Wired Home
We just bought a new house and are now in the “settling down” phase, well, at least my wife is…the geek in me always wants to tinker with things and find other ways to do things that were already easy to do in the first place. I was lucky enough to get a house that had a finished basement, and even more lucky to have a dedicated theater room already built, it saved me money and time because I was planning on building one either way.
“With a new house comes new responsibilities” said a voice inside me (maybe b/c I just finished watching Spider-Man 2) as we finalized the paperwork for the house, and I felt it was my responsibility to have a “wired” house! At least, wired for media!
And thus my modest quest began….
First off, this setup is not going to win any awards, nor is it something that you’ll see on the next episode of Cribs, it’s a modest home that underwent a small project to share media across multiple locations, it turned out as per my expectation and am very happy with the end result, so without any further chatter, onto the setup!
Any self proclaimed geek knows that you start dreaming and planning the things you want to do well before they become a reality, and I was no exception. I already had the basic ideas planned out in my head:
- I wanted all equipment to be in a centralized location
- Media locations should be very minimalistic, containing only the display and, optionally, speakers
- Each media location should have access to all my media on my server (Movies/Music/Pictures)
- Each media location should have access to live TV (Dish Network)
- Each media location should be able to watch any source I have at the centralized location at any time
- Each media location should be able to control everything with one remote (and thus would need some type of IR repeater system)
- Each media location would need to be connected using HDMI
- All displays were going to be 1080p
For the actual connection to the displays I first thought of doing long runs of HDMI (monoprice.com anyone?), but I quickly decided against that as I wanted more flexibility. And since my longest run was going to be about 120 feet, I didn’t think HDMI cables were gonna cut it.
I then started looking at other ways to distribute media over hdmi and came across devices that do HDMI over cat5/6. Doing a little research and a lot of reading I found a company called Octava (Octavainc.com). They had the products that I was looking for, are located locally to me, and their prices seemed fairly reasonable as well (hell, anything is reasonable when compared to Gefen products).
I wanted to make sure everything would work as planned before I actually ran the wires, so for testing purposes I ordered their HDMI over Cat5/6 Extender along with varying lengths of cat6 cables from monoprice. Octava claims that their cat5/6 extender can do 1080p up to 150ft over cat6 and I wanted to confirm that claim since I needed it to function properly at at lest 120ft. After receiving their products and doing a mini review I decided that this product would fit my needs. My plan was to use 4 of their extenders connected to a 4×4 HDMI Matrix Swtich, but about a week after purchasing this product they came out with a 4×4 HDMI Ethernet Matrix which had integrated cat5/6 connections, so I quickly returned the extender and bought that instead.
Running the wires was by far the toughest part of this project, although was a lot easier than I thought. First let me give you an idea of where my media locations are going to be:
- Living Room (1st Floor)
- Master Bedroom (2nd Floor)
- Media Room (2nd Floor)
- Future Pool Table room (Basement)
- Office (2nd Floor, not going to be connected to the matrix, but wiring it to connect to network)
Each of the above locations will get 5 drops of cat6 cables. 2 for HDMI, 1 for network, 1 for IR and 1 extra just incase.
For the three rooms on the 2nd floor we were first thinking of running the wires from outside, feeding all the wires up to the attic, then down one side of the house right to the equipment room in the basement. But my dad (who used to be in construction in his younger days) said there has to be an easier way of running the wires without the need to go outside (this was after I called a professional to get an idea and quote for running the wires, which did NOT include patching up sheetrock). My dad went to the attic, moved around some of the insulation, and found a pathway that led straight to the equipment room in the basement! We were already having work done to the house so we got the same guys that were doing work to run the wires for us. We ran a 4 inch PVC pipe all the way from the attic to the equipment room in the basement and passed all the wires through that…couldn’t be easier (minus all the sheetrock having to be re-patched).
For the Living room and basement they cut open the sheetrock ceiling of the basement and passed the wires through the soffit in the basement right to the equipment room. One day to run the wires and two days to do the patchwork and painting and it looked as if the house came prewired! (I wish I would have taken pictures of the work in progress :/)
Now it was my turn to setup everything, which meant terminating the wires so they looked neat (WAF) and making sure everything was going to work as planned (another WAF). I think I’ll let the pictures do the talking for me:
Notes
- I’m including pictures of other work we had done on the house, we got rid of the formal living room in order to make the bottom room bigger with a walk-in closet.
- The IR Passtthrough for the Ocatava is very iffy, it didn’t work well for me at all and I spent many hours thinking I was doing something wrong. The HDMI Cat5/6 Matrix part of the switch works flawlessly though.
- For the IR I went w/ Xantech IR equipment and ran it through my cat6 cables. It works flawlessly. A RF remote control would also get iffy with its connection especially when going 2 floors down. IR over cat6 is able to go about 1000ft and is more reliable.
- I decided to go with 2 HTPCs and 2 Dish receivers connected to the matrix instead of 4 HTPCs, just made more sense.
- The Theater is not connected to the matrix and has it’s own dedicated HTPC.
- There’s another TV used in the bedroom we built on the 1st floor. It is the “TV2″ for the ViP-722k receiver and only has TV.
- I still need to purchase 1 TV for Media Room, 1 TV for Basement, and 1 Pool Table for Basement.
- All wires/keystones/IR/etc. were purchased from MonoPrice, Firefold, and SmartHome.
I still have some finishing touches to do and some wires to tidy up, but overall the system is working as planned and each location has access to the 4 sources connected to the HDMI Matrix. I’ve been tinkering with it so much that I haven’t had much time to enjoy it 
Hope you guys enjoy the pictures.
Cool house, cool rooms, and cool system.
HDMI over CAT6 is an awesome creation – will be looking at that myself !!
Have you posted your Home Cinema at AVForums (http://www.avforums.com/forums/home-cinema-diy/) ??
Yeh, the HDMI over cat6 has been working well for me so far, no real issues at all except for not knowing what input another room is watching. I’ve had channels swtiched on me while in the middle of watching something many times lol…