We will be gutting our house and moving a few walls about before moving in.

Also have new kitchen and bathroom.

Whilst in the planning stage I want to include some sort of way of getting music and movies around the house from one single place.

What do I need to include and how do I do it ?

Dry line all the exterior walls so as to save massive amounts of energy and make the house quieter, as well as avoiding the need to decorate over the previous owner’s horrible wallpaper. Run your cabling behind the dry lining. Wish we’d done this when we bought our present house.

What cables do I need ?

All a bit lost with it to be honest.

Hard to say what what’s really future proof, but Cat 6 should see you OK for a year or 2. It’s also affordable and pretty easy to terminate.

Is wireless not the future? So loads of 240v sockets but no need for anything else?

Is wireless not the future?

You’d think, but it can still be problematic depending on distances, what walls are made of, supporting high res media etc. For now (and since it’s a relatively trivial cost) I’d be putting in at least one cable per room.

Is that one cable for internet in each room ?

Can it be hooked up to something centrally that holds all my music and movies so if we fancied watching a film in bed we could whilst my lads watched something else in their bedrooms etc.

Can it be hooked up to something centrally that holds all my music and movies so if we fancied watching a film in bed we could whilst my lads watched something else in their bedrooms etc.

I use plex to do that.. holds all my music and transcodes it to suit whatever device on the network I fancy watching it on.

On the OP, I’d put Cat 6 everywhere… as many of them as you can manage, all routed back to a central patch panel. Then you can use baluns to adapt them to carry just about any signal you like – hdmi etc, no problem.

Dave

Can someone help me design a setup for a four bedrooms house with four rooms downstairs too.

Or even just give me a guide on what kit I would need and also how to set it all up.

We want a tv in each room. Apart from the kitchen.

We would like to have the option of music in each room too. I was thinking of the sonos kit for that.

Morning bump !

A TV in each room? So you’re giving up cycling?

and nookie..?

DrP

Nope not giving up riding.

We want a tv in 3 bedrooms and downstairs in the two lounges.

Music wise. Is the sonos stuff any good or can I do better for the money ?

plastic duct/pipe up the back to carry the cables. Wireless is still not up there for heavy use from a domestic router. Anyway with a pipe you can swap the cables out.

Wireless is still not up there for heavy use from a domestic router.

Future proof, until 200″ holographic TV’s arrive it’s probably never going to be necessary to stream anything of higher bandwidth than a HD video.

NAS + Router + Smart TV in each room + Cat6 cable everywhere. By the time Cat6 is superseded wireless will be even faster.

Depends how much of a faff you want to make it. I’ve got friends who I swear spend longer troubleshooting media systems than they do watching them. I just use Netflix/SkyGo and a chromecast or HDMI cable.

I do wonder at those houses on grand designs a few years ago where they use hundreds of km of Cat5 cable to control the heating, lighting, doorbell etc. I wonder if they now wish they’d just gone wireless.

As mikewsmith says – ducting. Leave a length of string in place for pulling through future cables.

FWIW, I have three routers – the main one connected to the phone line (eg the main internet wifi) and then two others set up as repeaters/access points.

As such, I have wifi everywhere and can happily stream video around the house either from the internet or from the NAS.

The living room pc is connected with ethernet cable to one of the repeaters.

The worst faff I can think of is that occasionally (once every six months by my reckoning), I need to unplug one of the routers to restart it if it gets a bit slow.

I don’t think I’d cable the house even if I was starting from scratch now. Wifi works perfectly well already and it’s only going to improve.

I’d run ducts everywhere, so you can pull/push cables / fibre etc or whatever you want in the future.

We have 2x Cat 6 network sockets/cables in each room. In the living room we actually could do with 6x cables now, 😯 but use a switch as generally only 1 thing is using the network at a time in the Living room. (TV, Amp, RetroPie, PS4, PiCorePlayer)

We also installed aerial points in each room which are hooked up to a TV distribution box . We can also watch whatever is on the main TV in all the rooms with this thing. This thing also handles satellite and CCTV signals.

TV and Network Hubs are all located in a central point in the house, so the cable runs aren’t massive.

So you are going to need 100m if not more of Cat6 cable, a 100m roll of CT100 aerial cable and a 1Gb network switch with enough ports for all the cables. You’ll need tools to terminate the ends, install the network plugs. Use STP cables if you are going near noisy equipment, eg: transformers, fluorescent lighting and try to run at right angles to these power cables or any other electric cables.

Then all you need is a decent NAS like the HP MicroServer to run a DLNA server, LMS, etc and anything else you would want.

Personally I do not trust WiFi, easily hacked, not very reliable, especially if there is a lot of WiFi closeby. Everything is a lot quicker on cables, and if you’ve got 4x TV’s watching HD video on WiFi, with another 4x on FacePoo you will experience a slowdown/spinning circle thingy. WiFi is great for mobile devices, but leave it at just that.

Is wireless not the future? So loads of 240v sockets but no need for anything else?

This.

Personally I do not trust WiFi, easily hacked, not very reliable, especially if there is a lot of WiFi closeby.

Not a problem for us, neighbours (and road) too far away.

Although I did hardwire the surround sound in our (new houses’) lounge a few years ago.

Maybe should’ve cabled up so we could push Sky upstairs as the video-sender doesn’t work in our new house (too far), but cba now and not prepared to pay for multi-room.

Loads of Cat6. We have some but I sometimes wish we had more, e.g. there’s two sockets by the hifi stand, as originally I only needed it for the PS3. I now have a switch there to connect PS3, Apple TV, Sky, Blu ray player & the new amp when it arrives. Everything has networking now. Yeah I could use wifi but I just feel a lot happier with a wired connection. Fit & forget.

If you have any intention of running a projector in the future, putting an HDMI cable & power socket in place in the ceiling / high up on the wall would be a good move. In fact, it might be worth running HDMI to the bedroom TVs too. You can get widgets to push HDMI via Cat5/6 but it’s another bunch of boxes & power supplies. A simple HDMI would be nice and neat.

An alternative to running Cat6, THESE are rather nifty.

Ok i’m suprised no one has said it (unless my scan read wasn’t sufficient), but seriously do not buy Cat6 cabling – It’s no better than Cat5e.

Buy Cat6a instead for up to 10Gb performance across longer distances.