Browse Forums Home Theatre & Automation 1 Sep 28, 2011 6:34 am Hi All, I would like to buy something like a starserve or Hills home hub for distributing normal tv and pay tv signals to other rooms. I have installed cat6 cables to each room and they be connected to the switch, so I don't need a hub for that. I need the hub mainly for distributing the normal tv, pay tv(foxtel) and video signals to other rooms, so that all rooms can watch whatever channels they want and change them independently. The hub should also do distribution of telephone signals to other rooms with a mode 3 for security system. Hope someone can help me with a solution as I heard that both starserve and hills hub are outdated Re: Starserve, Hills home hub, what to buy? 2Sep 29, 2011 9:48 am Bumping this thread. I too want to know what best of breed custom hardware there are out there as alternatives to Hills Home Hub and Clipsal StarServe (which are ageing technology). I want gigabit distribution of HDTV and HD videos inside the house, which Hills and Clipsal can't do. Several people on here (and Whirlpool) have recommended something like:
Any other additional hardware you could think of? 13-08 Moved in 13-05 Build restart 13-04 VMIA compensation 12-08 Builder liquidation 12-03 Fixing 11-12 Lockup 11-11 Frame 11-09 Slab 11-09 Start 11-07 Contract 10-11 2K deposit 10-06 Titled land Starserve, Hills home hub, what to buy? 4Sep 29, 2011 6:24 pm Hi Category 6 (cat 6) structured cable is the basic requirement. Various solutions are available to deliver audio and video over this. Obviously you can stream content from your PC or NAS over the network, but you can also get various boxes to send HDMI and component video over this cabling ( these solutions do not send the signal over the network, they just use the wires). Tv antenna and pay tv are best distributed using traditional coaxial cable. You can use the previously mentioned solutions to send the output of a pay-tv box to other rooms over the Cat6, but obviously you can only watch one channel at a time per box. Paul Re: Starserve, Hills home hub, what to buy? 6Sep 29, 2011 11:34 pm depending where you live or build wont be long and both pay and fta tv will be via FTTH making starserve, hills etc useless. For steaming HD just use NAS with a mediaplayer like "WDTV live" or a "PS3" or "Xbox". all do a great job and only require a small amount of set up if you already have network points at your tv's. Still Waiting for Titles!!!! Re: Starserve, Hills home hub, what to buy? 7Sep 30, 2011 8:12 pm abraham <cut> I need the hub mainly for distributing the normal tv, pay tv(foxtel) and video signals to other rooms, so that all rooms can watch whatever channels they want and change them independently. The hub should also do distribution of telephone signals to other rooms with a mode 3 for security system. Hope someone can help me with a solution as I heard that both starserve and hills hub are outdated I'm a little new so hopefully this is right, I'm looking at doing something similar but probably with a 4RU or 6RU cabinet. So gigabit switch for the data cabling. You can use a phone line splitter to split the phone line and patch them into the patch panel A TV splitter could be used to wire into distributed TV points (wired to your central location) and this would cover normal free-to-air TV. The pay TV I'm unsure about... That's what I'm planning to do, I haven't worked out the specifics yet Re: Starserve, Hills home hub, what to buy? 8Oct 02, 2011 6:18 am Why don't you use a video matrix switch. You can get them in hdmi and component versions as well as some that use 2x cat 5 wires. Hdmi is pretty unreliable in a matrix switch, and the good ones are expensive. Checkout something like the aton44, you can link up to 2 of these together if a 4x4 matrix on it's own is not enough. I personally put in a cable vision p-1488 8x8 matrix switch, but I opted for running component video cables. I have 5 tv locations and wanted to be able to watch hd video in any room from any source. my house blog: http://sugarloafdrivebuild.blogspot.com/ Re: Starserve, Hills home hub, what to buy? 9Oct 02, 2011 9:28 am That's an interesting system, I didn't know that was possible....I was thinking someone must be doing HDMI over ethernet I might add that to my one-day list, not my current build list, its way out of my budget. I'm looking around 2-3K for cabling and speakers! Re: Starserve, Hills home hub, what to buy? 10Oct 02, 2011 8:46 pm Thank you for your response. I was having a look at the Aton HDR44 I couldn't see anyone selling in Australia. I wouldn't want to buy one from USA as they use 120volt and then I will have to buy a step down transformer. Do you know of anyone selling this unit in Australia I liked the Aton HDR44 because it has cat 5 connectivity and I have ample of cat6 cables running to all the points. Is anything similar to Aton available in Australia. I have 7 TV points and they all start from our WIR (coax & cat6 ) , the free to Air and pay tv will have to be distributed from this place to the 7 points Starserve, Hills home hub, what to buy? 11Oct 03, 2011 1:07 am Hi Try searching for "resi-linx" on eBay - this seems to be a similar system. Paul Re: Starserve, Hills home hub, what to buy? 12Oct 03, 2011 9:29 am Audio authority also has a great product called avatrix with built in ir routing and also works over cat5. It comes with an external 18v power supply, so if the power supply isn't already dual voltage, you could just buy an 18v supply locally. I went with the channel vision p1488 because it costs about 1500 only for an 8x8 and I was happy to run the component video cables alongside the cat6. The channel vision doesn't provide infrared distribution, you have to do that separately. The avatrix does everything for you in one unit. my house blog: http://sugarloafdrivebuild.blogspot.com/ Re: Starserve, Hills home hub, what to buy? 13Oct 04, 2011 8:59 pm This one available locally can do a similar job. http://www.qualifi.com.au/index.jsp?ref ... uct=184134 Slab Down: 2/6/11 Moved in 13/3/2012 Current Status : Waiting for the garden to grow. My build thread : viewtopic.php?f=31&t=47031 Re: Starserve, Hills home hub, what to buy? 14Oct 07, 2011 8:41 am abraham ... so that all rooms can watch whatever channels they want and change them independently... To have each endpoint (eg. TV) be able to select and view it's own broadcast feed independently basically means each has to have their own tuner (in-built TV tuner/STB/Foxtel or PayTV box). For FTA this is simple, obviously, as you just make sure each TV has an antenna connection and it's own internal tuner and presto. For PayTV however (eg. Foxtel) the box has one tuner so therefore can only display/output one channel at a time. Each endpoint you want to have independent PayTV tuning capability will basically need it's own PayTV box - where you locate them is another matter (ie. you could have multiple Foxtel boxes all centrally located in one rack and cabled to each of the TVs....). Even if it's not being sub-divided and you want to keep it as Torrens title, you will still need to talk to a town planner or Council themselves, to see if they will allow… 1 11035 Thanks again Simeon for being so elaborate. Appreciate it. Its gives us a very idea. Kind Regards 4 3675 Looking at some of the designs on websites, they are all selling very similar products. I get that you want something stylish. It's worth looking for search terms like SaveH2O… 2 7006 |