Geek House - Home TV Server

Have you been thinking about building an integrated system to pipe all of your video around the house, but weren’t sure how it all goes together?

Well, head over to ExtremeTech, where they’ve just posted the entire “Build Your Own Home Television Server” chapter from their “Geek House” book.

In typical ExtremeTech fashion, they’ve gone into all of the details — everything from planning the necessary amount of network bandwidth for various video compression formats, to “how to burn a DVD”.

The system they outline is based around running SageTV on the server as the TV Capture / Encoding point, and SageTV Client on the remote end, but most of the details would also be applicable to running PVRs with similar architectures, such as MCE 2005 with Media Center Extenders (or X-Boxes running the MCE software).

Even if you’re going in a different direction, this is a great overview with lots of attention paid to common “gotcha” issues.