Kremlar,
What you're looking to do is definitely possible and there are many, many ways of accomplishing your objectives. I'm doing pretty much exactly what you describe in my home.
As a general response to your question, I don't think you'll find a more powerful or flexible product than Media Center to serve as your PC-based media hub. I'm a very PC-centric kinda guy myself, have been using it for years, and I've been very, very pleased with it.
Our whole house system is configured as follows:
- The central whole house distribution system is a Russound CAV6.6. The Russound supports up to six A/V sources, six keypad-controlled zones, and four A-Bus subzones. The Russound web site has all the detailed specs and manuals for their products.
- Wiring-wise, you need to run Cat5 between each of the keypads and the Russound controller, and speaker cable from each of the speakers to the Russound controller. The Russound has 20 watt amplifiers for each zone, so you may need to use external amplifiers if the zone space is medium to large.
- I use a Russound ST-2 tuner that provides XM and AM/FM as two of the sources. A third source is a Slim Devices Squeezebox in the kitchen (another handy alternative for accessing your PC-based music). A fourth source is one of the cable TV boxes (our cable system has excellent non-commercial, all-music channels).
- To route remote A/V sources back to the Russound controller (over Cat5) I've used both MuxLab S-video/audio baluns and Elan A/V input wall plates. Both have worked very effectively.
- A PC with copies of all my music and photos (running Media Center, of course) is collocated with the Russound controller because of all the wires that run between the two.
- A fine fellow named Carl Hyslop developed (and provides for free) an add-on program for MC11 that allows you to integrate MC11 with the Russound controller. This is done by connecting a serial cable between the PC and the Russound controller. The program lets you use any of the Russound keypads to select MC11 playlists to play and to control playback (next song, previous song, mute, etc.). The program also displays the currently playing song title and artist on the keypad displays. The program supports up to six independent MC11 zones as sources, so you can have different MC11 zones playing in different rooms. You can get a copy of the program, and learn more about it, on the AVS Forum thread "CAV6.6 / MC11 link software".
- I also have the S-video output from the PC modulated into a channel on the antenna cable that goes to all the TVs in the house. I then run MC11 in theater view mode as a "simple" way for people to view and control MC11's library and playlists. The PC is controlled from each TV location using URC MX-850 programmable remotes that communicate commands (via RF) to an IR receiver connected to the PC. The only downside here is that you can control only one MC11 zone (Russound source) at a time.
- VNC also gets used quite a bit to remotely control the Media Center PC from any of the other PCs in the house.
My eight-year-old, and even my wife, find it easy to select and control just about everything -- we're listening to music ALL the time now. I've had an absolute blast putting it all together, but I was lucky to be starting with a whole-house remodeling project where I could run wire and install ceiling/wall speakers wherever I wanted relatively cheaply.
A couple of other things you might want to investigate:
- I haven't tried it, but I believe that Media Center has a simple web-based interface that allows a remote client to control the server. I recall some recent forum postings that describe how this works.
- I'm not aware of any add-ons for Windows MediaCenter, but MC11 can act as a universal plug-and-play (uPnP) server. There are several uPnP client devices available that have their own display/remote, or that use a TV and remote, that would let you remotely control MC11 playback.
Lots of luck!
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Topic: Using Media Center to run my wholehouse audio system (Read 10408 times)