis.
How does it actually work?
While you can leave this all to a dealer, with all the inputs involved, I needed to get my head around how it actually works. I subsequently broke it down to this:
Fig 2 plays this out nicely using the single ethernet cable standard with HDBaseT
If any of you are experts in this area, then bear with me, I'm learning some of this stuff for the first time. Any corrections or suggested changes are appreciated to make this clearer for anyone else reading this post.
There is also a really insightful Official Control4 forum where users and dealers exchange and share knowledge on installation, tips and support. You can glean a lot from here. Don't you just love the power or the web for collaboration :)
So, to achieve my objectives at least for an intial phase of getting my AV sorted, how much would this set me back? Up to £13k using the Control4 plus HDBaseT type switchers alongside racking, cabling, software licenses and design and installation from a Control4 dealer. Throw in a UPS and that's just the set up cost. I still need to figure out what the annual charges for maintaining this sort of environment would be.
I suspect there are some challenges with this set up. For example, can you really game with Xbox and PS3 with controllers over IR? This may not work. However, the beauty of this platform is that is very flexible. Adding in Lighting and Climate control through devices such Nest is all doable with Control4 being a platform where drivers are written for it. One of the other requirements I have is around energy monitoring with real time cost displays which again looks very doable with the requisite investment.
While the missus likes the idea of a de-cluttered equipment across the rooms and an easy to use way of access all the entertainment in a familiar way, think there a more challenging issue of selling this idea off the back of a new kitchen extension. I'll keep you posted on how this one develops :)
Being able to watch the Boxee box, Apple TV (1st and 3rd gen), Sky+ HD or the Blu-ray in the other rooms around the house would be useful. Similarly, being able to game on the Xbox or the PS3 in different rooms offers flexibility for my family when we have guests and we need to give the kids different rooms where to hang out. It's also seriously good geeking project.
Saving you the long spiel in terms of what I've explored, this post focuses on the solutions now available, supported by relatively new standards and products which require quite a big investment (at least for my pocket) to make this happen. But first, let's zero in on what I'm trying to do here. There are 3 outcomes:
Centralise all equipment in one place.
Simplify all rooms to a single display.
Use common interface to access music, films, energy monitoring, lighting, climate control.
Seeing that I have up to 8 devices and 3 TVs in our family home, the first challenge was to understand what was achievable and how it is best organised to deliver multi-room AV. There are 2 aspects to this and Fig 1 brings this to life:
 |
| Fig 1 - 8x8 HDMI Matrix Switcher using HDBaseT Single Wire taken from the UK HD Connectivity site |
HDMI Matrix Switchers
The first part is what all the HD devices connect to and then what can be pushed to one or more displays around the home. This is the switching device. It has 2 parts to it a) control of the device via a mounted IR point attached to the source, through the matrix switcher and then onto the display itself. It allows us to natively use the remote control even though the device is not present in that room. The other part is b) feeding the HD source via conversion from HDMI to Cat5e/6 through the matrix switcher and out to the display itself via a HDMI/Cat5e/6 extender unit.
More recently, the multi-room AV market has been evolving from simple HDMI switching units to HDMI over Cat5/6 to now HDMI over HDBaseT as a platform. Over time, the evolution of the matrix switcher has overcome challenges in terms of HDMI cable length, signal loss/degradation and auto-adaptation to the display(s) being driven. The end result as shown in the Fig 1 is that each device feeds into a suitable equipped switching unit which has a HDMI in/out, IR in/out and Cat5e/6 out to each display panel. The more HD inputs in, drives the size of matrix switcher your need. In my case, it gets to an 8x8 which is a beast of a unit (and expensive).
When I first looked into multi-room AV, my thinking was that each source could be left in its original room and I could connect everything on a point to point basis via a centrally located switch. I quickly realised this would be inefficient and a mess to manage. This ended up changing my thinking in terms of where I put it, how the matrix switcher would be wired to all the HD sources and how neatly I can hide it out of the way. Yep, you got it – it would work best, be more efficient and be easy to maintain and support if I centralised the sources and switcher into one main rack (hidden from the family of course).
User Interface
Of course, to tie this all together in a neat and easy way, I wanted a Sonos like way to manage it all and of course, using an iPad or an iPhone. After a number of discussions with my local hi-fi dealer (Musical Images – hat tip), Control4 came up as the platform of choice, which could meet my requirements. Reading up on them, reveals quite an established organisation who built up out the commercial market, are a leading vendor for residential home automation in terms of multi-room AV, Lighting and Climate control. Their wireless control of historically uses the Zigbee wireless mesh design as opposed to Z-Wave, although the platform has an extensible part to it, in which drivers from other hardware vendors can be written to integrate into Control4. My discussions concluded that their premier controller would fit my needs. Going through an authorised dealer network (registered most likely with CEDIA) would ensure the design, installation and support of a Control4 installation. They also take care of the requirements of the matrix switcher alongside all other elements in the requirement and design phase.
And of course, to use Control4 on iOS, there is a license cost which are delivered on a site or single device basis.
How does it actually work?
While you can leave this all to a dealer, with all the inputs involved, I needed to get my head around how it actually works. I subsequently broke it down to this:
- Master controller (say the HC-800) links into Router and Wifi network (Node 0)
- Master controller is wired to HDMI Matrix switcher via Ethernet
- Master controller creates new home mesh network for Control4 aware devices
- Matrix Switch is also connected to each source device using IR
- Each TV display also has an IR connected back to the matrix switcher
- Each TV receives the converted Cat5/6 signal via the HDMI Ethernet Extender which is located close to the TV itself
- The Control4 Software is programmed to replicate each native remote control of your source devices
- Each device receives command by IR
 |
| Fig 2 - Matrix Switcher using HDBaseT and a Control System such as Control4, taken from the Wyrestorm site |
If any of you are experts in this area, then bear with me, I'm learning some of this stuff for the first time. Any corrections or suggested changes are appreciated to make this clearer for anyone else reading this post.
There is also a really insightful Official Control4 forum where users and dealers exchange and share knowledge on installation, tips and support. You can glean a lot from here. Don't you just love the power or the web for collaboration :)
So, to achieve my objectives at least for an intial phase of getting my AV sorted, how much would this set me back? Up to £13k using the Control4 plus HDBaseT type switchers alongside racking, cabling, software licenses and design and installation from a Control4 dealer. Throw in a UPS and that's just the set up cost. I still need to figure out what the annual charges for maintaining this sort of environment would be.
I suspect there are some challenges with this set up. For example, can you really game with Xbox and PS3 with controllers over IR? This may not work. However, the beauty of this platform is that is very flexible. Adding in Lighting and Climate control through devices such Nest is all doable with Control4 being a platform where drivers are written for it. One of the other requirements I have is around energy monitoring with real time cost displays which again looks very doable with the requisite investment.
While the missus likes the idea of a de-cluttered equipment across the rooms and an easy to use way of access all the entertainment in a familiar way, think there a more challenging issue of selling this idea off the back of a new kitchen extension. I'll keep you posted on how this one develops :)
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