Also on your setup, do you have just one Ethernet cable going into the wall and then a switch in the attic to route all the wires to the other rooms??
whats the best setup for PMS if your PC is in one room and your TV and internet modem are in another
Here? I stapled cable that matched the ceiling color along the corner of the ceiling. Not ideal, but it works. (Ceiling is white, cable is white, staples are white. You need to look for it to see it.) Other places I’ve drilled a hole in the floor near the modem/switch/router and then ran cabling under the floor, drilling a hole where I wanted it to come back up. In still other places I’ve lived, I got a long wire and snaked it between the carpet and the floor, and pulled the networking cable through to where I needed it. Again, the cable is not seen, except where it comes down to the floor and then up to the device.
The current with the stables, I used cable staples that are designed for 2 runs of cat5/cat6 in each staple. As my NAS is Link Aggregated to the main router, this gives me a full 2Gbps pipeline from my PMS to anything locally. While I seldom have a need for this speed, when I do need it, it’s there ready and able to support what I have going on. And since I was already running one cable run, it made sense to double it up. (Don’t need to double it later on.)
My wife would NEVER allow me to run wires were they can be seen so that’s not going to work. That’s why I was hoping an equipment solution would be adequate for 4k playback. Not sure how much it would cost to pay someone to rewire my house but I suspect it wont be cheap.
Have you considered using powerline Ethernet adapters, like the ones in the link below:
I have used an older 200mbps version in the past for a room that only needed a slow connection and found that they work well, admittedly they are not a cheap solution but they do cut down on wires and the tech and speed is better now than when I was using mine several years ago.
@richarddc79 said:
Have you considered using powerline Ethernet adapters, like the ones in the link below:I have used an older 200mbps version in the past for a room that only needed a slow connection and found that they work well, admittedly they are not a cheap solution but they do cut down on wires and the tech and speed is better now than when I was using mine several years ago.
And if you have ANY networking issues whatsoever, those are the first things you want to take out of the equation. Reliability is almost non-existent. There’s a reason you don’t see a lot of these in commercial ventures. They just don’t work well.
I know first hand that what ever you have hooked up with a pair of these (takes two, right? One near the router and one near the device you want hooked up.) If both aren’t on the same circuit breaker forget them talking to each other.
And since we’re talking something we want to have 100% reliability, 100% of the time, yeah, it’s your dime, I guess.
If you don’t want stabled wiring, you can always do some sort of decorative conduits. There are tons of styles out there. And they might be an easier sell to the significant other. You may even be able to incorporate some sort of track lighting, accent lighting, etc. in them… Just takes some research to see the options. And remind her: This is how she gets Plex and your movies on the TV in the living room! 
Mike, I agree with you about not using the electrical adapters because of the reliability issues and since the two rooms are on different CB’s. I probably will just have to wire the house if the performance suffers from using the router (which it probably will streaming 4k from what most of the replies say) Although if I were to place the router and a separate storage device (such as a NAS), next to the TV (which is perfectly ok since the internet modem will be there as well) the only thing I would need to do wirelessly would be my tablet and the PC. But then we get back to the transcoding issue which everyone agrees should be performed by the PC. OMG, my brain is going to explode. I guess there’s no getting around having to either have my pc next to my tv (not likely the boss will allow it) or rewire the house with cable. And unless someone has a better idea (that would work streaming 4k), that leads to another question - am I better off buying big internal HDD’s for my PC (since it appears I would have better performance running both PMS and media storage on my PC in a direct wired environment) or an external device such as an NAS wired directly to the PC or router or whatever?
I run my PMS on a NAS. It’s not the low end, run of the mill NAS, though. Mine has a real CPU in it with some teeth, compared to the lobotomized cell phone CPU’s we see in all of the entry level models. If you are going to run PMS on a NAS and intend to do 4K, you are looking at $1800 or so just for the NAS, and then you still need to fill it with drives.
You are making this SO much harder than it needs to be.
QUOTE: “You want to get something that works well for your layout? Go to WalMart, BestBuy or whatever big box store you have locally to you and buy a laptop with an i7 CPU in it. Install PMS on it. Hang an external drive on one of it’s USB 3.0 ports and put your movies on the external drive. Buy a Prosumer router that has good reviews from numerous sites. (I am partial to Asus, and can heartily recommend the RT-AC66U or 68U.) WIRE the laptop to the router. WIRE the TV to the router.”
This is as simple as it gets. If your new laptop has an HDMI out, you can use that to output to the TV’s screen. Rocket Science in a nutshell. (Which is what I do with my NAS, BTW. It’s HDMI out is connected to the TV, so I can use it as a display for the NAS.)
Forget the fad equipment. Stick to things that can do the job with room to spare. That means something with 10K or so passmarks (more is better when you talk 4K.) Store your media in the proper containers and codecs. Make sure everything except mobile devices are wired. (And if you buy a laptop for PMS, it’s not a mobile device anymore. It’s a desktop machine now, since it’s got external drives hanging off it and has a fixed purpose.)
Ok, thanks everyone, I think I have all the info I need to proceed.
@richarddc79 said:
Have you considered using powerline Ethernet adapters, like the ones in the link below:
These things are so flakey and temperamental I refuse to recommend them. If a client asks, I tell them not to use them. If they do anyway, I tell them have fun but don’t call me for help when you have problems because step 1 will be ripping that POS thing out. They always call anyway, which is why I know first hand they suck.
Depending on the amount of money you are willing to spend I might have a solution for you! As my significant other also hates wiring and blinking in the living area, but my tv, modem etc. are in the living room for best reception I just went to your favourite swedish furniture shop and bought a cheap cabinet for around 50 SwissFrancs (probably even cheaper in the US), I ordered some cabinet fans from ac infinity and threw all the tech in there. In this cabinet I have 2 4-Bay Nas, a 2 Bay Nas, a switch and a Intel Skull Canyon Nuc (really slim machine). The Skull Canyon Nuc is running PMS and the Nas-boxes are there for storage. The only two wires leaving that cabinet are a gigabit ethernet cable for hooking up the switch to the main router/modem which serves as wifi access point and therefore isn’t in the enclosure for better reception and of course a power cable for the power strip hidden inside the cabinet. The AC Infiniti cabinet fans have a thermal control unit ( http://www.acinfinity.com/quiet-cabinet-fans/) where you can set a desired inside temperature. I really like this setup but regret a bit, that I have not bought a bigger cabinet for further expandability.
So how much did that cost me you might ask…
Skull Canyon Nuc incl. SSD and RAM around 800.-
NAS Devices (I went with Zyxel Nas542 because they are quite a good value and I don’t need all the funky software solutions from Synology. Basically they are only there to serve as storage space and provide some redundancy) 1 4-Bay Nas is around 150.- without drives. I threw in 4x 4 TB wd Red in Raid 5 which gives me a usable space of 11 TB as a Windows network share.
Cabinet 50.-
Fans around 100.- incl. shipping.
2 hours of work (a drilling machine and a jigsaw are needed).
So its around 1’100.- without the drives.
